Free Black Cats and Evil Eyes by Chloe Rhodes

possibilities to be interpreted depending on the exact bone of your foot or section of
your scalp the gecko touches.
    While most of the pseudoscience that existed before the Renaissance faded out of favour as more empirical methods for explaining the universe were discovered, sleep is one of the few areas in
which modern science is still relatively in the dark. Dream analysis is still popular to this day, with thousands of different books on the subject in print in Europe and America.

A CHILD’S NAILS SHOULDN’T BE CUT BEFORE ITS FIRST BIRTHDAY
    The significance of the hair and nails in folklore dates back to early Egypt, when it was believed that a potion made by stirring together hair, nails and human blood could
give the mixer complete power over whichever unfortunate soul the samples had come from. The potency of the ingredients came from the fact that they were thought to represent the person on an
elemental level.
    Hair and nails were certainly used in sixteenth-century spells designed to protect against evil curses. Archaeological evidence of this practice exists in the form of witch bottles – glass
bottles into which were placed hair and nail clippings, pins, wine or urine. The idea was that any curse that had been directed at the owner of the witch bottle would be attracted to the hair and
nails and trapped inside the bottle, held there by the pins and washed away by the wine or urine. They were common during the mid-sixteenth century and have been discovered hidden beneath the
floors and inside chimney breasts of houses from this era.
    Experts in Wicca suggest that many of the uses for hair and nails in Western witchcraft have their origins in
The Venidad
, a Zoroastrian book of laws written in the fifth century BC . In these
early scriptures the hair and nails are said to be used as instruments of evil by witches andsorcerers (of whom Zoroaster, as the prophet for one of the first monotheistic
religions, heartily disapproved) because they grew with a life of their own and could be cut off the body and used in spells.
    It is traditional in many cultures for hair and nails to be buried or burned to prevent them from falling into hands that might put them to such uses and this practice continued in Great Britain
and Ireland well into the nineteenth century. For infants, who were especially vulnerable to the forces of evil, it was deemed by many parents to be too risky to cut their nails at all until they
were over twelve months old.

SPITTING TO WARD OFF EVIL
    These days spitting is usually regarded as both unhygienic and uncouth, but spitting hasn’t always had such a grimy reputation. In the Gospel of John, Jesus spits on the
ground and mixes his saliva with the dirt to make mud, which heapplies to the eyes of a blind man and restores his sight. In ancient Greece spitting was a way to counteract
the advances of malevolent spirits and in AD 77 pliny the Elder wrote ‘We are in the habit of spitting to repel contagion.’
    It does seem to have been viewed as a superstitious act even in those days though, as the ancient Greek philosopher Theophrastus, writing his study of human motivations
The Characters
, includes
in his description of ‘The Superstitious Man’: ‘If he sees a maniac or an epileptic man, he will shudder and spit into his bosom.’ Maniacs and epileptics were in those days
thought to be possessed by demons, and the condition was believed to be catching.
    Spitting on to the bosom is a custom that still exists in Greece and Cyprus, although over time it became unnecessary to actually spit to evoke the protection it offered and the sound
‘ptew’ was used instead. ‘Ptew, Ptew mi me matiasis’ is still commonly recited in Greece to repel the Evil Eye (
see
The Evil Eye ) and can be roughly translated as
‘Spit, spit, I spit on myself to protect myself from the Evil Eye.’ The most superstitious will still lift the clothing away from their chest at the neck and imitate