Why did so many cultures believe in the evil eye?

in all these so many different cultures you will find this now you might ask well okay mufti you know if all these cultures have had it which they have very clearly i want to give straight away a bit of an understanding to why did this develop because one question could be if so many different cultures had this belief uh then you know mufti how do we know that that's not authentic because they're not sharing a similar source they're all arriving at this belief so it's important to kind of get to the

the source with it and that is that you see in the past people saw the eye as an active agent now the eyes have always been incredibly profound they've been described as the windows to the soul they have you know symbolically if you if you want to go into other kind of uh psychoanalytic um frameworks and symbolism you will see whether you know the two eyes what these things are also found to be very almost a symbol of life in many ways

tied in with the body you know the the kind of physical structure but we're not going too much into that but the way you have two eyes will represent other like whether it's whether it's breasts whether it's things like this historically people symbolized things like that in a lot of symbolism they saw or whether it's to represent things like the testes and you have the nose representing a phallus and you and you have like a mouth representing things like um the actual vulva and the vagina and saliva as

semen historically as in when you go back thousands and thousands of years people saw a lot of symbolism in things and they saw the eye one eye often to represent seen as like the opening almost as a it was symbolized with as the as kind of life um life creating because of its symbolistic structure or resemble not resemblance but mirroring the vagina or the vulva and it's often even used

um euphemistically even in modern day cultures like people may not know but it's used as a euphemism when people will say like even an urdu you know like makiank and obviously what they mother's eye but what they mean as a euphemism is the vulva because that you know the vagina turned on its side is seen as the one eye that the thing giving life now these things obviously sound bizarre today but if you go well into the past into egyptian mythology and the mythologies of the past that you will find these things symbolisms and hence the one eye

um quite prominent you will find these things but these are the structures as well but the eye put that aside the eye was seen as a very apart from being a powerful organ but as an active organ now this is important so you can see here that look it was only up until the 1500s and arguably maybe the 1700s that people realized the eye is actually a receptive um organ it's not actually something active so even people as far back as you know you could look at people

like francis bacon you know the father arguably of uh science uh you know of the scientific method still believing that the eye was an active organ that it actually you see this is to do with what you have extra mission or intermission does the eye sh cast out vision does it shoot out rays by which we see or is it because of light shooting into the eye now in may today to many of you seem common sense but for the most part of human history people believe the i was an active agent it was not

passive so you will see even people like like here you can see francis bacon who's describing uh envy in his words as an ejaculation that it's kind of sprouting out this this envy from the eye and that's francis bacon the father of the uh you know arguably the father of the scientific method now you can see here that these are some of the conditions uh the factors that come in with the evil eye and this is according to a particular study anthropological essays on the evil eye they found that the power emanates from

the eye or the mouth and strikes some object and it's interesting how the eye and the mouth have been you see the hurt that comes from the mouth and the hurt that comes from the eye the parallel that have been kind of drawn in history and it's interesting how both on their own have symbolized in symbolism the female genitalia and why that's interesting is because it's seen as a source of life and in contrast the the mouth and the eye although could be seen as

sources of good but of sources of destruction you could destroy someone by casting a spell onto them or by casting an evil glance and you will see this that the one affected may not be able to identify with the source of power and the evil eye can be deflected now this often in the past they would refer to the person who has the evil eye the sahib al-ain or the sahib as the fascinator the fascinator in uh you'll see that in a lot of literature um

or studies on it as the fascinator now with the evil eye comes the ability to avert it because you have to fight it off but you can see here as well on this page that look the belief that it what it affects uh but the belief helps to explain or rationalize sickness misfortune or loss of possessions such as animals or crops so these things were often done to help people cope so people when they were trying to look at why did the crops go bad why did

this person suddenly fall ill you can see here that look harm and destruction its possessors the human animals or demons these were the possessors of the evil eye they they were just normal people but they would bring suffering and you can see that here that look to rob young men of their manliness and young women of their beauty and infants were especially vulnerable now that that is uh an important factor to kind of keep in mind that people

are trying to explain the inexplicable and this was interesting i thought i'd share this as well with you and that you can see here that the thief it's got a quote at the top where he raises high his fists with both um and uh you know he raises his hands and he says uh he makes a kind of incantation saying take that he says oh god ice uh square them off for you that god i've i've got them for you here and people would do this so you see you would have in the past

you would get people that would you would get people that would if they believed this person had the evil eye they would hire them they were an eye for higher and the stories of the arabs would sometimes starve or not starve but make certain people go on a fast for three days and then when after those three days they would tell them that look at that camel now and he would cast this evil eye onto the camel or onto and people tried to do this with the prophet as well

by the way but obviously the evil eye is nonsense it's bs it does not it doesn't have a reality but they tried this they thought and this is people who like i said are trying to explain now whenever something um right right whenever something inexplicable was happening people would refer to the best possible answers that they had now when you have something from the unseen you must have something that can prevent it that can propel it and sorry prevent it from happening and

that's where you get the rise of amulets so you will see that this is these are some examples you'll have um the eye of horus because in egyptian mythology what you have is seth who kind of he injures the eye of uh of horus and then it's replaced by thoth but then the eye of horus is used to prevent the evil eye and you've got things like in islamic uh cultures you've got like the hand of fatima

and you've got in christian cultures and all cultures you will find this belief of the evil eye going back almost 5 000 years you'll you know you've got the ancient egyptian civilizations you've got the sumerian civilizations coming right up to luminaries you know very profoundly educated people you will see them uh so here you can see look in the middle ages uh many luminaries including thomas aquinas dante leonardo da vinci martin luther

francis bacon now these are not you know by any measure we're not talking about dumb people the people were very intelligent that believed in things like this now the question was why and it comes back to how the organ operates the eye operates it casts out a lens and you have to remember this so if i um