The Arrows Of The Evil Eye example essay topic

'There be none of the Affections, which have been noted to fascinate, or bewitch but Love, and Envy. They both have vehement wishes; They frame themselves readily into the Eye; especially upon the presence of the Objects; which are the Points, that conduce to Fascination, if any such Thing there be. ' Francis Bacon, Essay IX: 'Of Envy' (n 1) Courtly love seems the epitome of formalized culture, the origin, in many ways, of our own mannered romanticism. The evil eye, that unseen force that causes harm to babies and crops to wither and die, seems the opposite: a superstition arising from a perceived lack of control through knowledge or art. (n 2) I wish to propose, rather, that courtly love has much in common with the evil eye; that it is a code that arises from a desire to legitimate the same drives that produced the superstition of the evil eye: a growing fascination with the world. My argument, quite simply, is that courtly love, as it is spelled out in 12th c. works, is derived as much from envy as it is from love and, as a result, represents a reorganization of such cultural paradigms as the taxonomy of the vices and virtues. The origins of courtly love, in other words, speak to a new way of perceiving the world, but it is one that is grounded more in the substratum of myth than in the codes of the elite. (n 3) The locus classic us for the symptoms of courtly love is, arguably, the following description of Lavine from the Eneas: Lavine fu an la tor sus, d'une fenestra garde jus, vs. it Eneas qui fu des oz, form ent l'a es garde sor to...

Amore l'a de son dart fe rue... ou al recut lo cop mortal... Ele comanche a tres suer, a et a, sov ant se pas me et, fre mist, li cu ers li fact, so, sole, braille: ... or sui tote espalier et vain e, dedans le corn une ardor sent (Levine was up in the tower. She looked down from a window and saw Eneas, who was below. She gazed intently at him above all... Love struck her with his dart... she... received the mortal blow...

She began to perspire, then to shiver and to tremble. Often she swooned and quaked. She sobbed, quivered; her heart failed; she heaved and gasped and gaped... 'I am all pale and weak.

I feel a burning in my body... ') (lines 8047-8055; 8057; 8071; 8073-8077; 8086-7; trans. 215-216) The provenance of these symptoms, as summarized by Roger Boase, is usually ascribed to an ongoing, if adapted, elegiac tradition. Most recently, Wack's reading of courtly love as reflective of medieval lovesickness follows this convention. (n 4) Certain parallels can and have been drawn between the love-sick in Latin lyric and those in medieval romance; the works of the Roman elegists serve admirably to demonstrate this. (n 5) Yet, it is my contention that ultimately such a link serves to blur rather than clarify the picture. Rather, I would propose that courtly love is, at least in part, an aesthetic response to a growing cultural and social problem that is not based on love in any form but rather is exhibited most clearly via the vice of envy. That is, it is envy which speaks of a cultural development for which courtly love, at least in works of the imagination, was constructed to offer a creative response.

I will return to Lavine shortly. But, first, let me compare two twelfth-century descriptions, one literary, one homiletic, of the fictitious animal, the basilisk, which was reputed to stun with its glance. For the troubadour Aimeric de Peguilhan, the basilisk is associated with the powers of love: Quo. l qu " ab joy s'a net au cir, Quant el mira lh se e.'s vi, Tot etc vos de mi, Que m' qu an vos ve i ni. us re mir. (Like the basilisk which went joyfully to its death when it was reflected in the mirror and saw itself, even so are you my mirror, for you slay me when I see you and look upon you.) (n 6) But to St. Bernard the basilisk is perceived in the following terms: At, ut aunt, in oculi ger it, animal, et pray omnibus. Noise cup is osculum... osculum? Invidia cogitator.

Quid very, nisi malum vide re est? (The basilisk, they say, carries poison in [his] eye, lowest of animals and execrable before all others. Do you wish to know about the venomous eye, the bewitching eye? Think about (envy), for what does it mean to envy if not to see evilly (malum vide re). (n 7) The literature on the basilisk makes it clear that the basilisk is usually perceived as a representation of envy and a force of evil. A passage from Heliodorus confirms this: You have doubtless heard of the serpent called basilisk, whose breath and look alone is enough to parch and corrupt whatever it encounters. (75) Yet the fact that Aimeric uses this animal to speak of love is very suggestive indeed. (n 8) Envy and courtly love seem to be linked; both, it would appear, depend not only on sight, but on the extra mission theory of vision.

Via the Chalcidius translation of Plato's Timaeus the medieval world gained a full description of Plato's account of vision. David Lindberg explains that 'Plato taught that from our eyes flows a light similar to the light of the sun. An exterior light is united with the inner light flowing from the eyes, strengthening it and making it capable of drawing from visible objects their colors. ' (89) Into this theory Chalcidius incorporates elements of Galenic theory which 'adds the anatomical findings of the physicians. ' (89) Chalcidius' translation of the Timaeus provided the basis for further deliberation on vision that occurred in the twelfth century by scholars such as William of Coaches and Abelard of Bath.

While each made revisions to the Galenic theory of Chalcidius, each clung to the basic extra mission theory; each insisted that vision was the result of an emanation from the eye of the beholder. It is thus of little surprise that both classical and medieval understandings of sight-based phenomena should become associated with projective imagery. The connection between the two basilisk passages would seem, at first, to bear this out: the power of the basilisk, in each, is associated with a projective glance. And yet, while love imagery from classical times forward is represented most frequently by Cupid's arrow it is only in its medieval use that that arrow becomes necessarily aligned with the glance. Vergil's Dido, for instance, is infected with love's poison through kissing Cupid and listening to Aeneas's tory; the golden arrow that strikes Ovid's Apollo in the first book of the Metamorphoses is nowhere connected specifically with sight. (n 9) Sight, in other words, while helpful to love, is, in classical literature, not the sole means to the end. Sight is, however, always a necessary condition for envy.

Most discussions of this fact point to the word's Latin etymology. According to Elworthy, Cicero defines the meaning of fascination as, which he then glosses as 'to look closely at. ' (7) But this gloss, as Elworthy makes clear, also exposes the fact that behind this etymology lies an even richer mythology, that of the evil eye. In 'Wet and Dry the Evil Eye,' Alan Dundes explains that ' [t] he evil eye is a fairly consistent and uniform folk belief complex based upon the idea that an individual... has the power... to cause harm to another individual or his property merely by looking at or praising that person or property. ' (93) The evil eye, as Dundes and all others engaged in working on it agree, is the direct result of envy. (n 10) 'If the object is animate it may fall ill... Symptoms of illness caused by the evil eye include loss of appetite, excessive yawning, hiccoughs, vomiting and fever.

If the object attacked is... a plant or fruit tree, it may suddenly wither and die. ' (n 11) If human, it may lose sexual potency. Classical versions of this superstition make it clear that the evil eye is a fiery emanation that kills through burning; it draws on the belief that the body is a closed system dependent on water -- to dry it up is, first, to make it impotent, then, to kill it. A figure with the evil eye can be controlled by having this ray turned back on him: so Narcissus dies from his own reflection (he dies of thirst); the Gorgon is killed with Jason's mirror; and the basilisk is destroyed ' [q] u ant el mira lh se e.'s vi'. Heliodorus, again, explains the evil eye in an interesting way.

He writes that the air around us: brings with it qualities it has received outside and implants in the person receiving it whatever affections it has acquired. Thus when one looks upon a beautiful object with envy he fills the surrounding air with this malignant quality and transmits his own pernicious breath to whatever is near. Being thin and subtle this breath penetrates to the bones and marrow, and thus envy under its commonly accepted designation 'evil eye' is a disease which affects many people. (75) In the texts of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, this illness of envy is perceived in the following ways.

Basil writes: 'How might we avoid becoming affected by this disease [of envy] and how, after we have contracted it, might we be cured? First, by not regarding the goods of this world -- human prosperity, renown, which fades like a flower, health of body, as either great or admirable. We do not define our highest good in terms of these transitory things, but we are called to share possessions that are real and eternal'. (n 12) Augustine, in Sermon XIX, 'Ad Fratre's in E remo,' counsels his audience to avoid since it 'omnes virtues, omnia bona dissipate, omnia male general' (burns up all virtues, dissipates all good, generates all evil). (n 13) In the lines that follow, Augustine establishes the argument that is -- at least in certain contexts -- the sin of sins because it has: 'torment um sine refugio, sine reme dio, labor em sine respiration e, poe nam sine intermission e, fame m sine... O in vide vermis...

O igneous serpens. ' ('torment without refuge, illness without remedy, unceasing labor, punishment without end, hunger without satisfaction. O hateful, death hearing worm... o fiery serpent. ' ) Isidore likens to the serpent and to fire, when he says: ' virtu tum germ ina, bona ardor e... Invidia est anim i tinea, sens um come dit, ur it, me ntem, cor hominid, quasi quae dam pestis, . ' (Invidia burns up the seeds of all virtue, devours all good with a pestiferous fire.

Invidia is the worm of the soul which eats up common sense, burns the understanding, afflicts the mind, feeds on the heart of man as if it were some vermin). (n 14) St. Bernard speaks of it as an 'imm anis best ia' whose fiery breath kills anything it touches. (n 15) Abelard's Historia Calamitatum likewise focuses on its vicious, fiery nature: Hin c me arum, que nunc usque, , et quo fame ro stra, alien a in me succ ensa est. From this my troubles began and have plagued me to this day; and the more widespread my fame has become, the more has the envy of others been enkindled against me. (16) It is in fact the 'enkindling' of that causes Abelard to be hounded from place to place. In the opening passage of her first lad, Marie likewise states that she is concerned with the role of envy in her culture: Celui dei vent la gent loerKi en bien fait de sei parler. Mais quant il ad en un paisHumme u femme de grant paris, Cil ki de sun bien unit envieSovent en die nt: Sun paris li violent; Pur ceo le mestierDel chien court, fel un, Ki mort la gent par tr aisun.

Nel voil mie pur ceo lissier, Si gang leur u losengierLe me violent a mal turner: Ceo est lur dre it de mes parler! (Guigemar, 1-18) (People should praise anyone who wins admiring comments for herself. But anywhere there isa man or a woman of great worth, people who envy their good fortune often say evil things about them; they want to ruin their reputations. Thus they act like vicious cowardly dogs who bite people treacherously. I don't propose to give up because of that; if spiteful critics or slanderers wish to turn my accomplishments against me, they have a right to their evil talk.) Marie's examples of envy in the lads suggest that envy has become a central problem in her society. Yet Basil's solution -- to avoid 'regarding the goods of this world -- human prosperity, renown, which fades like a flower, health of body, as either great or admirable' clearly is not Marie's answer.

Rather, the 'disease' of envy, as transmitted by the evil eye, is 'cured,' at least in works of fiction, by a different approach in which the disease and the cure become one. The 12th-century lyric 'En a ital rime ta prima' by the troubadour Raimbaut d'Aurenga illustrates this well. 'De la false gene qe lima / E deck'e ditz don que c km / Ez e most'e guinea... per q'i eu sec e pols e guin h. ' ('About the false men who file and declare and speak because of which I file each one of them, and constrain and point out and stare... wherefore I wither and pant and stare' Pattison, 73). The fact that the poet is dried up and withered because of the glance of the envious suggests that he has become the victim of the evil eye. Such a reading might also explain Raimbaut's use of the verb liar in this strophe.

This verb is usually explained as deriving from Horace's image of filing a poetic text in the Ars Poetica. (n 17) But filing, particularly of iron, is associated with warding off the evil eye. So J. Tuchmann (176) points out that 'Dens quelques localities du sud de la France, on croft que passe une, il est, pour se preserver de ses malefic es et du mauvaise oil, de un objet de fer et de le server dans la main; a Saint Yriex-la-Perc he, Haute-Vienne, il suffix de touched du fen' (n 18) But what Raimbaut's poem demonstrates as well is that while his body may wither and pant and stare he does not die or become impotent as a result. Quite the opposite: inspired by the sight of 'firm-ripe fruits and singing birds' he then turns to Joy, about which he sings and cries, and the nightingale arouses itself and wounds him 'in that part of the body so wounded by love' to paraphrase Pattison's gloss. (74) What is most striking about this lyric, in short, is that Raimbaut is not trapped by envy. As much as the imagery draws on that of the evil eye, it also uses the same imagery to transcend the effects of envy.

That is, what starts as imagery of envy becomes, by the end, the imagery of love. He seems to be able to heal the wounds of envy by his own powerful glance. In this context, it is important to note two things: first, that there exists a concomitant tradition of the good eye in which the evil are destroyed by the glance of the virtuous: the Trinity and the Virgin are each asserted to possess this power. (n 19) The notion, then, that good as well as evil can result from a glance is certainly a possibility. However, the symptoms of courtly love, as is evident from the quotation I used to start the argument, cause illness, or lovesickness, that falls on the good, not the evil, and ultimately has an ennobling, not a disastrous, effect. Second, there does exist, from antiquity, an 'ambiguous tradition' that associates certain characters with a combination of 'beauty and hideousness' in regards to their face and eyes (Suther 163). Most commonly, Medusa is seen to possess this dual power.

While the existence of such a duality is indeed important to the imaginative manipulation I am arguing for here, I find little of Medusa's arbitrariness evident in the twelfth-century romance. Rather, there is repeated surprise expressed at the fact that an illness is also a cure. For what sets the symptoms of courtly love apart from those of either classical envy or love is the fact that the sight of the beloved causes harm, or illness, but that that illness is, ultimately ennobling. A further example can be found in Marie's first lad, Guigemar, in which the eponymous hero begins as the object of envy and becomes the subject in love. Both Guigemar and the lady whom he eventually loves -- a lady who remains, significantly, unnamed -- are each identified as being the best of their kind, the best examples of the social station they hold.

Guigemar is described as being without peer, the lady is praised as being a perfect wife. The situation for each causes envy: Guigemar is alienated from his fellow knights; the lady is locked in a tower -- or so she thinks -- by her husband. Guigemar's encounter with the androgynous deer is, arguably, directly related to the evil eye. Some people are born with this ability, others acquire it, but what is striking about those who have it is that they are, historically, those least in need: the rich and the clergy are two groups often accredited with this power. It is often, therefore, the central character, like Guigemar, who is seen to have this devastating power. Since the evil eye draws on the belief that the body is a closed system a figure with the evil eye can be controlled by having this ray turned back on him.

Guigemar -- separated from the other knights -- is left facing-seeing -- the unusual animal, standing there with its offspring -- and the arrow he sends to kill it returns to wound him. Much like Narcissus in the story as told by Ovid, the deer clearly works as a reflection of Guigemar; the arrow returns to him as if reflected off the animal. As in the Narcissus tale, Guigemar's glance, reified by the arrow, returns to wound him in the thigh; the sight of his double, a perfect reflection, is ultimately, if only temporarily, emasculating. Guigemar, the envy of his peers, would seem to possess the evil eye. The problem of Guigemar, when set in this context, is, how do you cure the evil eye? Marie offers her own answer.

In telling Guigemar that he will be healed only by falling in love, the text suggests that the victim of envy may be able to find happiness in love. What this lai suggests is that there is a way to integrate caritas with, a form of love that shares with a basis in sight and the symptoms of the evil eye, while remaining open, seeking, generous, like caritas. Perhaps most striking of all is the similarity between the symptoms of those infected by the evil eye and those in love; the particular symptoms exhibited by those struck by love would appear to owe more to the superstition of the evil eye than to any amatory tradition. Such symptoms as Lavine suffers -- sweating, shivering, swooning, burning -- are all standard symptoms of the evil eye. (n 20) Moreover, each is caused by a glance: Andreas Capellanus makes it clear that blind men cannot love. (n 21) Passages such as the following descriptions of the envious by Ra banus Maur us and Adam Scot bear this out as they clearly echo the symptoms of courtly love: Est e nim vult us mina x et torus aspect us, pallor in facie, in tremor, stridor in, verba rabid a et... (The expression of the envious is threatening, his appearance grim, there is a pallor on his face, a tremble to his lips, a grinding of his teeth, his words are rabid and his cries unrestrained). (n 22) Cum e nim detestable malum how plane me ntem, take e jus medullas infuse... Perfunditur, et inflator veneto is to, ignescent oculi, labia tremont, viscera, et to ties quasi lethal) virulent) glad ii cuspid e, quotes e um ad versus quem commodus est.

(When, then, this detestable evil has completely overtaken the spirit, 'with its disease having been poured into the marrow'... the breast is infused and inflated with that death-bearing venom, the eyes burn, lips tremble, innards are twisted, and he is struck as if by the deadly and virulent tip of a sword whenever he sees the one who has enraged him). (n 23) So close is this to the description of love-sickness provided by Lavine that the similarity is unmistakable. The effects of envy, via the evil eye, and the effects of love, in the context of courtly love, seem to share great affinities. The question of why can only be answered tentatively in a study of this length. As we have seen from the early medieval passages on envy, caritas was frequently suggested as the cure for. Marie de France posits as well that caritas, the love exhibited by her final three lovers in the Lais, lies at the opposite end of the spectrum from her starting point of envy. Yet she reaches caritas by means of a long and circuitous route through the world; her tales weave back and forth through the complicated intricacies of social interaction.

If caritas is to cure envy, in her book, it must do so by incorporating, not avoiding, the world. The way to deal with envy is not to turn your back on it, or to turn it back on itself, but to accept and redirect its powers. Courtly love, I would propose, uses the visual to reach the invisible, the body to transcend the body, the illness to become the cure. What I am suggesting is that the code of courtly love was developed as a response to the culture's growing interest in the visual, an interest which led to the social problem of envy and manifested itself in the superstition of the evil eye. The only way to validate the visual was to redefine the relationship between the vices and virtues.

As Alexandre says in Chretien's Cliges: Miall vue l qu " ainsi to jor z me teingneQue de ne lui santee me, Se de la ne vient la santezDont est venue l'. ' I'd rather have [love] always hold me in its grip like this than recover my health from anyone, unless that health comes from the same source as my illness. ' (lines 861-64; trans. 104) Courtly love, as portrayed in courtly art forms such as the romance, is indeed derived from the same source as the illness. But the illness is that caused by envy, not love; and the arrows of the evil eye are deflected to become the source of a love based on vision. (n 24) As a result, courtly love offers a safe middle ground between and caritas which, in turn, proffers a model for confronting the ills of a society that is basing its values increasingly on vision. While courtly love does not in and of itself solve the pressing social issues that fostered it, it does offer a new way of thinking about, and reading, that world.