The

The Welcome to Steers podcast, a boozy dive into mythology, legends, and folklore.

Every week we pour a drink and learn about a new story from around the world.

I'm Amanda.

And I'm Julia. And this is episode 316, The Evil Eye. Yeah Amanda so I'm going to start us off with a story,

right? Oh yes please. So a couple of months ago I was having a lot of migraines kind of seemingly

out of nowhere unrelated but also somewhat relatedly I'd recently changed my hair and had been getting a out of nowhere. Unrelated, but also somewhat relatedly, I'd recently changed my

hair and had been getting a lot of compliments just from random people. This is not to brag.

I promise this has a point. It's not just me being like, my hair's so cool. Oh, my God.

So when I complained about how bad the migraines had been lately, both Jake and my mother-in-law were both like,

oh, it's probably the malokia. And I was like, excuse me? The what? So the way that they explained

it was when someone gets a lot of compliments or praise, the person doing the complimenting can

either accidentally or on purpose cast the evil eye on the person that

they're complimenting. Now, I'd had like kind of a vague understanding of what the evil eye was at

that point, but it did kind of kind of pique my interest a little bit, especially since when I

started wearing the little evil eye pin that I had on my jacket, the migraines kind of just became

less frequent. That gauged my interest and I knew like it wasn't just the Italians who believed

in the evil eye. So as I do, I started digging into the history and the different traditions

surrounding the evil eye. But first, Amanda, I have to ask, what do you know about the evil eye?

I came across the evil eye lots growing up.

There were a lot of people in our hometown, whether they were Greek, Italian, Jewish, Spanish,

who had evil eye, you know, key chains, decorations, and other, you know, just like part of their lives in some ways.

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