The charms people carry

Ancient Egypt

The deepest single source. Egyptian workshops turned out scarabs, wedjat eyes, djed pillars and ankhs in faience by the thousand, for the living to wear and the dead to be wrapped in. The forms outlived the religion and were still being copied in Roman Italy.

Mesopotamia

Amulets here were legal instruments as much as ornaments. Plaques against the demon Lamashtu named her, listed her crimes and ordered her out; a Pazuzu head worn at the neck set one monster to guard against another.

Greece and Rome

Roman boys wore a bulla and girls a lunula until they came of age, and the phallic fascinum hung over doorways and on cart axles. This is also where the evil eye acquires the literature that still shapes how people talk about it.

Jewish and Kabbalistic

A tradition uneasy about amulets that produced a great many of them anyway: silver kame'ot inscribed with divine names, Aramaic incantation bowls buried upside down under floors, red thread from Rachel's tomb, the hand called the Hand of Miriam.

Islamic

Text does the protecting. The ta'wiz or hijab is a written verse folded into a metal case, and the Throne Verse, the two final suras and the ninety-nine names are the commonest inscriptions. Alongside them run the older folk objects the jurists argued about.

Christian

Relics, medals, scapulars and pilgrim badges, plus a long undergrowth of written charms the church periodically condemned. The line between a sacramental and an amulet was argued over for a thousand years and never settled.

Norse and Icelandic

Silver Thor's hammers worn at the neck during the conversion centuries, runic inscriptions on bone and wood, and the later Icelandic grimoires whose staves, Vegvisir among them, are a seventeenth-century book tradition rather than a Viking one.

Celtic and Gaelic

Rowan and red thread over the byre door, holed stones on a string, clover and hazel, and the healing charmstones some families kept for generations. Much of it survives in nineteenth-century folklore collections rather than in archaeology.

Slavic

Lunnitsa pendants, axe and key charms, embroidered oberegi worked into collars and cuffs where the body meets the open air, and the faceless cloth dolls made without a needle so nothing could be pricked into them.

South Asian

Yantra plates rolled into copper tubes, the black thread and kajal smudge put on infants against nazar, rudraksha beads, and the tabiz worn across religious lines. The evil eye is treated as an everyday nuisance to be defused rather than a rare curse.

Chinese

Jade at the throat, cash coins tied with red cord, peach wood against ghosts, and printed paper talismans whose authority comes from looking like an official document, because a summons from heaven is drafted the way a summons from a magistrate is.

Japanese

Omamori bought at a shrine and never opened, returned and burned after a year. Ofuda for the household shelf, ema boards for written requests, and the shop-counter figures like maneki-neko that sit on the border between charm and advertisement.

African and diaspora

Minkisi bundles whose power is in what is packed inside, gris-gris pouches, Ethiopian painted prayer scrolls cut to the owner's height, and the American conjure bag that carried the practice through slavery under a new name.

Native North American

Medicine bundles, quilled and beaded pouches, and the Ojibwe hoop that reached the wider world as the dreamcatcher. Much of what is sold under this heading is made by outsiders, so provenance matters here more than anywhere else in the library.

Southeast Asian

Thai phra khruang amulets pressed from clay and blessed in the temple, then collected, graded and traded like coins. Sak yant tattooing puts the same protective diagrams into skin instead of metal, which makes the charm unremovable.

The default. Hung where it can be touched without looking and hidden under a collar when needed, which is why so many surviving amulets are pierced at the top.

A ring is a charm you can also press into wax. Late antique and medieval seal rings carry the same names and figures as pendants, with the added authority of leaving a mark.

Cheap, easy to tie on a baby, and unmistakably a boundary drawn around the body. Red is the commonest colour across unrelated cultures.

A text folded small and sewn into leather or cased in metal. The Islamic ta'wiz, the Jewish kame'a, the Ethiopian scroll and the English charm-paper all work this way, and none of them are meant to be read again.

Power by ingredient list. A gris-gris, mojo bag or medicine bundle is defined by what is inside and by the rule that it is not opened or handled by strangers.

A knot binds a thing in place, which makes it useful for holding good luck in or a spirit out. Sailors' wind knots and the tied red string work on the same logic in opposite directions.

Too heavy to wear, so it protects a place instead of a person. Mesopotamian demon plaques, Chinese paper talismans and foundation deposits all guard a threshold rather than a body.

Nailed, painted or set into the lintel. The horseshoe, the mezuzah case, the hex sign and the Roman fascinum over the shop door all mark the point where outside becomes inside.

A small body standing in for a large one. Household gods, the beckoning cat and the laughing Buddha are all placed rather than worn, and usually face the door.

The oldest form of all. Glass and stone beads carry colour and pattern rather than script, which is why they travel across languages so easily.