Note 3 — Chapter I · THE EVIL EYE AND THE SCARING OF GHOSTS.
Reading edition
One, and perhaps the most common theory of the Evil Eye is that “when a child is born, an invisible spirit is born with it; and unless the mother keeps one breast tied up for forty days, while she feeds the child with the other (in which case the spirit dies of hunger), the child grows up with the endowment of the Evil Eye, and whenever any person so endowed looks at anything constantly, something will happen to it.”3 So, in Ireland we are told that “the gift comes by Nature and is born with one, though it may not be called into exercise unless circumstances arise to excite the power; then it comes to act like a spirit of bitter and malicious envy that radiates a poisonous atmosphere, which chills and blights everything within its reach.”4