Part III

New Spiritualities Challenging

the Body/Soul Divide
 7
When Soma Encounters the Spiritual
Bodily Praxes of Performed Religiosity
in Contemporary Greece

Eugenia Roussou

It was a warm afternoon in August, towards the end of my ethnographic

research on the island of Crete. I was having one of my last field site
strolls around the town of Rethymno when a shop window, filled with
evil eye amulets and decorative items, caught my attention and drew me
into the shop. The owner, a friendly Rethymniot woman, greeted me, and
we began to talk about the evil eye. During our conversation Elena,1 an
Orthodox Christian adherent and a strong believer in the evil eye, nar-
rated an incident that, as she explained, had changed the way in which she
perceived the relationship between the somatic and the spiritual.
One early evening, as she was walking around the streets of her home-
town, she bumped into an old Cretan man who was sitting on a pavement,
smoking a cigarette. She recognized this man as her grandfather – who,
however, had died several years before. He was wearing his usual clothes,
smoking his usual cigarette, and, as Elena put it, looked very much alive.
He did not talk to her, and she was too stunned to ask him who he was.
She just returned home, unable to believe that she had not imagined the
whole thing, and did not reveal what had happened to any member of her
family. More than twenty years passed. It was only a couple of years be-
fore the day I met her that she discussed that childhood incident with her
two brothers; only to discover that they too had seen their grandfather on
that same day, each of them in another part of Rethymno, dressed in those
same clothes, smoking that same cigarette.
As Elena admitted to me, it was that familial discussion which con-
vinced her about the physicality of her experience. What her brothers and
she had seen was not a figment of their imagination. On the contrary, they
134 ◆ Eugenia Roussou

had perceived their grandfather’s somatic presence, while engaging in a

close encounter with his spirit. They had seen his body and his soul simul-
taneously. Elena went on to clarify that every time she feels the evil eye on
her body, and then has it removed by her mother via religious praying and
ritualized somatic action, she has the same sensation of bodily communi-
cating with the spiritual ‘just like when I saw my grandfather’s soul’.
When an individual carries envy, meanness and general bad feelings
in her2 soul, she holds the power to transmit the evil eye (mati) to her
fellow human beings. This emotional broadcast occurs during everyday
sensory communication. Gazing, gossiping, hearing, smelling, tasting: the
engagement of the senses, while people interact with one another, results
in evil eye affliction (matiasma). It is followed by a state of bodily distress,
where the afflicted person experiences the effects, in the form of ill-health
symptoms, on her body, spirit and soul. And it is removed via a ritual
healing process (ksematiasma) which, with the aid of religious symbolism,
is predominantly performed by lay specialists.
From the summer of 2005 to the winter of 2006 I directed my anthro-
pological attention towards the practice of the Greek evil eye3. Bourdieu
(1990) has established that individuals become powerful players in the so-
cial arena through their practice: an action which is not necessarily con-
scious or intentional, but a product of the feel for the social game (Bourdieu
1990: 22). Adopting Bourdieu’s concept of ‘practice’ throughout my cur-
rent analysis, I argue that people in Rethymno and Thessaloniki practise
the evil eye by becoming engaged with it – albeit not necessarily inten-
tionally or consciously – in multiple ways. Rethymniots and Thessaloni-
kans cast, embody and heal the evil eye. They perform, believe, perceive
and talk about it. They devise their own and follow Orthodox Christian–
and ‘New Age’–inspired4 routes, where Orthodoxy – the state religion of
Greece – and its church5 interacts, and blends with nondoctrinal paths of
religiosity. And, as Elena’s case shows, in practising the evil eye, they act
towards the collapse of the boundaries between spiritual belief and em-
bodied perception, while bringing body, soul and spirit closely together
into a reciprocal interaction.
The present chapter focuses on the creativity with which people in con-
temporary Greece somatically encounter the spiritual. I argue that such an
encounter is far from antithetical. Furthermore, it is not just confined to
an interaction between body and soul. Instead, it takes place through a
threefold communication between body (soma), soul (psyche) and spirit
(pneuma). The main part of the chapter is divided into three levels of anal-
ysis. I begin by examining the body-soul-spirit relationship in the con-
text of Greek Orthodoxy, where special attention is paid to the important
role gender, and the female body in particular, plays in this context. I then
proceed to offer a detailed account of how the tripartite relationship is
negotiated in the evil eye practice via both Orthodox and non-Orthodox
pathways. Finally, belief and perception seal the discussion, by stripping
 Bodily Praxes of Performed Religiosity in Contemporary Greece ◆ 135

the relationship between the somatic and the spiritual of its often per-
ceived antithetical nature, edging it instead towards a creative rapport.

Soma, Psyche and Pneuma

The idea that human beings are composed of body, soul and spirit – rather
than of body and soul alone – originates from Paul’s blessing in 1 Thes-
salonians 5:23: ‘May the God of peace himself sanctify you entirely; and
may your spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of the Lord
Jesus Christ’ (Murphy 2006: 2). The Greek Orthodox Fathers mostly fol-
lowed Paul’s threefold schema. For them, soma, ‘the physical or material
aspect of man’s nature’, psyche, ‘the life-force that causes the body to be
something that feels and perceives’, and pneuma, the force ‘through which
man apprehends God and enters into communion with him’, were strictly
interdependent (Ware 1999: 47–48). Sometimes, the Fathers described
human nature as being the unity of body and soul alone. However, as
Lossky (2005: 127) maintains, such an interpretive diversion is simply one
of terminology, since the followers of the twofold schema recognized the
significance of the spirit, which they regarded as the most superior aspect
of the soul.
‘The threefold scheme of body, soul and spirit is more precise and more
illuminating, particularly in our own age when the soul and the spirit are
often confused’ (Ware 1999: 48). Rethymniots and Thessalonikans of-
ten employ this ‘confusion’, treating soul and spirit as almost one and
the same. For them, psyche is mainly the source of feelings, and pneuma
is mainly the source of spiritual and mental intellect. Both psyche and
pneuma are thus associated with emotions and thoughts, and are consid-
ered to be closer to the spiritual sphere of our cosmos. Soma is not just the
natural temple of psyche and pneuma: it transcends the physical aspect of
human nature and perceives the spiritual; a spiritual, which is not neces-
sarily related to God, devil or Orthodoxy. My informants’ act of negotiat-
ing the soma, psyche and pneuma interconnection does not derive from
an Orthodox doctrinal influence; it occurs during their everyday praxes of
performed religiosity. But before I explain further their approach towards
the somatic and the spiritual, the relationship between the two in the ‘of-
ficial’ field of Orthodoxy needs to be clarified.

Orthodox Embodiments

According to the Greek Constitution, ‘the prevailing religion of Greece is

that of the Eastern Orthodox Church of Christ, under the autocephalous
Church of Greece’ (Alivizatos 1999: 25). Of course, the religious iden-
tity of Greeks is far from monolithic: other religious traditions coexist
136 ◆ Eugenia Roussou

with Orthodoxy in the twenty-first-century Greece. And, as my research

has shown, Greeks pluralize their religiosity in everyday practice, where
Orthodox and non-Christian spiritual activities are synthesized. Still, the
‘official’ religion of Greece remains that of Orthodox Christianity, and
even nonreligious Rethymniots and Thessalonikans have characterized
themselves as at least nominally Orthodox. It is a fact that the former
archbishop of Greece, Christodoulos, who has now passed away but who
at the time of my fieldwork was the current archbishop of the Church of
Greece, brought more disbelievers closer to the Church, and opened the
Orthodox Christian door to a new bodily code. He would routinely urge
young people to go to church wearing their jeans, their earrings, and their
piercings. And by giving bodily freedom to current or potential religious
adherents, he simultaneously freed the path that would lead towards an
easier communication with the spiritual.
Despite such a development, the rigidity of the Church in regard to
how Greeks should embody their religion remains. In the official circles
of Orthodox Christianity, the body, soul and spirit threefold schema, so
popular with the Greek Fathers, becomes twofold and dichotomized. The
body is presented as acting in opposition to the soul. The idea that the
body raises passions and sinful behaviours appears strong. Consequently,
according to the advocates of such a viewpoint, predominantly priests,
the soul is tempted to deviate from God and perform the ‘original sin’
all over again. Christians must steer away from embodied pleasures and
seek salvation, while disengaging from the somatic and seeking the way
back to their spiritual home and their Creator (Ruether 2002: 42).6 And
it is women’s bodies that are primarily accused of raising temptation and
preventing the soul from reaching the spiritual.

Women, Religion and the Body

During church liturgies, women must always sit on the left-hand side of
the church, whereas men sit on the right. This segregation aims to move
the female and male body away from one another, and to do away with
the possibility of physical temptation or sinful thoughts. It also holds a
particular symbolism. Women can be associated with Eve and the left-
hand side, and are supposed to be closer to the devil, whereas men can be
associated with Adam, the right-hand side, and are purportedly closer to
God (Du Boulay 1986: 140). The position gendered embodied selves oc-
cupy in church is thus determined by potential spiritual implications.
Women are also supposed to wear skirts when going to church. Dur-
ing my fieldwork, I saw many women, especially in Thessaloniki, who
attended Sunday liturgies in trousers. Such a dress code is permissible now-
adays – especially since Christodoulos’s act of loosening the doctrinal
Church boundaries. Still, many of my female Rethymniot and Thessaloni-
kan informants referred to numerous instances where Orthodox priests
 Bodily Praxes of Performed Religiosity in Contemporary Greece ◆ 137

have scolded little girls who, according to them, have not dressed ‘appro-
priately’ for a church liturgy. As an elderly female Rethymniot put it, with
an evident irony in her voice: ‘Priests shout at little girls who “dare” to
wear trousers instead of skirts. But when it comes to women who wear
skirts up to their bums, they do not have the guts to say anything. They
just seem to enjoy the sight of naked flesh’.
But perhaps the most serious taboo has to do with the menstruating
body. The belief that the female body is ritually impure during menstrua-
tion is old, dating back to the third century (Ware 1997: 98). This belief
is still popular in the contemporary Greek Orthodox Christian context:
women must not kiss the icons, receive Holy Communion, or even attend
a liturgy, when they have their period. And as the following story, told
by Maria, shows, they are prevented from learning how to heal someone
from the evil eye:
I always wanted to learn how to do the ksematiasma (anti–evil eye ritual heal-
ing). And I kept telling her, ‘Grandma, you have to teach me’. ‘Okay I will’,
she kept promising. Years passed by. One day I ask her: ‘When are you going
to teach me?’ We sit down, and she says that it is no longer possible because I
have already menstruated. At the end, she wrote the prayer down for me. But
I never used it, exactly because we did not go through the formality of the
process.

The ksematiasma prayer is considered by lay people as a sacred, Ortho-

dox Christian prayer. If a woman wants to reveal it to another woman, she
usually has to find a man, who then serves as a medium in the transmis-
sion process. An intergender intervention (woman-man-woman) is thus
required; otherwise the effectiveness of the prayer will be lost. But the
lack of a mediating man was not the only and most important reason why
Maria refused to use the prayer, and why her grandmother strongly hesi-
tated to reveal it. If the latter had made the revelation before Maria’s first
menstruation, no Eve-related evilness or other possible forms of spiritual
danger would be posed, since Maria would not yet have acquired the sta-
tus of a fully-female embodied self. But Maria had menstruated; she had
‘officially’ and bodily become a woman who, raised as a Christian, carried
the symbolic qualities of an ‘Eve’ inside her.
The taboo stereotypically attached to menstruating female bodies rests
on the assumption that they are carriers of symbolic dirt and impurity
(see Douglas 1966). Drawing on her research in a small town of southern
Portugal, Lawrence (1988: 131) observed that, during their menstruation,
women may endanger others and cause misfortune because of their condi-
tion, without necessarily acting consciously. When Greek women have
their period, the prospect of transmitting the evil eye to others drastically
increases. In most cases, however, this is not an intentional malicious act.
It derives from the spiritual – and not essentially evil – power a menstruat-
ing woman is believed to possess.
138 ◆ Eugenia Roussou

As Buckley and Gottlieb (1988: 7) contend: ‘Many menstrual taboos,

rather than protecting society from a universally ascribed feminine evil,
explicitly protect the perceived creative spirituality of menstruous women
from the influence of others in a more neutral state, as well as protecting
the latter in turn from the potent, positive spiritual force ascribed to such
women’. The menstruating female soma can be spiritually positive and
creative. It can be associated with sacred Christian female figures, such as
Mary Magdalene (Fedele 2006) and the Virgin (Dubisch 1995). In the end,
it can be seen to cooperate with the spiritual and transmit a not-always-
evil eye.
Menstruating or not, the Greek female body holds spiritual impor-
tance. ‘Women light the oil lamp or candle in front of the family icons,
and guard the house against pollution and the evil eye’ (Dubisch 1995:
211). They can be possessed by the spirit of a saint of the Greek Orthodox
Church, as Danforth (1989) demonstrates in his study of Anastenaria, a
ritual where women and men in a northern Greek village become spiritu-
ally possessed by Saint Constantine. And, as Seremetakis’s (1991) thor-
ough ethnographic account of female lamenting in Mani shows, women
can use their bodies to create a sacred space of their own; a space, the
entrance to which is refused to the male religious authority of the priest.
When it comes to the evil eye, female somata (bodies) play an equally
crucial role: they are spiritually active and religiously challenging. Yet, it is
both Rethymniot and Thessalonikan women and men that are immersed
in the practice. Perhaps differently, but as cultural equals, female and male
individuals participate in Orthodox Christianity and the Church, and in
everyday religious and spiritual activities. And, through practising the evil
eye, they manage their gendered selves, while taking care of their bodily
and spiritual cosmos.

Vaskania: Possessed by D/evil

Vaskania is the ‘official’ term that is used in the context of Greek Or-
thodox Christianity to define the evil eye. It etymologically derives from
the ancient Greek verb vaskaino, which means ‘to look at someone with
envy’. According to the official ecclesiastic texts and the Fathers of the
Greek Orthodox Church, vaskania is a demonic energy, connected with
the evilness of the devil, and can result in serious personal damage (Dickie
1995; Hristodoulou 2003: 66). And, as a Thessalonikan woman argues: ‘I
think that vaskania has to entail evil. Otherwise, why call a priest to bless
you against vaskania?’ The Orthodox Church, its priests and its religious
devotees can show tolerance towards mati (evil eye) and matiasma (evil
eye affliction), namely, the most commonly used terms in reference to the
evil eye. Yet, it is vaskania they recognize as the evil eye phenomenon.
In the words of Father Ioannis, a Thessalonikan priest: ‘Vaskania is pro-
 Bodily Praxes of Performed Religiosity in Contemporary Greece ◆ 139

voked by satanic powers; it is the devil’s work’. Or as a young woman told

me: ‘Look, my mum, who is quite religious, accepts what the Orthodox
Church accepts, namely, that vaskania exists. There is this special prayer
which the priest reads in order to get rid of this thing’.
When it comes to vaskania, a distinction appears to exist between ‘doc-
trinal’ and ‘practical/ local’ religion, that is, between ‘a religion as textual,
theological percept of official church, and the one as practiced at a particu-
lar time and place as part of a given community’ (Stewart 1991: 11). Vas-
kania seems to belong to the doctrinal part, and mati to practical religion.
But vaskania is practical too. It is not only perceived and practised by the
official church representatives. Lay people utilize it rhetorically and do
not make a sharp, or usually any, distinction between vaskania and mati.
They cover vaskania with Christian symbolism, however. It is this name
that is appropriated by the Orthodox Church and its priests, after all.
According to the official ecclesiastic approach then, the devil and other
demonic forces are responsible for sending the evil eye to possess people’s
bodies. ‘If we regard the evil eye as devilish’, a female Thessalonikan has
stated, ‘then the devil possesses our body’. The devil is regarded as the
personification of evil in the context of the Orthodox Christian tradition
(Stewart 1991: 141). Every form of evil, evil eye included, which touches
Orthodox grounds, is attributed by the Church to the power of the devil.
It is the devil who, by taking the evil eye form, possesses people’s bod-
ies. As some priests and devoted Christian informants have explained, the
devil and other demonic forces try to use the evil eye for their benefit.
They attempt to take advantage of an everyday belief, in order to contami-
nate and steal human souls.
In practice, however, my informants, Orthodox devotees included, have
not actually complained of soul loss, after being victims of what is char-
acterized by them as a ‘devilish evil eye’. When demons possess Roman
Catholics in Sri Lanka, they attack their bodies and minds, not their souls.
As a result, Sri Lankans become physically and mentally ill. Their souls,
however, are safe (Stirrat 1977: 138). The souls of Orthodox Rethymniots
and Thessalonikans appear to be as ‘safe’ as their bodies and their spirits
are. If evil eye possession is equivalent to possession by the devil, then the
latter does not directly aim to attack and possess their souls alone. He af-
fects people’s bodies, spirits and souls.

Energetic Somata: Channelling Spirituality

‘From what I can understand, the evil eye is like a mini demonic posses-
sion. People get sick, not from natural causes, like a cold or a virus or
something, but from other reasons. Or maybe it is these electromagnetic
waves we were talking about earlier’. Giannis, a Rethymniot in his thir-
ties, manages to capture the ambiguity of possession in the evil eye prac-
140 ◆ Eugenia Roussou

tice. Matiasma can be a form of possession by demons. At the same time,

it can be the result of energy exchange, due to a broadcast of ‘electromag-
netic waves’: a possession caused by human beings. Ranging from atheists
to religious Orthodox adherents, Rethymniot and Thessalonikan men and
women share the belief that the evil eye occurs when one has her body
possessed by someone else’s ‘energy’ (energeia).
‘People’s negative energy often influences me. You feel that there is
something negative about a person and, by being in close touch with him,
you become negative and moody, or you get a headache. And, do not for-
get, moodiness and headaches are the basic symptoms of matiasma’. The
above words come from Eva, a woman in Thessaloniki. She is an evil eye
ritual healer, and a nondevout Orthodox Christian. She believes that nega-
tive energy invades her body, spirit and soul when she becomes evil eyed,
when she sits in close proximity to people who are evil eyed, or when she
has any contact with individuals who carry negative feelings in their soul.
Energeia, and the way in which it is communicated between people, seems
to be for Eva, and for the majority of the Greeks I have spoken to both in
Crete and northern Greece, the principal reason why the evil eye is pres-
ent in their lives. As Mina says:
I usually avoid thinking bad of others. But I became really angry with this par-
ticular person. For all the bad things he did to me, I strongly wished he would
fail in all aspects of his life. I believe that this curse came back to me. I think
that if you cannot manipulate the negative energy you want to send, then don’t
do it. Since then, I try to avoid any bad thoughts because I feel I can send nega-
tive energy. And it can come back to me, like a boomerang. Or it can reach its
destination, in which case I will regret sending it anyway, since I honestly do
not want to do any harm.

Channelling usually refers to ‘the use of altered states of conscious-

ness to contact spirits – or to experience spiritual energy captured from
other times and dimensions’ (Brown 1997: viii). Mina’s channelling seems
somewhat distant from such a definition. Energy exchange in the evil eye
context does constitute a form of channelling, however. A spiritual field
of intercommunicating energies triggers the evil eye, and people’s bodies,
spirits and souls are possessed by its energetic power. Mina and Eva are not
strong religious disciples. Yet, they both define themselves as Orthodox
believers. Mina and Eva are two amongst a large number of Rethymni-
ots and Thessalonikans who are both Christian and evil eye practitioners,
and, at the same time, open to ideas of energy channelling and ‘New Age’
spirituality. These are predominantly younger women and men, aging be-
tween twenty-five and forty-five years of age, who have graduated from
university and are of middle-class background. Yet, older informants of
mine, especially women who are devoted to Orthodoxy, are also keen on
accepting energy channelling as part of their evil eye discourse and their
lives in general, by talking about the continuous exchange of electromag-
 Bodily Praxes of Performed Religiosity in Contemporary Greece ◆ 141

netic waves between people. Consequently, the rigidity between Ortho-

doxy and ‘New Age’ spirituality and, furthermore, between the somatic
and the spiritual, is decisively weakened.
‘The purpose of channeling – and by extension, other forms of New
Age spirituality – is to bring together elements of life ripped apart by West-
ern civilization: science and religion, body and soul, culture and nature,
male and female, reason and intuition, thought and matter’ (Brown 1997:
48). Energy channelling retains a close affinity with ‘New Age’ spirituality.
Channelling is crucial in the evil eye practice, which, consequently, appears
to share essential common ground with ‘New Age’ spirituality. My infor-
mants leave what they mean by ‘energy’ open. Namely, energy broadcast
can be attributed to both demonic beings and human beings. One thing is
certain: evil eye energy affects people’s bodies, spirits and souls.

Afflictions

Eleftheria, a woman in Thessaloniki, has emphasized the intensity with

which she experiences the evil eye. She feels as if she is possessed by a
foreign power, a perceptual state where she has no control over her body,
feelings, thoughts and actions. ‘It is like someone penetrating your being,
as if you somatically hold someone else’s negative energy’. In Hofriyat,
a village in the northern Sudan studied by Boddy (1988), people are pos-
sessed by zairan, or zar spirits. Zairan belong to a class of beings that
are known as jinns and are considered to be natural beings, though of
a different nature than the human one since zar spirits are not confined
within the boundaries of the physical world (Boddy 1988: 10). The Hofri-
yati who are possessed by zar spirits share a similar symptomatology with
the Rethymniots and Thessalonikans who are possessed by the evil eye.
‘Apathy and boredom, insomnia, anorexia, and inflamed soul – glossed as
excessive worry’ (Boddy 1988: 13), which have been observed among the
Hofriyati, are symptoms that my informants also frequently experience.
And, as in the Sudanese case, the evil eye type of possession is spiritual,
while simultaneously belonging to the physical world. Sofia, a Thessaloni-
kan woman, describes the way in which she experiences the evil eye on
her self:
I feel as if I am not present here. If you ask me to perform a task I will not be
able to understand what you are talking about. It feels like I am one step be-
hind. It is as if I have entered another dimension from which I observe the pres-
ent one. As if I cannot observe the present. As if I cannot be here. The phone
rings, I answer, I listen to what they say, but I do not remember anything.

Sofia refers to a somatic and spiritual absence, to a bodily state where her
perception, her spirit, her feelings, and her will for action are all lost. The
evil eye attacks people’s perception. An evil-eyed person enters another
142 ◆ Eugenia Roussou

dimension, as Sofia indicates, a state of embodied and spiritual isolation

both from others and from oneself. One’s own body feels different and
alien. Soul and spirit seem to be absent from it. This absence is depicted in
one of the most popular evil eye symptoms: kommara.
‘I feel very tired. I want to lie down. My levels of energy drop. I feel
like my body is “cut” from the rest of the world. My soul becomes heavy.
And my spirit weakens’. This is how Manolis, a Rethymniot man, defines
kommara. Niki in Thessaloniki feels similarly:
I am in a very bad mood and I know it is mati, I can feel it. I have this weird
headache that includes dizziness, shivers, and a sense of catatonia; all at the
same time. I cannot move. I feel so tired. I have kommara; my feet are ‘cut’.
This is something that automatically weakens your spirit and your soul. It
changes your sense of time. Your body feels so weird, and you cannot focus.
Strange, very strange.

Kommara semantically derives from the Greek verb kovo, which means
‘to cut’. Thessalonikans and Rethymniots use the term as a way to describe
the variety of feelings the evil eye inflicts upon them. They feel as if their
somatic and spiritual self is ‘cut’ from the rest of the world. Kommara sig-
nifies that, by feeling somatically and spiritually cut, one is also cut from
any form of social activity. Having to deal with a body, soul and spirit that
are possessed by the evil eye, people experience social disconnection and
isolation. Sleepiness, extreme tiredness, stillness, lack of energy, a weak
spirit and a heavy soul are included in kommara and contribute to the
feeling of a numbed soma, psyche and pneuma.
According to Desjarlais (1996), the Yolmo Sherpa in Nepal suffer from
spirit loss, and, as a result, they experience a variety of symptoms: bodily
heaviness, lack of energy and of appetite, inability to talk and socialize,
troubles in sleeping and proneness to illness. In addition to these, they
lose the sense of kinaesthetic attentiveness, or ‘presence’: when their spirit
is lost, so is their sense of (bodily and spiritual) presence (Desjarlais 1996:
144, 145). And, as happens with my Greek informants, Yolmo people
lose their bla – their spirit – and become socially, bodily and spiritually
absent.
The evil eye spiritual affliction is somatically expressed in the form of
an illness.7 The evil eye power shows its presence by possessing the hu-
man body. The outcome of the imposed bodily distress varies. Headaches,
dizziness, stomach upsets, eye-related problems, somatic weakness, per-
ceptive awkwardness; in combination or as stand-alone inflictions, these
constitute the most commonly developed symptoms one experiences when
possessed by the evil eye. At the same time, my informants suffer from a
sense of spirit and soul loss. But not in the Christian sense; that is, people
in Rethymno and Thessaloniki do not think that the devil is stealing their
soul and spirit through the evil eye, resulting in the blocking of the road
to heaven. The devil might be one source of possession; the negative en-
 Bodily Praxes of Performed Religiosity in Contemporary Greece ◆ 143

ergy of a human being might be another. But what my informants feel as

spirit and soul loss is the sense of kommara: the experience of someone
else occupying the centre of their feelings and spiritual intellect, numbing
their sensations and bodies, and preventing their spirits from lifting up.
In order for their body, spirit and soul to become repossessed, namely, by
them, the performance of the ksematiasma healing is required.

Ksematiasma: A Therapeutic Encounter with the Sacred

I put water inside a small coffee cup. I cross it three times, in the name of Holy
Trinity, you see. Then, with my finger, I take oil from the kantili (oil lamp),
which I have already removed from the ikonostasi (icon altar).8 While silently
saying a prayer, I drop oil into the water. If the person is evil eyed, the oil drops
directly to the bottom of the cup and dissolves. If not, it stays on the surface.
I do this seven times. Then I cross his forehead and I give him to drink three
times.

There are a few other ways of performing the ksematiasma, yet the one
with the water and oil, described above by an older female healer in Thes-
saloniki, constitutes the most popular practice. Favret-Saada (1980: 97)
observes that in France ‘exorcists make a sharp distinction between spells
and demonic possession: only the latter is of interest to the clergy’. The
same stands for the anti–evil eye performance. Since the Orthodox Chris-
tian Church attributes the evil eye to demonic forces, the healing from it
must come from an ‘official’ ecclesiastic source. However, it is rare for
someone to go to a priest and have the evil eye removed from her body.
The majority of Greeks visit evil eye healers, who use Christian symbol-
ism,9 and recite religious prayers,10 in order to ritually remove the evil eye
from the body of the afflicted individuals.
When someone tells me that he feels strange and he feels kommara, that he has
the evil eye and all, I feel it. It is like I receive a wave which he casts. I feel an
unbelievable heaviness on my forehead, and I want to yawn. I say my prayer.
And when I take a big breath I feel I have absorbed his evil eye, I have healed
him.

As a Thessalonikan ksematiastra reveals above, the healer absorbs what

the evil-eyed person feels; this is how healing is achieved. Spiritual chan-
nelling causes the evil eye. The channelling of positive energy and reli-
gious sacredness through Christian praying leads to its removal. Since the
eighteenth century, when new discoveries about electricity were made,
performances of Christian healing have been infused with the idea of a
flowing divine energy and the ways in which it relates to Christ (Porter-
field 2005: 163). Religious healing, therefore, has to do with the evocation
of energy, and ‘this is shared between Christian and New Age discourses
of healing’ (Csordas 1994: 54).
144 ◆ Eugenia Roussou

‘Whenever I had the ksematiasma done for me, my mind would just
travel around: to a boy who teased me at school, to a friend who did not
call. And I felt so guilty. I knew I had to focus my thoughts on God and
not on my friends. Otherwise, the ritual would not be right’. Just like
Mirto, the majority of Rethymniots and Thessalonikans feel that ksema-
tiasma brings them closer to the divine; that it opens a conduit between
them and the sacred world. When they stand opposite the healer and listen
to her praying murmur, they feel the need to recite a prayer themselves in
order to come closer to God and to other spiritual powers. By construct-
ing a ‘sacred reality’ (Danforth 1989: 55), the path to an efficacious healing
appears to them unhindered.
In his research about the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, a religious
movement that began in 1967 and was initiated by junior faculty and
graduate students at Catholic universities, Csordas writes that ‘essential
to the Charismatic healing is a concept of the person as a tripartite com-
posite of body, mind, and spirit’ (Csordas 1994: 39). As in the case of the
Catholic Charismatic Renewal, the evil eye therapeutic system requires
the combination of healing genres into a ‘pneumopsychosomatic synthe-
sis’ (1994: 40). Pneuma, psyche and soma encounter each other before
and during the ksematiasma. Their interaction leads to the habituation of
a charismatic world and the creation of a ‘sacred self’, through healing
(1994: 24). The spirit, the soul and the body return from their cultural
ostracism. Presence is reclaimed.

Belief as Perception

‘The distinction between “this world” and a “beyond” is widespread, but

it is not universal. It is this distinction between two modes of existence
that leads to a distinction between two ways of apprehending what exists:
perception and knowledge on the one side, belief on the other’ (Pouillon
1982: 2). The usual predetermined representation when it comes to the evil
eye rests on the assumption that there are two segments of cosmos: the
physical, which is bodily perceived; and the spiritual, which is believed.
The evil eye is usually placed in the second cosmos. Nevertheless, such a
spatial bipolarity makes no sense. Perception and belief share a comple-
mentarity, not a rupture. The evil eye has not only cracked the symbolic
fence that allegedly separates the embodied from the spiritual world. It
has knocked the fence down.
At the beginning of the article I narrated the experience of Elena, who
somatically perceived her grandfather’s soul and spirit, and who, through
the evil eye, has embodied the spiritual ever since. ‘Through our bodies we
see, feel, hear, perceive, touch, smell, and we hold our everyday worlds’
(McGuire 1990: 285). Perception, given the involvement of sensory or-
gans, is attained through embodied attendance. Elena has characterized
 Bodily Praxes of Performed Religiosity in Contemporary Greece ◆ 145

her experience with her grandfather as ‘spiritual’ and ‘supernatural’. At

the same time, she has insisted upon the embodiment of her belief. As she
has said herself, she saw her grandfather’s soul. And she has claimed that
the evil eye practice works in the same way: spiritual energies correspond
with the body, and people become evil eyed and are subsequently healed.
The evil eye is sensed by the bodily organs. It is physically experienced.
And it is perceived through spiritual communication. Seremetakis (1994:
39) argues that ‘the sensorial is not only embraced by the body as an in-
ternal power, but it also spreads out there, and can invade the body as a
perceptual experience’. In the process of debating whether the evil eye
should be considered as somatically sensed and/or spiritually perceived,
Rethymniots and Thessalonikans have continually talked about belief: be-
lief in the evil eye, belief in God, belief in spiritual forces, belief in energy
exchange. My informants have not only talked to me about their beliefs,
but have also described how they perceive their beliefs and act them out
in practice. They have shown how the evil eye inhabits an embodied space,
a ‘location where human experience takes on material form’ (Low and
Lawrence-Zuñiga 2003: 2), and how it populates a spiritual space too.
According to Pouillon, the Hadjerai people of the African country of
Chad believe in the existence of invisible spirits, the margay, like they be-
lieve in their own existence. The anthropologist then goes on to correct
himself: ‘or rather, they don’t believe in it: this existence is simply a fact
of experience’ (1982: 7). To draw an analytic parallel, those who believe in
the evil eye believe in it as they believe in their own being; those who do
not, simply believe in the evil eye’s nonexistence. Yet, it is not random that
individuals who have experienced the power of the evil eye are in most
cases the ones who actually believe and recognize its existence. Evil eye
belief is not only ‘learned’ (Severi 2007: 30). It is also practised through
the action and activation of sensory experiences, bodily sensations, and
perceptual correspondences. And by doing so, it renders the belief-versus-
perception, the somatic-versus-spiritual, and the body-versus-spirit and
soul dichotomizations obsolete.

Epilogue: The Somatic and the Spiritual

in Creative Interaction
Creativity is an ‘activity that produces something new through the recom-
bination and transformation of existing cultural practices or forms’ (Liep
2001: 2). It emerges from specific people who reshape their sociocultural
settings in particular historical moments (Rosaldo, Lavie and Narayan
1993: 6). In the preceding pages, I have attempted to demonstrate the cre-
ative manner with which individuals in Rethymno and Thessaloniki prac-
tise the evil eye, perform their religiosity and, ultimately, approach the
relationship between (their) body, soul and spirit. Rethymniots and Thes-
146 ◆ Eugenia Roussou

salonikans have entered a process of bringing Orthodox Christianity and

‘New Age’ spirituality closer together and, in doing so, they have begun
reshaping their everyday religiosity. Through practising the evil eye, they
challenge the dichotomized stereotype that seems to stubbornly pursue
the somatic and the spiritual. Namely, they show that the body is not a
brute fact of nature that only belongs to the physically perceptual sphere
of our cosmos. On the contrary, it carries spirituality and sacredness; it
is ‘spirited’ (Murphy 2006: ix). And they also illustrate that the spirit and
the soul are not a spiritually privileged domain which only the Orthodox
ecclesiastic official representatives can handle; lay people can vigorously
and productively deal with the spiritual too.
‘Let us be careful not to separate body and spirit. We can emphasize
one or the other, but to split them apart is false to what it means to be
a human being. Life is in the body; we cannot separate body and spirit
and live’ (Raitt 1995: 106). People in Crete and northern Greece ‘inhabit’
their bodies so that these become (spiritually) ‘habituated’ (Scheper-
Hughes 1994: 232). They employ their senses and emotions. They believe.
They perceive. They practise. During their everyday religious and spiri-
tual restlessness, my informants vibrantly engage with the spiritual and
the somatic. By spiritually perceiving and somatically believing the evil
eye, they transcend the obstacles that stand between body, soul and spirit.
They prove the need to go back and rechallenge our commonly held idea
of natural perception; and reconsider what ‘being-in-the-world’ (Ingold
2000: 168) really means. After all, it is mati that permeates spiritual and
bodily spaces, invading both, destroying their boundaries and bringing
them together under a cultural mutuality of perceptual coexistence.

Notes
Ruy Blanes and Anna Fedele deserve special thanks for organizing the EASA
panel and subsequently placing the topic of this book under a refreshed an-
thropological spotlight, and for their careful reading and commenting upon
earlier drafts of this article. I am also grateful to Charles Stewart for his valu-
able insights and thorough remarks and to Devorah Romanek and Diana Es-
pirito Santo for their scrupulous reading of the text.
1. The real names of my informants have been replaced by pseudonyms.
2. The female gender is grammatically used to identify both women and men,
throughout the present text. No insinuation that the evil practitioners are
mostly women is intended. This is a choice of personal writing style, in an
attempt to move away from the male-centred ‘he’ which has been popularly
employed to represent both the male and the female gender.
3. Fieldwork was divided between Rethymno, a town on the island of Crete, and
Thessaloniki, the second largest city of Greece. It was conducted for the needs
of my doctoral thesis, which focuses on the creative and pluralized ways with
 Bodily Praxes of Performed Religiosity in Contemporary Greece ◆ 147

which people in contemporary Greece handle their religiosity through the evil
eye practice.
4. ‘New Age’ is a vague category. It appears to be an unbounded field of spiritual
pursuits, which can involve a large variety of practices, and it is hence difficult
to define. Heelas (1996) argues that the New Age Movement is mostly about
individuality and the spiritual development of the self, and so does Brown
(1997: vii) who defines ‘New Age’ as ‘a diffuse social movement of people
committed to pushing the boundaries of the self and bringing spirituality into
everyday life’. Shimazono (1999) proposes the term ‘New Spirituality Move-
ments and Culture’ instead of ‘New Age’. As he explains, ‘many people in
these movements consider that they belong to a New Age of “spirituality”
that is to follow the age of “religion” as it comes to an end. “Spirituality” in a
broad sense implies religiousness, but it does not mean organized religion or
doctrine’ (Shimazono 1999: 125). Although many of my informants recognize
their participation in a ‘New Age’ spirituality, they do not define themselves
as ‘New Agers’. Consequently, in the article I use the term ‘New Age’ with
its etic sense. And I follow Shimazono’s approach, perceiving as ‘New Age
spirituality’ those practices of religiosity which deviate from the Orthodox
Christian doctrine, and which my informants employ in order to develop their
self and get in touch with the spiritual in non-Orthodox ways.
5. I am using the ‘church’ in its noncapitalized form to refer to the actual church
building, and the mass/ liturgy. The ‘Church’ in its capitalized form signi-
fies the doctrinal organ of Orthodox Christianity and the religious ideology
that is embedded in it; yet, it does also include the ‘church’ in its signifieds,
since the religious ideology cannot be separated from its material and liturgical
designations.
6. Christian monasticism, for instance, actively practises a separation between
body and soul (Asad 1993: 139–40). Yet, the separation is not a ‘privilege’ of
the Christian forms of monasticism only. In Buddhist monastic training, for
instance, as Collins (1997: 185, 188) observes, the absolute spiritual goal is nir-
vana, the ultimate achievement of a bodiless existence.
7. Kleinman (1980: 72) has famously argued for a distinction between disease, the
‘malfunctioning of biological and/or psychological processes’, and illness, the
‘psychosocial experience and meaning of perceived disease’. Although he later
came to rethink the issue and consequently changed his mind about his initial
statement, his dichotomized medical schema of the biological and the medi-
cally accurate versus the symbolic and the medically malfunctioning is still
popular. By referring to the evil eye symptomatology as ‘illness’, I definitely
do not follow an illness versus disease binarism. Instead, I use the term ‘illness’
to indicate both the biological and the sociocultural aspects of the symptoms
of illness that my informants experience.
8. In almost every Greek household, people, whether religiously devout or not,
dedicate a corner in the house to create a family altar, an ikonostasi, which is
usually filled with Christian icons and an oil lamp. This altar is supposed to
protect the household from evil forces and the devil, and it is the place where
members of the family go to pray and/or establish a form of communication
with the sacred.
9. Numbers three – signifying the Holy Trinity – and seven – denoting the seven
sacraments – are repetitively used: the ksematiastra (healer) recites the prayer
148 ◆ Eugenia Roussou

either three or seven times, she crosses the sufferer’s forehead three times, and
the latter has to drink the ingredients used three times. In Rethymno I was
told that ksematiasma is much more effective if it is performed by three wom-
en named Maria: a symbolic connection with the Virgin Mary is present. Fur-
thermore, oil is used because, to quote a middle-aged Thessalonikan, ‘Christ
sat below the olive tree, he prayed in an olive field, and oil is sacred because
we use it in Church’. And water, according to another healer, is important
‘because we cannot live without it, it is a natural element of nature and of
the human organism, and important for baptism’. For a thorough account as
far as the Christian symbolism of the evil eye is concerned, see Stewart 1991:
195–243.
10. A ksematiastra does not normally reveal the prayer she recites during the heal-
ing. But all the ritual healers I have spoken to have insisted upon the fact that
they only use ‘Christian words’. Apart from these secret prayers, the Creed
and Saint Basil’s and Saint Kyprianos’s exorcistic prayers against magic and
vaskania are the most popular choices in the performance of ksematiasma.

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