Orthodox Christianity, New Age Spirituality and Vernacular Religion

The Evil Eye in Greece

Eugenia Roussou

• Éditeur: Bloomsbury Academic
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350152816
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Sciences sociales
• Sous-sujet: Folklore et mythologie

This anthropological work thoroughly illustrates the novel synthesis of Christian religion and New Age spirituality in Greece. It challenges the single-faith approach that traditionally ties southern European countries to Christianity and focuses on how processes of globalization influence and transform vernacular religiosity. Based on long-term anthropological fieldwork in Greece, this book demonstrates how the popular belief in the 'evil eye' produces a creative affinity between religion and spirituality in everyday practice. The author analyses a variety of significant research themes, including lived and vernacular religion, alternative spirituality and healing, ritual performance and religious material culture. The book offers an innovative social scientific interpretation of contemporary religiosity, while engaging with a multiplicity of theoretical, analytic and empirical directions. It contributes to current key debates in social sciences with regard to globalization and secularization, religious pluralism, contemporary spirituality and the New Age movement, gender, power and the body, health, illness and alternative therapeutic systems, senses, perception and the supernatural, the spiritual marketplace, creativity and the individualization of religion in a multicultural world.

1

Introduction

Ariadne,¹ a northern Greek woman in her early forties, is making all the necessary preparations to show me how she performs the ritual healing against the evil eye. It is in the summer of 2019, and hers is the last interview I will conduct before closing my almost fifteen years of on-and-off research on the practice of the evil eye. I sit on the sofa, waiting for her to return from the kitchen, where she went to fill a coffee cup with water and get some olive oil, namely the necessary materials to perform the ritual on me – it has become a common ethnographic strategy to sense how the evil eye healing works on my own body. While I wait, I notice the feng shui lucky charms, the New Age crystals and other similar objects in her living room; a rosary, which, as Ariadne has told me, was given to her by a female relative for spiritual protection, after a visit to a Greek Orthodox monastery, also claims its own space in the room. Ariadne comes back but immediately realizes she has forgotten something, so she excuses herself and leaves the room again to go and get it. I wonder what she could have possibly forgotten, as all the necessary things for the healing are already standing here in front of me.

Ariadne comes back with a piece of wood sitting inside a small porcelain saucer; she does not need to explain to me what it is. I had recently discovered palo santo,² and I had also bought a small saucer depicting an eye from a popular retail chain shop to burn it inside for positive spiritual energy (see Figure 1). I am stunned by the coincidence but I try not to show it to Ariadne, since I do not want to impose my own choices, ideas, beliefs and explanations – at a personal and at an auto-reflexive ethnographic level – on her. So, uninterrupted, she describes what palo santo is and mentions the fact that she bought the little saucer from a particularly popular shop from where she had brought lately various objects depicting eyes, because she wanted to be protected from all kinds of negative energies, evil eye and otherwise; she has also bought some napkins with the eye symbol on it; ‘perhaps it can protect me from the evil eye and from the admiration of people when I cook a very tasty dinner for them’, she jokes. Ariadne usually keeps the evil eye saucer and the palo santo in her bedroom where, almost every night, she lights the little piece of wood before she goes to sleep and she meditates, so as to ‘fill my bedroom with its spiritual aroma, to protect me, and bring peaceful energy in my dreams’. Ariadne lights up the piece of wood, passes it around the room and makes a smoky circle with it around my body, before leaving it to slowly burn off on the table in front of us. She then proceeds with the ritual healing against the evil eye, murmuring a religious prayer and using the oil and the water.

Figure 1 Palo santo and the evil eye.

The evil eye (kako mati or simply mati) refers to the phenomenon where certain individuals, possessed by envy, meanness and general bad – but sometimes also good – feelings in their soul, transmit a form of energy to fellow human beings. It is a belief that exists since Greek antiquity, with a terminological and analytical emphasis being placed on the ‘eye’, since it is through the sense of vision and the exchange of gazes that the evil eye is supposed to primarily occur. Despite the important role of vision and its subsequent influence in defining the practice of the evil eye linguistically, as it will be argued later in the book, the evil eye is a practice that involves all the senses but also goes beyond them. The emotional broadcast in the evil eye occurs during daily sensory communication, when people interact with one another visually, verbally and aurally. Such interactions commonly result in evil eye affliction (matiasma). This is followed by a state of bodily distress, where the afflicted person (matiasmeni) experiences the evil eye effects, in the form of ill-health symptoms, on his/her body. What follows is a ritual healing known as ksematiasma, which is predominantly performed by lay specialists. Finally, in addition to the spiritual beliefs and practices involved, people draw on a panoply of evil eye material objects (matakia), which are mainly used as prophylactic amulets against any form of evil.

Placing the belief in the evil eye at the centre of the analysis, this book explores the practice of vernacular religiosity in a southern European country, by examining the dynamic ways in which lay people in Greece, and more specifically in Crete and northern Greece, practise their religion and spirituality during their everyday lives. Stepping away from the theoretical and analytic stereotype of perceiving religion and spirituality as antithetical, the objective of this ethnography is to analyse the complex and creative ways in which religion and spirituality are amalgamated in vernacular performances of religiosity, while approaching contemporary spirituality as ‘lived religion’ (McGuire 2008). With the popular belief in the evil eye and its various elements as a vehicle, it will be shown how people in Greece redraw the boundaries between religion and spirituality, creating a dynamic field of spiritual freedom through individual action, as ‘traditional forms of religion, particularly Christianity, are giving way to holistic spirituality, sometimes still called New Age’ (Heelas and Woodhead 2005: x).

The analytical value of choosing the practice of the evil eye as the main theme of study rests on the fact that it stands between Orthodoxy and New Age spirituality, merging both in its everyday performance. It furthermore designates that something has changed in Greece nowadays. Orthodoxy’s defences have dropped, and its concrete walls have become porous and do not deny the reception of other spiritual influences. Greeks do not simply ‘tolerate’ (Hayden 2002) other religions any longer. They are not afraid to be religiously, spiritually and ritually creative. They now produce their own syntheses of believing, and they actively practise their belief. Through the evil eye, it is shown how contemporary Greek religiosity is going through a process of ‘individualization’ (Pollack 2008), and how New Age spirituality has become an active part of Greek religiosity. Orthodoxy appears to be losing its exclusive authority, as Greeks have the choice to follow other spiritual paths. Cretans and northern Greeks attend church liturgies and do sun salutations at home; they practise reiki and simultaneously perform religious-orientated healing treatments; they place Christian icons next to feng shui objects; they possess religious amulets and healing crystals; they believe in the divine, the supernatural and in flowing energy. Namely, they combine Orthodox religion and New Age spirituality, based on their individual spiritual needs and beliefs.

This spiritual amalgamation between (Orthodox) religion and (New Age) spirituality that is currently experienced and practised in Greece constitutes a fundamental development. It shows that the link between Orthodoxy and Greek identity does not stand by itself uncritically any longer. Namely, Greek religious identity has ceased to be ‘assumed’ (Stewart 2004: 280), since its Orthodox boundaries have become transcended. Greeks, therefore, have taken a crucial step towards freeing themselves from having Orthodoxy as a given part of their identity. Given the historical bond between Orthodox Christianity and Greek identity and the resulting predominance of Orthodoxy in the country for centuries, people in Greece today are doing more than simply transforming Greek popular religiosity. Instead, they are rebelling against an – up until recently – predetermined religiosity without, however, abandoning doctrinal religion altogether (as have many of their European counterparts). Greeks, then, act creatively while they handle their religiosity in dynamic ways through their pluralistic choices to follow more than one spiritual path along the way. Perhaps it is not so random, therefore, that the evil eye practice has been transformed, keeping its complicated yet everlasting relationship with Orthodoxy, but simultaneously incorporating new forms of spirituality. In the context of the evil eye belief and practice, a crossing of paths between religion and spirituality has occurred: a belief and practice that are considered religious and magical, Orthodox and pagan, natural and supernatural, scientific and mystical. In the words of Bruce (1998: 230):

As cultures become more diverse and as individuals claim greater authority to decide not only what they want to do but also what they want to believe, the shared ground for communal beliefs is reduced. This in turn reduces the plausibility to any individual of any religion but it does not prevent people from idiosyncratically entertaining diverse views of the life hereafter. Indeed, because there is no longer a dominant tradition with the power to stigmatise alternatives as deviant, it positively encourages low salience flirtation with an exotic array of alternatives.

As shown in the ethnographic example of Ariadne above, vernacular religiosity and spiritual creativity go hand in hand within the field of religious practice (Primiano 1995, 2012; Bowman and Valk 2012). In this book, emphasis is placed on the transformation of the Greek religious landscape at the level of everyday religious practice, where the so-called New Age spirituality (Heelas 1996; Hanegraaff 1996; Sutcliffe 2003; Heelas and Woodhead 2005; Kemp and Lewis 2007; Sutcliffe and Gilhus 2013) has become a new lived religiosity. Christianity and contemporary spirituality have always co-existed, interacted and continue to intermingle in the religious landscape of southern Europe. At the same time, as recent anthropological works (Rountree 2010; Fedele 2012; Cornejo Valle 2013; Fedele and Knibbe 2013; Roussou 2011, 2013) demonstrate, the presence of alternative spirituality in countries like Italy, Spain and Greece has become apparent, claiming an important role within the religious landscape of European countries that have been directly linked to Christian belief.

Especially during the current socioeconomic crisis in southern Europe, new forms of spirituality have provided an alternative to denominational religion, predominantly Christianity, for the latter has left people feeling largely unsupported and disillusioned in these difficult times. And although most of Christian believers do not let go of the Church completely or at all, the majority of the individuals quoted in this ethnographic work have questioned the position that Orthodox Christianity holds in contemporary Greece and have begun to follow non-Orthodox spiritual itineraries.³ Their need to pursue other spiritual directions in parallel to practising Orthodoxy is inspired by global trends and their desire to discover new ways of communication with the sacred. The aim of the book is to follow the(ir) diverse spiritual trajectories of vernacular religiosity, as people in Greece are gradually letting go of the churches and ‘believe without belonging’ (Davie 1994), without, however, abandoning their religious heritage.

Orthodox Christianity and Greek socio-cultural identity share a long-established intimacy. According to statistical surveys, around 97 per cent of the Greek population is – at least nominally – Orthodox (Alivizatos 1999: 25). Nowadays, however, practices of New Age spiritual orientation challenge the almost exclusive role of Orthodox Christianity as the autochthonous religion in contemporary Greece. Orthodox Christianity and New Age spirituality interact and amalgamate, leading contemporary Greek religiosity towards a dynamic path of creative spiritual synthesis. It is true that, up until recently, Orthodox Christianity seems to have dominated the religious field of contemporary Greece. However, the recent popularity of New Age spirituality challenges religion in contemporary Greece and pushes it in novel directions. More particularly, New Age spirituality has entered the evil eye practice as a result of a porous Orthodoxy and of the pursuit of new spiritual and cultural trends. Greeks do not perceive these new paths of spirituality as threatening. The evil eye practice remains socio-culturally Greek, even when accompanied by reiki or yoga, or when the ritual healing is performed to keep the negative energy away and while New Age crystals, feng shui objects and religious icons reside in some other part of people’s homes to protect from evil energies. Consequently, from articulating discourses on energy, to practising yoga, and from adopting a feng shui lifestyle to enhancing ksematiasma with reiki healing embodiments, the religious landscape in contemporary Greece appears to have escaped Orthodox Christianity. As Stewart (2004: 280) argues: ‘Now, with around 96 per cent of the populace at least nominally Orthodox, religious boundaries and identity have become more assumed than defended.’

With only a few exceptions (e.g. Rountree 2010; Palmisano 2010; Fedele 2012; Cornejo Valle 2013; Palmisano and Pannofino 2017; Roussou 2017, 2018; Clot-Garrell and Griera 2019), when it comes to countries of southern Europe such as Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy, studies have continued to reproduce the traditional stereotype that connects southern Europe to the single-faith, namely Christian, approach. The present work escapes this stereotype and it is one among a very scarce number of studies that present a different image of contemporary Greek religiosity, disconnecting Greece from the stereotypical assumption that follows it, as a southern European country, that (Orthodox) Christianity dominates the religious landscape of the country. The objective is to demonstrate how contemporary Greek religiosity is characterized by open religious horizons, where a creative amalgamation of Christianity and New Age spirituality takes place at the level of vernacular religious practice.

Conceptualizing religion and spirituality

Despite their usefulness as analytical means of negotiating contemporary issues of belief and religiosity, religion and spirituality are two concepts that are complex, vague and can be considered as ‘umbrella terms’. For that reason, it is important to clarify their signifieds and, through such a clarification, to contextualize the main focus of the book, namely the practice of the evil eye, within the interactive yet challenging relationship between the two. For the needs of my argument and analysis, then, religion is employed in the book as synonymous to the prevailing organized religious institution in Greece, namely Orthodox Christianity. Spirituality is used in order to signify non-institutional and more subjectivized New Age practices that have recently entered the spiritual field of contemporary Greece. It must be emphasized again, however, that religion and spirituality are not perceived as – necessarily – opposed to one another. Orthodox Christianity consists of and can be regarded as spirituality. New Age practices consist of and can be regarded as religion. Namely, both Orthodox and New Age practices possess elements of both religion and spirituality equivalently.

Using religion as synonymous to Orthodox Christianity does not imply a portrayal of contemporary Greek religiosity as mono-religiously oriented. Furthermore, as mentioned above, it is a fact that New Age practices may well be regarded as religious; yet, when my interlocutors in Crete and northern Greece mentioned religion during our conversations, they referred to Orthodox Christianity, which they thought to be the prevailing institutional, doctrinal, official religion of Greece. During my ethnographic research religion (thriskeia) was perceived as synonymous to Orthodoxy. Consequently, for the needs of the analysis, I follow the emic interpretation of thriskeia as synonymous to Orthodoxy, while being aware of the possible limitations such an approach can entail.

In addition, ‘alternative spirituality’, ‘new (forms of) spirituality’ and – especially – ‘New Age spirituality’ are all considered to be umbrella terms and have received criticism in recent years (Sutcliffe and Bowman 2000; Sutcliffe 2003; von Stuckrad 2005; Wood 2007). As has been argued, ‘the scholarly field of New Age studies is fraught with a tendency to lack theoretical underpinning, empirical evidence and comparative considerations’ (Wood 2007: 9). Taking thus into consideration the difficulties and the complications these terms entail, they are used interchangeably in the present text, in order to denote the non-Christian and more individualized paths that my interlocutors follow during their everyday lives. Adopting an emic analytical model and ethnographic perspective, the analysis is based on the fact that Rethymniots and Thessalonikans – the residents of the Cretan town of Rethymno and the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki, equivalently, where I conducted my ethnographic fieldwork – use themselves the terms alternatively in order to describe their practices and utilize the terminology accordingly.

Shimazono (1999) has proposed the term ‘New Spirituality Movements and Culture’ as an alternative. In his words (Shimazono 1999: 125):

Using ‘movements’ in the plural shows that the term embraces various types of ‘New Age’ groups. The word ‘spirituality’ is used because 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. Rather, it is used to mean the religious nature expressed by an individual’s thoughts and actions.

According to Shimazono’s approach, spirituality does not belong to any official doctrine. It is not collectively organized but individually driven and practised, while moving culturally forward, gradually leaving religion behind. As happens with ‘New Religious Movements’, ‘New Spiritual Movements’ imply an antithesis between religion and spirituality, where religion is understood as the officially organized doctrine and spirituality as the individual experience of the sacred in everyday life.

In my analysis, I follow Shimazono’s (1999) approach, without, however, adopting the implied antithesis between religion and spirituality. Knoblauch (2008: 145) asserts that ‘spirituality differs from religion by the stress laid on subjective experience of great transcendences by “ordinary” people. Students of Weber may detect the fundamental change with respect to traditional religion: charisma is not restricted to virtuosi or administered by organizations but becomes generalized and subjectivized’. People in my Greek fieldsites have shown that Orthodoxy and New Age spirituality should be considered as complementary – the boundaries between them are blurred. Certainly, there is a long tradition of spirituality within Orthodoxy. Thus, the synthesis of Orthodox and New Age spiritual practices in present-day Greece may not come as a surprise. Mysticism and meditation existed in the Orthodox circles long before yoga, feng shui, reiki and New Age spirituality made their appearance in the country. But what also needs to be emphasized is the fact that spiritual charisma in contemporary Greece is not a privilege of the Orthodox virtuosi; vernacular religious practitioners can claim it too.

And here lies the uniqueness of the relationship between religion and spirituality in the Greek context. In the Western socio-cultural context, denominational religion and individualized spirituality are perceived and practised in antithetical terms and can hardly co-exist (see Shimazono 1999; Knoblauch 2003; Stark, Hamberg and Miller 2005; Knoblauch 2008). In Greece, however, judging from my ethnographic research at least, the boundaries between the two appear not only softened but almost collapsed. Religion and spirituality are amalgamated in p...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The New Age of Greek religiosity: Orthodox Christianity and beyond
• 3 Matiasma: The energetic interplay of senses and emotions
• 4 Ksematiasma: Healing, power, performance
• 5 Creative syntheses through material culture: The evil eye in the spiritual marketplace
• 6 The pluralistic landscape of Greek religiosity: Religion and spirituality at a Global Age
• 7 Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Imprint