An Apotropaic Holiday Gift Guide!

This holiday season, I want to be shiny and protected like my Polish peasants of yesteryear ancestors.

Apotropaic Magic is just a fancy word for “protection magic”, but I’m feeling mystical today. The lamppost outside my window keeps on blinking, and even though I live in a fancy neighbourhood no one’s come to fix it. I was outside walking my sister’s dog a few nights ago and, suddenly, it got way too dark. Then, lighter, with a flicker. On, then off, and then back on like nothing happened. 

The word itself comes from the Greek apotrópaios, and means “to turn away”, in the sense of turning away or repelling evil. Evil can take many forms -vintage kitten heels breaking dramatically when you’re walking to a fabulous gallery opening, boys that make you cry, some asshole yelling at you on the metro ride to work and specialty 20$ mezcal shots that are so awful you have to pinch your nose to drink them. And God, we will be hot and protected this holiday season! If not out of superstition, I will gift myself and my loved ones protective trinkets out of tradition.

As night falls earlier and earlier and swallows more and more of sunshine hours, it gets colder and wetter. Every terrasse drinks soirée turns into a next-day wasting illness since they banned the outside dining heaters in Paris. It’s not the smoking or the drinking, it’s really because of the cold humidity in the air! We’re fine in the summer!  I always get seasonally anxious, and I can feel myself becoming needy and annoying. Everyone else gets needy and annoying too. Either way, it feels like we desperately need a protection spell cast upon us, and salt thrown over our shoulder (not the tequila shooter kind, the magical kind). 

Apotropaic magic is a type of magic practiced to ward off negative influences and evil forces, as well as those who mean to do us harm. This type of magic exists in all ages and throughout the world in different forms, and with different symbols to adopt and deities to call on. In Ancient Egypt, ivory wands were adorned with carvings of apotropaic solar deities and waved over pregnant women’s bellies. Dreamcatchers, Brigid’s crosses, gorgon faces, horseshoes, evil eyes -the list goes on and on. As always, most of these are beautiful and can be as decorative as they are effective. Since most of us rent and have very pissy landlords, we can’t carve the walls of our apartments with sigils and symbols. So we’ll have to get creative.



1.Halsgezeige and other charm necklaces

Girls all over TikTok and in the major fashion houses have been piling on charms, trinkets and layering metal jewellery this season, and not only is clink-clinking around town incredibly joy-inducing, it can also be magic. It is icky to have the same charm necklace as every single ones of your girlfriends though, excluding for the five-dollar nameplate necklaces that we loved in middle school and wear out to clubs sometimes when we feel youthful and don’t feel like yelling our name over loud music to every guy who’s trying to buy us drinks. It cuts the chit-chat short, and it’s a good way not to have a guy call you the wrong name all night and when he brags to his friends about how you were totally into him. 

Charms are supposed to be personal and they’re supposed to mean something, at least it’s what I’ve been told. Why would I collect talismans if they’re meaningless? It seems insanely counterintuitive. In that spirit, it’s actually very easy to make your own charm necklace, either with those tiny pliers we all have from making plastic jewellery as kids or by taking all the charms you’ve foraged on the internet and at vintage stores to a jeweller who will put them all together.

In Yiddish culture, the halsgezeige were 18th and 19th century textile necklaces used to ward off the evil eye from negatively affecting pregnant women. They were colourful, adorned with shiny coins and stones and made custom. 

From what I’ve read on the internet, they had many forms but their defining quality is their statement presence. They had to be distracting. For the statement jewellery friend in your life, or for the pregnant women in your friend group, crafting one of these necklaces is the gift-giving equivalent of actual protection witchcraft.

2.Evil Eye Talismans

The Evil Eye is another symbol that can be painted, worn as a protective amulet, tattooed, you name it. First of all, you probably have a slew of eye nickel silver-plated bracelets in an old box in your childhood room. I have seven, and the silver parts have all turned green now, and sometimes I wear them when I’m home for the holidays and they turn my wrists turquoise. Pure joy.

On my wish list this year are those exquisite necklaces from Susan Alexandra.

Taliswoman Necklace

Eye Necklace

3.Mirrors to deflect the dark forces

I love catching glances of myself in darkened shop windows, and evaluate the curve of my jaw and the optimal pointyness of my shoes with the angle of my coat. I know you do too. And, as it turns out, mirrors and reflective surfaces are known to repel negativity, because Evil is even more narcissistic than the vainest of frenemies. Obviously, there’s also a superstition never to buy a mirror second-hand, and I’ll have to ask my grandma but gifting mirrors can be a little on the line of inviting different auras of energies into the life of the one receiving the gift. 

The lacquered silver bags that catch the sun and shine darts into people’s eyes at street corners are a great alternative to mirrors. It works with giant earrings, thigh-high silver boots and giant vinyl trench coats too. The point is to have a mesmerising piece of reflective material at hand, just to be sure you can disappear behind it whenever someone tries to give you a reality check or an ex-boyfriend rolls by on a squeaky Lime bicycle.

Just to be safe, I’m adding these sunshine mirrors that were modelled on exterior decorations on a house in the Bukovina region (northeastern Romania).

Yellow Sun Mirror

4/5.Glasses for rituals, and dirty martinis

I love to drink three things at once. Diet Coker, water, black coffee. I never have any clean glasses at home for company. Every time my parents visit, they lament at my lack of glasses and bowls. This I mildly resent, but I’ve seen pictures from when they lived in Paris and were young and impossibly hot and had an actual small rattan bar to mix cocktails behind. I’ve always wanted to be one of those women on TV who have actual cocktail glasses at home, with the mixing gadgets and the big silver shaker. 

Ritual, whether it’s nighttime ablutions or morning water with apple cider vinegar, or the blood of vanquished enemies, require vessels to pour liquid into -and, sometimes, to leave it to stew until it goes sour or throw it in someone’s face.

So, these ceramic flower cups (who were destined to be ice cream bowls but I desperately want to use as cocktail glasses) are first on my list, and second are shiny geometric stainless steel champagne glasses you can stack and clink like they’re bells in a temple dedicated to the Old Gods.

Flower Cups

Stainless Steel Champagne Glasses

6.Hot Roman Priest calendar 

Protection is great, but it can be exhausting walking around in the big coats with the clinking bracelets and necklaces and the heavy shoulder bags, and the tiny tiny kitten heels that are vintage and fabulous and will break -like a Damocles sword that turns everyday life into a possible Greek tragedy. 

Sometimes, you just need to give a hot priest photographed in the early aughts who seems to be peering into your soul a smile and a naughty wink before you get out of the house. I’ve had mine for almost a year and I feel their holy hotness wash over me every time I do. In Ancient Greece, apotropaic gods and heroes were worshipped and given offerings in return for their protection. Now, I keep my mandarins in a silver bowl right under the hot priest of the month.

This one, you’ll have to purchase in Italy. I got mine in Venice, but they’re all over the country -no one knows how to market a hot priest like the Italian. 



7.Red shoes

In Eastern European folklore, the colour red is synonym with beauty and protection and red ribbons are tied around the wrists of loved ones to protect them from negative influences or to help them overcome a hurdle. What better way to protect ourselves from the filth and ugliness of the world than to walk all over it in shoes that would have made Dorothy jealous? 

I like these because they are so unbelievably loud when you walk down the street, and because they heal the little girl in me who grew up in the countryside and only wore boots outside -and floppy leopard print ballet flats inside.

Carel Mary Janes

Thanks for reading, happy ritualising!


Xx
Hannah