The evil eye. An account of this ancient and wide spread superstition

i88 THE EVIL EYE CHAP.
mark her as the type of human fertlHty. This latter
conception is of purely Asiatic origin, though the
same fertility was ascribed
' ^ i*.-««>w?a»^i«^ ->x
^ l^^^J^^^T^
Fig. 69.
to Isis ; moreover, the Diana
of Ephesus whose " image
fell down from Jupiter," is,
like Isis, allowed to be in
that aspect the same person
as the Indian Parvati. The
multiplicity of mammae was
^^^^ symbol of abundance of
nutriment. The same sym-
bols are used in representa-
tions of the Babylonian
Ishtar and the Indian
Devaki.^°^ The wide differ-
ence between the fertile
matron of Ephesus and the
chaste maiden of the
Romans has to be carefully
borne in mind. The illus-
trations we give in Chap.
X. of statues of the former,
show how the Romans
ignored the most prominent
of her Asiatic attributes, and
portrayed her, by way of compromise, as a portly
female of uncertain status, rather suggestive of her
patronage, as Diana Lucina, of the monthly nurse.
Looking at Isis as the mother of Horus,^*' in the
3"^ " St. Jerome says Diana of Ephesus was called Multimanwiia." Several
paps were ascribed to Isis also. Isis had sometimes a flower on her head ;
Diana always a tower (Montfaucon, vol. i. p. 96).
309 Pignorius, Expositio Mensir Isiaccr ( Vctitslissinitr Tabiihc), p. 16, alludes
to Mercury having placed horns made out of the head of a cow upon the head