Can anyone help me shed some light on a cryptic symbol? When working this spring bartending in Paris, one of my co-workers had this tattoo on his upper left arm: a hand (palm facing) with an eye in the middle of it. I asked him many times what it meant, but he refused to tell me.
But here’s when I got really curious: when we stopped by a Middle Eastern lounge – that is, it catered almost exclusively to Arab patrons and had live Arabic lounge music (it was a shady place in itself, apparently full of call girls from I heard later on). We ended up not getting in (no big loss…because one guy with us was wearing sneakers), but while my friend was talking up the bouncer in Arabic he rolled up his shirt sleeve and pointed out the tattoo. He proceeded to do this again several times when meeting other Arabic speakers. He was apparently proud to show it off, and it seemed like the bouncers (whom he’d never met before) understood.
Has anyone seen or heard of this symbol before? My friend is from Morocco, and he only brandished it to Arabic speakers…possibly only to fellow Moslems? Some sort of Islamic Mason-esque organization?
My gosh, maralinn that was one majorly Jungian article. It was cool that the author found so many incidences of that motif all over the world. But he left out the artist who had popularized it for the modern world: Kahlil Gibran. It appeared in “Divine World,” one of Gibran’s Blakean paintings for The Prophet, printed on page 111. It showed a hand with an eye in the palm in the center, ringed by seven seraph wings and many little nude human figures revolving around it, the whole composition echoing the shape of an eye.
Considering Gibran’s state of mind, I took it as a symbol of God’s omnipotence (the hand) combined with omniscience (the eye), with the angelic and human universes revolving around it. You may have seen that psychedelic portrait of Sgt. Pepper Beatles in which musical mystic George Harrison displays the Gibranian eye in his hand.
All along I had thought Gibran made it up himself. So it looks like he drew on unfathomable millennia of folklore. Thanks, maralinn, we learned a lot today.