Luck Bank

This small talisman belonged to my aunt and was made by her...

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 22:33:30 +1000

This small talisman belonged to my aunt and was made by her mother for her when she was a child in Greece. This talisman, called a filahta kept with her throughout her life to bring good fortune. This small Greek talisman is pinned on the inside of clothing to serve as a measure to counteract bad fortune. It is kept hidden from view as the filahta is said to lose its power if it is seen. The filahta is usually made by a mother or grandmother and given to a child. The handing down from mother or grandmother to child can be seen as an elder imparting a piece of themselves to the child, to spiritually be present with them at all times.

A filahta comprises of a small piece of cloth that is sewn together to contain a mysterious material that is precious and said to protect. Traditionally the user of the filahta does not know it’s contents and cannot open it up to see and validate the seemingly lucky contents. They must faithfully believe that it does contain precious materials that will provide them with good fortune.The precious materials that are said to be contained within vary widely depending on location and what the elder deems precious. Fillings that are said to be in a filahta are usually filled with plant material or food that is considered powerful including basil, blackberry thorns, pressed flowers, cloves and bread.

A tama from Brunswick, with thanks. The Greek shop around the...

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 12:17:00 +1100

A tama from Brunswick, with thanks.

The Greek shop around the corner in Sydney Road Brunswick (Melbourne) sells these strange metal objects. What are they for? According to the man with the big moustache who looks after the Greek section (behind closed doors at the back of the tobacconist), it’s called a Tama and is usually attached to a religious icon as a sign of thanks. Thanks for what? You can pray to the saint for a specific purpose - usually health. If your prayers are answered, then you show your gratitude to the saint with this votive, which is attached to the icon (perhaps a nail in the hole on the right). It’s like the anamitas in Chile which are covered with gifts from people whose prayers are answered. The baby was the only symbol on display in the shop. I guess there are a lot of grandparents thinking about the health of their descendants. It seems quite an archaic practice for a city like Melbourne. But the large Greek population tends to stick with their traditional beliefs. I must say, it does also provide a relief from the heartless medical technology services that also populate the corner.

These charms are made by the Triqui in Oaxaca. They have 12...

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 19:13:07 +1100

These charms are made by the Triqui in Oaxaca. They have 12 textile hearth shapes filled with different lucky objects (‘milagros’, colorin red beans, herbs) and must be hung above a newborn’s crib and remain there for 12 months, to ensure good health and luck. This was Emma’s. We got it as a present from a Triqui artist short before she was born. I has hung in her crib, in Mateo’s and now it will be placed in Sam’s as well! - Valeria Siemelink

Bracelets for Men, in Earthy Materials

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 18:24:58 +1000

Bracelets for Men, in Earthy Materials

The Harder I Work, The Luckier I Get | Both Sides of the Table

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 20:36:26 +1000

The Harder I Work, The Luckier I Get | Both Sides of the Table

Worry beads

Wed, 06 Apr 2011 22:58:34 +1000

Worry beads

El organillero augers a safe voyage

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 07:28:00 +1100

Cornelia Hornauer is a jeweller who lives in Viña del Mar, a seaside town next to Valparaíso, an hour north of Santiago. Once a month, her apartment building is serenaded by an organillero, a stoic gentleman with a crank organ. His cheerful tunes bring children out to buy lollies. But for the more adventurous, he will tell your fortune. For 500 pesos, he puts his green parrot in a wooden cage, which, on opening the door, bends down to select from a piece of paper from a tray which contains the fortune. Cornelia was that night going to set sail for Juan Fernandez island, the setting for the novel Robinson Crusoe. She was interested in the affect of the tsumani and how jewellery might make people feel better about returning to the sea. Thankfully, her fortune was that she would be successful in overcoming her fears, and would find good news soon.

The organillero is a German legacy. The organs still have German inscriptions. Like Cornelia herself, whose grandparents came out from Germany to settle in Latin America.

I half suspect that the organillero had a way of directing the parrot subtly to the appropriate colour.

Lingam exhibition Catharijne convent by Ruudt Peters

Mon, 07 Mar 2011 16:48:07 +1100

Lingam exhibition Catharijne convent by Ruudt Peters

The mauli is a red thread that is worn around the wrist in...

Fri, 04 Mar 2011 12:21:03 +1100

The mauli is a red thread that is worn around the wrist in India. It is usually received as part of a puja religious ceremony at a temple.

Men and unmarried women receive it on the right hand, and married women on the left (understanding that their husband is the dominant ‘right hand man’).

Legend has it that Lord Vishnu during his incarnation of Vamana tied a red thread on the hands of King Bali to grant him immortality and to rule the netherworld. It is sometimes believed that this blessed thread will protect against diseases and misfortune.

The red thread is found in many other religions, such as the Kabbalah and Buddism. It is similar to the Laotian basi.

Of course, as with all these wrist-strings, you must wear the thread until it falls off naturally.

In the photo, a mauli is being worn by Swarup Dutta, from the Indian Institute of Crafts & Design, who received his at the puja associated with the inauguration of his school year.

Meet the Ethical Placebo: A Story that Heals | NeuroTribes

Sun, 20 Feb 2011 02:15:47 +1100

Meet the Ethical Placebo: A Story that Heals | NeuroTribes

Charmed II

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 14:00:09 +1100

Charmed II

Safety First / Luck After Rewards So a sign reads on the...

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 13:22:35 +1100

Safety First / Luck After Rewards

So a sign reads on the outskirts of Delhi. The first part is self-explanatory. But the second remains quite mysterious. Perhaps this means, if you take care now, you will be lucky after. But this is quite curious, as safety and luck are antitheses. If you believe that you can be lucky, then you don’t need to be worried about safety now.

But perhaps this makes sense in a culture that believes in ‘karma’, the sense that your actions now can have a mysterious effect in the future, even another life.

It seems problematic to convert values between the Indian and Western luck banks.

Korean Charm

Sun, 23 Jan 2011 16:29:51 +1100

The way people wish luck and protect them from any misfortune is similar in everywhere in the world and in every generation since time began. The country I emigrated from, Korea is no exception and people in Korea wear the symbols that represent luck or charm as ornaments. Many Koreans also secretly carry pieces of paper with the lucky charms printed on them to give luck in their daily life.

These paper charms are mainly related to Buddhism. People can acquire them from monks or shaman known as a mudang, (fortune tellers).

Aesthetically the papers have Buddhist symbols or sayings drawn on yellow paper with red ink. The characters are drawn from traditional Chinese characters for luck, fortune, longevity, and fertility. When people carry those charm papers in their pocket, they think the spirit of the symbols will look after them.

Many of these charms are hand written, however more often they are mass-produced. The most prolific time for acquiring a charm is at the beginning of (Chinese) new year.

omamori

Thu, 02 Dec 2010 12:15:00 +1100

When I met Kevin in Singapore about a month ago, we got talking about lucky charms around the world. I told him about my ‘omamori’ that I carry around with me in my wallet. Omamori is a Japanese amulet dedicated to particular Shinto deities. Many people in Japan believe that omamori protects themselves from bad luck. There are different kinds of omamoris for different purposes. For instance, there is a ‘kanai anzen’ for good health and good fortune in the household, ‘kotsu anzen’ to protect drivers and travelers, ‘en-musubi’ for singles and couples to ensure love and marriage, ‘anzan’ to protect pregnant woman through pregnancy and birth and ‘gakugyo joju’ for students and scholars to achieve good results, to name a few. The omamori I carry around is ‘yakuyoke’ literally meaning to fend off bad luck. My mother gets it from a shrine in Tokyo, one for each member of the family and has been posting them to me for as long as I can remember. So, although we live in Singapore, my family very much follow the Japanese tradition and my husband (British) and my two daughters all carry a ‘yakuyoke’ in their wallets. We also have a ‘kotsu anzen’ omamori hanging in our car.

Normally a new set of ‘omamori’ will arrive around the end of the year to replace the old ones. I will post back the old omamoris to my mother who will take them to a local shrine to be burnt. This is the respectful way of disposing the old ‘expired’ omamoris. You should never throw them away or treat them with disrespect (or bad luck will befall on you).

When Kevin asked me what was inside the little paper parcel. I confessed that I had never opened it, superstitious that it will bring bad luck if I were to ‘disrobe’ or expose the little deity – another disrespectful way of treating the omamori. I am not a religious person but my relationship with omamori has always been like this. If you treat it right, it will protect you. If you treat it wrongly, then anything can happen! Carrying it around, it does make me feel protected though.

I suppose it is coming to that time of the year when I will be bidding good bye to the old omamoris and welcoming the new ones. I do appreciate my mother’s effort in keeping this going. I very much understand it to be her love and wish to keep my family protected from bad luck.

Singapore is eight times lucky

Tue, 12 Oct 2010 23:54:22 +1100

Today we had another Charm School in Singapore - this time at Lasalle University. From this, I learned that the whole identity of Singapore seems organised around ideas of luck. Apparently most buildings are designed with advice from a Feng Shui master about the proper arrangement of space. Businesses much sometimes most to ensure that they operate in the most auspicious setting.

There are elements of city design purely for luck, such as the Fountain of Wealth in Suntec. Apparently, if you touch the waters, you will experience good luck, or at least that is what tourists are told as a way of attracting people to the area.

This came to a head during the recent Global Financial Crisis, which happened to coincide with a fault in the fountain. Many connected the two events together. There were not only desperate attempts to reverse financial fortune by restoring the fountain, the nearby Singapore Eye wheel had its direction reversed to stop money flowing out of the country.

The money itself is designed around the Daoist symbol of luck. The eight-sided shape of the one dollar coin was a government decision ensure that the propitious shape of the octagon (Bagua) would be as widely disseminated through the nation as possible.

This came to my attention in a different way when I visited a geomancy shop specialising in Thai lucky charms. At first I was struck by the high prices of the various lucky stones and symbols, but then I realised it wasn’t that the prices were expensive, it was that they had the lucky number in them - $288, $388, $488, etc. Apparently, on 8 August 2008 there were more than a thousand weddings in Singapore.

Why this obsession with luck in Singapore? A participant today offered the reason that Singapore is a purely money-based economy, so it depends more than anything else on confidence.

Stolen bike

Fri, 01 Oct 2010 17:38:42 +1000

Last night I was at a gathering of a central Victoria family. The family historian told me a story of one of the first settlers, who kept all of his money as silver coins in his bike pump. One day he went into the barber’s to have a hair cut. While he was inside someone took off with the bike. He was distraught to find his bike, and his life savings, gone. But the person who took it had mistaken it for his own bike, and quickly came back to return it. ‘That’s lucky’, we said.

But really, nothing had changed. He had the bike just as before. But it needed a tragedy in order to make the restoration something lucky. So does this suggest that luck is a zero-sum game? Is the route to luck misfortune?

The new threat of catastrophic bushfire

Sat, 07 Aug 2010 13:15:00 +1000

The new threat of catastrophic bushfire:

Black Saturday was a new phenomenon, a glimpse into the future. It was the first fire of the era of global warming and it was terrifying. No one had ever seen anything like its velocity and intensity. It resulted in a new category of fire assessment: ‘catastrophic’.

So what were the new elements? As submissions to the Royal Commission by scientists like Professors Neville Nichols of Monash and Peter A. Gell of Ballarat University pointed out, the answer is that south-eastern Australia is drying out and the most plausible cause is global warming. Victoria has had a 20 per cent drop in rainfall over the last 12 years. Recent summers have been the hottest and driest on record, way outside the normal range.

As Nichols told the Commission: ‘The gradual warming of Australian mean maximum temperature of about 0.75°C most likely … contributed to the extreme heat observed on [Black Saturday] … It seems unlikely that such new records, so far outside prior experience, would have occurred in the absence of gradual warming since about 1970.’

Nichols also emphasised ‘the chronic Victorian rainfall decline over the past decade’. The weather systems that brought rain to the south-east are shifting further south so that much of the rain now falls either over the ocean or western Tasmania. It is misleading to talk about a ‘drought’, because that implies that things will eventually return to ‘normal’. In fact, the present weather conditions are the new ‘normal’.

This will lead to bushfires that are more frequent and intense, of greater velocity and more widespread. No longer are Black Friday and Ash Wednesday the norms by which fires are judged; the new measure is Black Saturday. Psychologically this has left many people gobsmacked. They are unable to comprehend what has happened, let alone think that Black Saturday might now be the norm for future bushfires.