In many parts of the world many people or magicians attempted to avert evil by either using amulets or uttering commanding dispelling words. In my native town (founded by Italic Greeks [Throurioi] in 204 B.C., in southern Italy, as I mentioned before) there is a magical spell , which I learned there before moving to New York, but it is in corrupt Latin form, while the local dialect is a bundle of Greek, corrupt Latin, and corrupt Italian words. Its contents make me suppose that it is a late version of a Greek spell:
"uottu e nove, fore mal'uocchiu" literally = "eight and nine, outside/away [be] the evil eye".
Fore = Latin Fore
Mal'uocchiu = male uocchiu < Lat. Malis/Male + Oculus
8 e 9 mean nothing to me, but I have an hypothesis: those words are an invocation to the 8 Chthonic gods and the 9 Celestial or Olympian gods -- not so classified by Hesiod, but probably by Dorians.
The Celestial gods would be , as in the oldest myths, Ouranos and Gaia, plus, from later myths, Selene or Artemis, Ares, Hermes, Zeus, Aphrodite, Chronos, Helios or the Solar Apollo. The Chthonic [terrestrial and underground] gods would be Hades, Poseidon [of fresh and salty waters], the triple-goddess
Hekate [originally the One Below, Khthonie herself; Hekate Phosphoros in Hades; but also identified with Selene/Artemis], the Chthonic Apollon or [Thessalian] Haplos, and two others: Demeter, the mother of grain vegetation, personified as Kore, and Kore, who after Hades' abduction, was identified with Persephone.
So it seems.
