Folklore: Charm to ward off bad luck

Genre: Proverb/charm, Provençal?  (myself)
December, 2, 2001

Avanti, avanti, maleficium defense
(avantee, avantee mal-le feecee-ium defance)
out out evil protect Out, out evilness, and protect (me?)
honi soit qui male pense. let there be no thoughts which are bad.
(oni swoa kay mal-ee pance)
it that bad and thought

I first learned the proverb from a former boyfriend, poet John Oliver Simon (b. 1942), of Berkeley, Ca., ca. 1982. He used “Avanti” as a preventative magic superstition charm to ward off evil. The first time he used it was when he ritually smudged his house with sage to purify it ca. 1982, and another time, when we were in San Cristobál de las Casas, Chíapas, México, in the mid-’80s, during the New Age event, the Harmonic Convergence, touted by José and Ivan Argüelles.

But instead of harmony, it was as if the dead and the devils were truly on the rampage. While hiking, we met a gringa (American) who had been raped, and someone else was just murdered on the trail we were on....we were too close to the underbelly of the world.

The night of the so-called Convergence, I had nightmares that the dead were after me, and I kept waking up, screaming my lungs out, with my hands in the aura where their ghostly green presence was. After my third nightmare, John felt the need to purify us. He said “Avanti” was an old Provençal proverb from the Middle Ages, and he’d successfully used it as a charm for 20 years.

Still I was haunted, so we gave up the idea of sleep, climbed onto the roof and sat back-to-back with our elbows interlocked and chanted the charm as we watched the stars while waiting for dawn to arrive.

When I described the strange dead woman who visited me in my dreams that night, John said he recognized her; I’d described how she dressed, demonstrated how she stood, hand on hip, pointing to John. She had a message for him, but I couldn’t make it out. He said, “That’s Mickela, in Berkeley. Something’s happened.” I hadn’t a clue who Mikela was.

But next morning, a telegram arrived from the poet Alta, John’s former wife: Mikela died that night. The first apparition was a friend of mine, poet Dave Evans,—I wondered why he was in my dream.

When I returned home to the States months later, I learned Dave Evans had died that week of a heart attack. The third apparition was demonic, perhaps Jaguar & it wanted me. My Irish grandmother had the gift of the Second Sight, I’d dreamt of the deaths of Borg Haugen, and a poet-friend Boschka Layton, (sister of Donald Sutherland, & wife of poet Irving Layton), but I never dreampt of someone I didn’t know, and for another person. I’ve no explanation for it, as I don’t tend to place much stock in it. However, if I’m in a tight situation, I will say “Avanti.”

In an attempt to track down the origin of this proverb, I asked far and wide, to no avail, I couldn’t even get anyone to help me translate it. I was told it was medieval Provençal, but how could I prove it? It kept niggling at me. I knew this proverb from somewhere else, but where?

The only clue I had to go by was the 1994 movie, “The Madness of King George,” the king wears blue ribbons (the Order of the Garter) around his calves with the proverb printed on them. So I began to think of knights, and a UC Berkeley linguist, Renee Perelmuttter, said, “Isn’t that from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? He wears it on his girdle to remind himself of his foolishness. And then all the knights wore girdles too.”

Then I began to harbor some anatomical worries. Seething like Malvolio at cross-purposes with his garters, I pondered: why did they confuse girdles which presumably go around a man’s waist, to garters, which hold up one’s stockings around the calf or thigh?

The last line in the 1959 Penguin edition of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” indeed ends with: “HONY SOYT QUI MAL PENCE” (p 125). It is not in most of the Sir Gawain tales. I looked at 5 other tales. This particular version of Sir Gawain comes from the 14th c. Cotton Collection MS, Nero Ax, in the British Museum. A footnote revealed: “The conjunction of the green baldric and the motto of the Order of the Garter; but that order was founded by Edward III, in about 1347...” It went on to say that the Green Knight was originally associated with the Order of the Bath. And “Ritual purification of knights by bathing appears to have been practiced by the English as long ago as the 11th c.” Henry IV formalized the Order in 1349. So we have a terminus ante quem of the early to mid-14th c; and a possible 11th c. source. Since the story Sir Gawain is a Romantic reworking of an older Celtic tale (it first appears in the Ulster Cycle, in the 12th c. MS, Leabhar nahUidre), further research into Medieval French courtly poetry is required to see if I can locate the first line of the proverb.

UC Berkeley Folklore Collections
Kroeber Hall, Dr. Alan Dundes