Amulet vs Talisman vs Charm vs Pendant: What Each Word Really Means

Amulet vs talisman vs charm vs pendant, and the two harder words, phylactery and gau: where each one came from, what it first named, and the museum objects that show the difference better than any definition.

Amulet vs talisman is one of those questions with a neat answer in shops and a messy one in museums. The neat answer says an amulet guards you and a talisman draws something toward you. The messy answer is that the people who carved, folded and sealed these things were not using English words at all, and the scholars who catalog them today disagree about where the line falls. Both answers are worth having, and each word still carries a trace of what it first meant.

Amulet vs talisman: the short answer

In the older sense, an amulet is something worn or carried that is meant to ward trouble off and keep doing so, while a talisman is something made, often inscribed, for a particular purpose. A charm was first a spoken or sung formula. A pendant is only a shape: anything that hangs. In everyday English the first three now overlap almost completely.

For the basics, and eight traditions in more depth, start with what an amulet necklace is. This page takes the comparison further, one word at a time.

Where each word comes from

Amulet: from Pliny's Latin

The Latin amuletum first turns up in Pliny the Elder's Natural History, written in the first century AD. Nobody has settled where Pliny's word came from. It may be related to amoliri, to avert or carry away, and the Oxford English Dictionary rejects the old idea that it was Arabic. English borrowed it in the mid-1400s, then barely used it again until about 1600.

The Greeks had their own words for the same thing, and the Victorian Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities lists three: periapton, periamma and phylakterion. The third, a safeguard, is where phylactery comes from.

Egyptian, older still, had several. A guide from the Egypt Centre at Swansea University gives meket, nehet and sa, which come from words for guarding or protecting, and wedja, which means well-being. Bristol Museums gives the same first three.

Talisman: from Greek through Arabic

Talisman took the longest road. Ancient Greek telein meant to complete, to perform a rite, or to pay a tax, all from telos, the end. From it came telesma, which in Byzantine Greek meant a religious rite or a consecration. Arabic took it up as tilsam, and from there it reached French and then English in the 1630s, when it meant a magical figure cut or engraved on stone or metal under set observances. The sense of "anything that gets extraordinary results" came only in 1784.

So the word has completion folded into it. A talisman, in the old sense, is a rite finished and fixed into an object.

Charm: from a Latin song

Charm comes from Latin carmen, a song, verse, or religious formula, from canere, to sing. It reached English around 1300 through Old French charme, meaning an incantation. By the 1590s it could mean any object worn to ward off evil, and the little ornament hung from a watch chain is recorded only from 1865. The charm bracelet is from 1941.

Pendant: from Old French pendre

Pendant is the plain one. It is the noun use of Old French pendant, the present participle of pendre, to hang, from Latin pendere. English had it by the early fourteenth century for any loose, hanging part of something. Nothing in the word says anything about belief.

Phylactery and locket

Two more words get tangled in. Phylactery, from Greek phylax, a guard, could mean safeguard or amulet, and Late Latin used it for a reliquary. Locket comes from Old French loquet, a latch, and first meant an iron bar across a window. The small hinged case for a curl of hair or a tiny portrait is recorded from the 1670s.

Amulet, talisman, charm, pendant: the comparison table

The real objects behind the words

The objects are more honest than the definitions, because each was made by somebody with a clear idea of what it was for.

An amulet: the heart scarab of Hatnefer

The Metropolitan Museum's own expedition found it in 1935–36, on the mummy of a woman named Hatnefer, in a tomb at Sheikh Abd el-Qurna on the west bank at Thebes (accession 36.3.2). It dates to about 1491–1473 BC. The beetle is serpentinite, 6.6 cm long, set in gold and hung on a chain of gold wire plaited in a quadruple-link pattern, 77.5 cm long. That is longer than any chain we send out, and a chain that length lets a pendant sit low on the chest.

On its flat underside is a version of Book of the Dead chapter 30A, in which the dead woman speaks to her own heart, "heart of my mother," and asks it not to testify against her when it is weighed against maat, the principle of order and justice. One detail on the catalog record stays with us. Hatnefer's name was added over erased text. The scarab had been made for somebody else first.

It is an amulet in the cleanest sense: laid on the body, and believed to protect the heart at the weighing.

A talisman: the shirt with the whole Qur'an written on it

The Met's talismanic shirt (1998.199) was made in northern India or the Deccan in the fifteenth or early sixteenth century, cotton painted in ink and gold. Its surface is broken into squares, medallions and lappet-shaped panels, and the museum records that the entire Qur'an is written inside them, bordered by the ninety-nine names of God in gold on an orange ground. On the back, in gold, "God is the Merciful, the Compassionate." The Met notes it may have been meant to be worn under armor.

This is the talisman as the old definition has it: a made thing, its power understood to lie in what was deliberately written onto it. And yet the essay the Met published alongside its Islamic collection is titled "Amulets and Talismans from the Islamic World," and its author, Yasmine Al-Saleh, defines a talisman simply as "any object that is imbued with protective powers." Protection was supposed to be the amulet's job. In one short essay you can watch the two words merge.

A charm: the Nine Herbs Charm

The best way to understand charm is to find one that is still words. The Nine Herbs Charm is an Old English poem in the Lacnunga, a tenth-century medical collection that survives in the British Library as Harley MS 585. It names nine plants and calls on both Woden and Christ. The prose at the end tells the healer to sing the charm, the galdor, three times over each herb before preparing it, then to sing it into the patient's mouth, into both ears, and onto the wound, before the salve goes on.

There is no object here at all. The charm is a sound in the room. English did not use the word for something worn until the 1590s.

A phylactery: a head-tefillin, and a word that argues with itself

The Met holds a single head-tefillin, probably nineteenth century and attributed to Egypt (X.392a, b): a leather cube 4.7 cm across on a wooden base, with a strap just over a meter long. The letter shin is formed on both sides, with three branches on one side and four on the other. Inside are four compartments for four small parchment scrolls with verses of Torah. One scroll is now missing, and the museum notes plainly that this makes the object ritually invalid.

Here the English word and the thing pull apart. "Phylactery" is the Greek New Testament's word for tefillin, and in Greek it meant safeguard, later amulet. Some modern scholars see a protective side to tefillin, and early rabbinic sources describe them guarding against demons. But the Talmud never calls tefillin amulets and in fact sets them apart from amulets. Inside the tradition they are a commandment, worn in weekday morning prayer, in a form fixed by Jewish law. "Amulet" is an outsider's word for them.

A reliquary pendant: the cross that opens

The Met's Byzantine reliquary pendant (2018.870.2) is copper alloy, tenth to eleventh century, 10.3 cm tall. Two halves meet on a hinge, and it was made to be worn on a chain. On the front the crucified Christ, between the Virgin and John the Evangelist, wears the colobium, a type the museum traces to the Early Christian centuries. On the back the Virgin stands with her hands raised in prayer, and the four evangelists look out from medallions on the arms, each holding his gospel. As a reliquary, it was made to close over a relic.

The Met's record for another cross, silver with niello and a pearl, calls it an encolpion, "a work made to hold relics and to be worn, hung from a chain, on the chest," and says it opens "like a locket." So now the phylactery, the locket and the reliquary are standing in the same place: a case worn on the body, with the important thing hidden inside.

An amulet box: the Tibetan gau

A gau (Tibetan ga'u) belongs with the cross and the tefillin. It is a case. The Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe has a nineteenth-century one from Tibet (A.1960.12.1ab), 7 cm square and only 1.1 cm deep, silver and brass set with turquoise. One square is laid over another so the lid has eight corners, an eight-pointed star framed in turquoise paving. The museum's own record files it under the name "Charm box." Its title calls it a portable altar or amulet box. Three English words, one small silver box.

The Rubin Museum's essay by James Gentry on a modern gau from Kathmandu, with its contents still inside, shows why. That gau held an amulet diagram wrapped in cords of five colors, relic pills, and small golden pills. Tibetan calls the contents ten, a receptacle, because they hold the blessing of buddhas, bodhisattvas and lamas. So in Tibetan the box and the protective thing inside it are not the same word. The gau is the house. The amulet, if you want that word, is what lives in it. There is more on what people sealed inside in The Gau: Tibet's Portable Shrine.

And the Roman bulla

The Roman bulla was the same idea in gold or leather: a round case on a neck chain, holding small protective things, worn by freeborn boys until they came of age. The Met has an Etruscan gold bulla only 1.9 cm across, on a string of gold beads (95.15.258). Its story is told in the guide to amulet necklace meaning.

How scholars actually use the terms

The scholarship is frank about the blur. A 2021 Leiden University doctoral thesis by M. A. Garcia Probert, on the Tawfik Canaan collection of Palestinian amulets, opens with a chapter called "What is an amulet?" that walks through the attempts to separate the two words.

The Egyptologist E. A. Wallis Budge, in Amulets and Superstition (1930), granted that the words were used interchangeably but argued they named two functions: an amulet works ceaselessly, of its own accord, while a talisman is meant to perform one specific task. Emilie Savage-Smith and Venetia Porter, writing on Islamic material, split them by material and time instead: amulets are small and durable, worn for lasting protection, while talismans are made of ephemeral things like paper and have a short-term job. The Encyclopaedia of Islam entry by Hamès puts it another way again: the inscribed text is the talisman, the actively magical part, and the amulet is the object that carries it.

Then the thesis points out the practical problem. Once an object enters a collection, usually without notes, it is very hard to say which it was. A thing used as a talisman at one point in its life can be reused as an amulet later. Canaan himself, in 1937, admitted the terms were being used indistinctly, and Garcia Probert ends up using the Arabic ḥijāb for both. She also notes that "amulet" and "talisman" were defined with reference to European ideas about magic, and that the words people used themselves often follow how an object was used, not what it was made of.

That is the honest state of it. The amulet vs talisman distinction is real enough to be useful, modern enough to be argued over, and fuzzy enough that a careful museum will put two names on one object.

What does an amulet look like?

Almost anything. The Victorian Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities lists stones, plants, made objects and pieces of writing, and among carved ones beetles, animals, eyes and fingers. Of the objects above, one is a stone beetle, one a shirt, one a leather cube, one a hinged cross, one a flat silver box, and one is a song with no body at all.

So an amulet is not a necklace, and a necklace is not an amulet. A necklace is the thing around the neck. A pendant is what hangs from it. An amulet is a reason for wearing it, and it can come as a pendant, a ring, a cord or a pouch.

Where our pieces sit, honestly

By the strict old definitions, nearly everything we make is a pendant. Whether it is anything more is decided by the person wearing it and the tradition they wear it in, and we are not going to tell you a piece of silver will protect you or change your fortune. What we can describe is the shape we chose, and which old form it follows.

Most of our Tibetan pieces carry a sign. The Garuda Pendant is the bird that, in the Tibetan telling, eats the serpents that carry poison; Garuda in Tibet explains the story. The Dharma Conch is carved with the eight auspicious symbols, which have their own long history in The Eight Auspicious Symbols. These are images, like the evangelists on the Byzantine cross.

Two of our pieces are cases, the way a gau, a bulla or an enkolpion is a case. The Wind Horse Locket is 49 by 29 mm and 7 mm deep, with a base plate hinged on one side and latched on the other over a hollow chamber, stamped S925 on the inside of the lid where only the owner reads it. It weighs 28 grams. The Tibetan Stupa Locket is 60 mm tall and 38 grams; its lotus base unscrews on a cut thread, and the Namchuwangden, the "All-Powerful Ten" of the Kalachakra tradition, sits in the niche behind its own arched doorway. Either can be sent empty for you to fill, or consecrated and sealed before it ships.

When we cut the thread on the stupa's base, we are making the same decision the makers of the bulla and the reliquary cross made. The outside is ours, carved and 24K fire-gilded and finished under a 40× microscope. The inside is for somebody else. Under the old words, an empty case is a locket. What it becomes after that is not up to us.

Questions people ask

What is the difference between an amulet and a talisman?

In the older sense an amulet is worn to ward trouble off continuously, while a talisman is made, often inscribed, for a particular purpose. Some scholars split them by function, others by material (durable vs paper), and many museums and writers use the two words interchangeably.

What is a talisman?

Originally a figure engraved on stone or metal under set observances; the word came into English in the 1630s from Arabic tilsam, from Greek telesma, a rite or consecration. Today it means any object believed to bring good fortune or extraordinary results.

Is a charm the same as an amulet?

Not originally. A charm, from Latin carmen, was a spoken or sung formula, like the Old English Nine Herbs Charm. By the 1590s it could mean a worn object, and by 1865 a small ornament on a chain. Talisman vs charm, then: one began as an inscribed object, the other as words.

Is an amulet a necklace?

No. A necklace is anything worn around the neck. An amulet is defined by why it is worn and can be a pendant, a ring, a pouch, a cord or a box. An amulet necklace is simply an amulet hung on a chain. More in What Is an Amulet Necklace?, and you can see ours together in our amulet necklaces.

What is the difference between an amulet and a pendant?

Pendant describes a shape: anything that hangs, from Old French pendre. Amulet describes a purpose. Every amulet necklace has a pendant on it, but most pendants are only pendants.

What is a phylactery?

From Greek phylakterion, a safeguard, which could also mean amulet. In English it usually means tefillin, the small leather boxes with Torah verses worn in Jewish weekday morning prayer, which the Talmud distinguishes from amulets.

Is a gau an amulet or a locket?

Both words get used. A gau is a Tibetan case, worn on a cord at the neck or slung across the shoulder, holding consecrated things such as relic pills, written mantras or an amulet diagram. In form it is an amulet locket; in Tibetan use the box is the container and the contents carry the blessing.

A name cut over another name

We keep coming back to Hatnefer's scarab, and not for the gold, though the plaited chain is fine work. It is the place on the underside where one name was erased and another engraved over it. The stone was not made for her. It became hers.

English has spent nearly six centuries sorting objects like this into amulets, talismans, charms and pendants. The scarab was made long before any of those words existed, and it went into the tomb with her name on it.

Wind Horse Locket Pendant · Tibetan Stupa Locket

More from the Journal: What Is an Amulet Necklace? · The Gau · Garuda in Tibet · The Eight Auspicious Symbols · What Is a Stupa?