apotropaically

(37) These devices also occur in prayers and healing charms--and the metrics of lament here too apotropaically knit Fer Diad's fragmented body back into a beautiful, heroic whole that endures forever in this poetry.

Indeed, with his own survival at stake, Harker is ironically thrust into the same position as the nonhumans he has consumed, becoming prey for the unhuman meal and reacting by meat-ing or 'beefing up' his carnivoristic defenses to apotropaically ward off his fear of cannibalism and of being eaten himself.

It does so by dint of the sheer nerve with which that anxiety is apotropaically invoked--not so much whistling past the graveyard as striking up a whole brass band against death.

That loss is being perpetually generated--manifest in the images of what has come and gone on the tides, reaching as far back as '[w]hen the word alone was, and the waters'--seems to indict the inexorable order of nature as a deleterious influence to be apotropaically shunned.

Cleopatra's charge that Antony will be himself apotropaically attempts to force Antony into confronting the conception of his identity that ties it to Rome and his wife's bed.