The Vilas-Sylvana Elementary Spirits.
Among the Slavonic and gypsy races all witchcraft, fairy- and Folk-lore rests mainly upon a belief in certain spirits of the wood and wold, of earth and water, which has much in common with that of the Rosicrucians and Paracelsus, but much more with the gypsy mythology (as given by Wlislocki, “Vom Wandernden Zigeunervolke,” pp. 49–309), which is apparently in a great measure of directly Indian origin.
“In the Vile” says Dr. Krauss, “also known as Samovile, Samodivi, and Vilevrjaci, we have near relations to the forest and field spirits, or the ‘wood-’ and ‘moss-folk’ of Middle Germany, France, and Bavaria; the ‘wild people’ of Eifel, Hesse, Salzburg, and the Tyrol; the wood-women and wood-men of Bohemia; the Tyrolese Fanggen, Fänken, Nörkel, and Happy Ladies; the Roumanish Orken, Euguane, and Dialen; the Danish Ellekoner; the Swedish Skogsnufvaz; and the Russian Ljesje; while in certain respects they have affinity with the Teutonic Valkyries.” Yet they differ on the whole from all of these, as from English fairies, in being more like divinities, who exert a constant and familiar influence for good or evil on human beings, and who are prayed to or exorcised on all occasions. They have, however, their exact parallel among the Red Indians of North America as among the Eskimo, and it is evident that they are originally derived from the old or primeval Shamanic faith, which once spread all over the earth. It is very true, as Dr. Krauss remarks, that in the West of Europe it is becoming almost impossible to trace this true origin of spirits now regarded as merely diabolical, or otherwise put into new rôles; but among the South Slavonians and gypsies we can still find them in very nearly their old form and playing the same parts. We can still find the Vila as set forth in old ballads, the incarnation of beauty and power, the benevolent friends of sufferers, the geniuses of heroes, the dwellers by rock and river and greenwood tree. But they are implacable in their wrath to all who deceive them, or who break a promise; nay, they inflict terrible punishment even on those who disturb their rings or the dances which they make by midsummer moonlight. Hence the proverb applied to any man who suddenly fell ill: “Naiso je na vilinsko kolo” (“He stepped on a fairy-ring”). From this arbitrary exercise of power we find the Vila represented at times as a spirit who punishes and torments.
Thus we are told that there was once a shepherd named Stanko, who played beautifully on the flute. One evening he was so absorbed in his own music that when the Ave Maria bell rung, instead of repeating the prayer he played it. As he ended he saw a Vila sitting on a hedge. And from that hour she never left him. By table, by his bed, at work or play, the white form and unearthly eyes of the spirit were close to him.
“By a spell to him unknown,
He could never be alone.”
Witches and wizards were summoned to aid him, but to no avail; nay, it made matters worse, for the Vila now often beat him, and when people asked him why it was, he replied that the Vila did so because he refused to wander out into the world with her. And yet again he would be discovered in the top of a tree, bound with bast; and so it went on for years, till he was finally found one morning drowned in a ditch. So in the Wolf Dietrich legend the hero refuses the love of die rauhe Else, and is made mad by the witch and runs wild. All of which is identical with what is told in an Algonkin tale (vide “The Algonkin Legends of New England”).
There are three kinds of witches or spirits among the Southern Slavonians which correspond in every respect exactly to those in which the gypsies believe. The first of these are the Zračne Vile, or aerial spirits. These, like the spirits of the air of Scripture, are evily-disposed to human beings, playing them mischievous tricks or inflicting on them fatal injuries. They lead them astray by night, like Friar Rush and Robin Goodfellow, or the English gypsy Mullo doods, or bewilder and frighten them into madness. Of the second kind are the Earth spirits, Pozemne Vile, in gypsy Pcūvushi or Pūvushi. These are amiable, noble, and companionable beings, who often give sage counsel to men. Thirdly are the Water sprites, in Slavonic Povodne Vile, in gypsy Nivashi, who are to the highest degree vindictive at times, yet who behave kindly to men when they meet them on land. But woe to those who, while swimming, encounter them in streams or lakes, for then the goblins grasp and whirl them about until they perish. From this account by Dr. Krauss, it appears as if this Slavonic mythology were derived from the gypsy, firstly, because it is more imperfect than the latter, and secondly, because in it Vilas, or spirits, are confused with witches, while among the gypsies they are clearly separated and distinctly defined.
Dr. Wlislocki says (“Vom Wand. Zigeunervolke,” p. 253) that “gypsies are still a race given to Shamanism, but yet they reverence a highest being under the name of devla or del.” This is, however, the case to-day with all believers in Shaman or Sorcery-religion, the difference between them and monotheists being that this highest god is little worshipped or even thought of, all practical devotion being paid to spirits who are really their saints. By close examination the Gypsy religion, like that of the country-folk in India, appears to be absolutely identical in spirit with that of American Indians. And I should say that the monk mentioned by Prætorius, who declared that though God and Christ should damn him, yet he could be saved by appealing to Saint Joseph, was not very far removed from being a Shamanist.
The Hungarian gypsies are divided into tribes, and one of these, the Kukaya, believes itself to be descended from the Pçuvushi, or earth-fairies, according to the following story, narrated by Dr. H. von Wlislocki in his paper on the genealogy and family relations of the Transylvanian Tent Gypsies:—
“Many thousand years ago there were as yet in the world very few Pchuvushi. These are beings of human form dwelling under the earth. There they have cities, but they very often come to the world above. They are ugly, and their men are covered with hair. (All of this indicates a prehistoric subterranean race like the Eskimo, fur-clad.[3]) They carry off mortal girls for wives. Their life is hidden in the egg of a black hen.”
This is the same as that of the Orco or Ogre in the Italian tale, “I Racconti delle Fate, Cesare da Causa,” Florence, 1888. Whoever kills the hen and throws the egg into a running stream, kills the pchuvush.
“Once a young Pchūvush woman came up to the world and sat in a fair green forest. She saw a very beautiful youth sleeping in the shade, and said: ‘What happiness it must be to have such a husband. Mine is so ugly!’ Her husband, who had stolen silently after her, heard this, and reflected: ‘What a good idea it would be to lend my wife to this young man till she shall have borne a family of beautiful children! Then I could sell them to my rich Pchuvūs friends.’ So he said to his wife: ‘You may live with this youth for ten years if you will promise to give me either the boys or the girls which you may bear to him.’ She agreed to this. Then the Pchuvūs began to sing:—
“ ‘Kuku, kukáya
Kames to adala?
Kuku, kukaya.’
“That is in English:—
“ ‘Kuku, kukaya
Do you want this (one) here?
Kuku, kukaya.’
“Then the young man awoke, and as the goblin offered him much gold and silver with his wife, he took her and lived with her ten years, and every year she bore him a son. Then came the Pchuvush to get the children. But the wife said she had chosen to keep all the sons, and was very sorry but she had no girls to give him! So he went away sorrowfully, howling:—
“ ‘Kuku, kukáya!
Ada kin jirklá!
Kuku, kukaya!’
“That is to say:—
“ ‘Kuku, kukaya!
These are dogs here!
Kuku, kukaya!’
“Then the ten boys laughed and said to their father: ‘We will call ourselves Kukaya.’ And so from them came the race.”
Dr. Wlislocki points out that there are races which declare themselves to be descended from dogs, or, like the Romans, from wolves. It is a curious coincidence that the Eskimo are among the former.
In all parts of Eastern Europe, as in the West, many people are not only careful to burn the parings of their nails[4] and the combings of hair, for fear lest witches and imps should work sorcery with them to the injury of those from whom they came, but they also destroy the shells of eggs when they have eaten their contents. So A. Wuttke tells us in his book, “Der Deutsche Volks Aberglaube der Gegenwart,” 1869: “When one has eaten eggs the shells must be broken up or burned, or else the hens will lay no more, or evil witches will come over them.” And in England, Spain, the Netherlands, or Portugal, there are many who believe or say that if the witches can get such shells from which people have eaten, unbroken, they can, by muttering spells, cause them to grow so large that they can use them as boats. Dom Leitas Ganet (“Dona Branca ou a Conquista do Algarve,” Paris, 1826), however, assures us that is a very risky thing for the witches, because if they do not return home before midnight the shell-boat perishes, “whence it hath come to pass that many of these sorceresses have been miserably drowned.”
However, an egg hung up in a house is a lucky amulet, hence the ostrich eggs and cocoanuts resembling them which are so common in the East. And it is to be observed that every gypsy in England declares that a pivilioi, or cocoanut, as a gift brings bāk or luck, I myself having had many given to me with this assurance. This is evidently and directly derived from India, in which country there are a mass of religious traditions referring to it.
“Once there was a gypsy girl who noticed that when anybody ate eggs they broke up the shells, and asking why this was done received for answer:—
“ ‘You must break the shell to bits for fear
Lest the witches should make it a boat, my dear.
For over the sea away from home,
Far by night the witches roam.’
“Then the girl said: ‘I don’t see why the poor witches should not have boats as well as other people.’ And saying this she threw the shell of an egg which she had been eating as far as she could, and cried, ‘Chovihani, lav tro bero!’ (‘Witch—there is your boat!’) But what was her amazement to see the shell caught up by the wind and whirled away on high till it became invisible, while a voice cried, ‘Paraka!’ (‘I thank you!’)
“Now it came to pass some time after that the gypsy girl was on an island, where she remained some days. And when she wished to return, behold a great flood was rising, and it had washed her boat away, she could see nothing of it. But the water kept getting higher and higher, and soon there was only a little bit of the island above the flood, and the girl thought she must drown. Just then she saw a white boat coming; there sat in it a woman with witch eyes; she was rowing with a broom, and a black cat sat on her shoulder. ‘Jump in!’ she cried to the girl, and then rowed her to the firm land.
“When she was on the shore the woman said: ‘Turn round three times to the right and look every time at the boat.’ She did so, and every time she looked she saw the boat grow smaller till it was like an egg. Then the woman sang:—
“ ‘That is the shell you threw to me,
Even a witch can grateful be.’
“Saying this she vanished, cat, broom, shell, and all.
“Now my story is fairly done,
I beg you to tell a better one.”
As regards these boats which grow large or small at will we find them in the Norse ship Skidbladnir, which certain dwarfs made and gave to Frey. It is so large that all the gods and their army can embark in it. But when not in use it may be so contracted that one may hava i pungi sino—put it in his purse or pocket. The Algonkin god Glooskap has not only the counterpart of Skidbladnir, but the hammer of Thor and his belt of strength. He has also the two attendant birds which bring him news, and the two wolves which mean Day and Night.
Another legend given by Dr. Krauss, relative to witches and egg-shells is as follows:—
“By the Klek lived a rich tavern-keeper and his wife. He was thin and lean—hager und mager—while she was as fat as a well-fed pig.
“One day there came a gypsy woman by. She began to tell his fortune by his hand. And as she studied it seriously she became herself serious, and then said to him, ‘Listen, you good-natured dolt (moré)! Do you know why you are so slim and your wife so stout?’ ‘Not I.’ ‘My good friend (Latcho pral), your wife is a witch. Every Friday when there is a new moon (mladi petak) she rides you up along the Klek to the devil’s dance’ (Uraze kolo). ‘How can that be?’ ‘Simply enough. As soon as you fall asleep, she slips a magic halter over your head. Then you become a horse, and she rides you over the hills and far away over mountains and woods, cities and seas, to the witches’ gathering.
“‘Little you know where you have been,
Little you think of what you have seen,
“‘For when you awake it is all forgotten, but the ride is hard for you, and you are wasting away, and dying. Take great care of yourself on the next Friday when there is a new moon!’
“So the gypsy went her way, and he thought it over. On the next Friday when the moon was new he went to bed early, but only pretended to sleep. Then his wife came silently as a cat to the bed-side with the magic halter in her hand. As quick as lightning he jumped up, snatched it from her, and threw it over her head. Then she became, in a second, a mare. He mounted her, and away she flew through the air—over hills and dales like the wind, till they came to the witches’ meeting.
“He dismounted, bound the mare to a tree, and, unseen by the company, watched them at a little distance. All the witches carried pots or jars. First they danced in a ring, then every one put her pot on the ground and danced alone round it. And these pots were egg-shells.
“While he watched, there came flying to him a witch in whom he recognized his old godmother. ‘How did you come here?’ she inquired. ‘Well, I came here on my mare, I know not how.’ ‘Woe to you—begone as soon as possible. If the witches once see you it will be all up with you. Know that we are all waiting for one’ (this one was his wife), ‘and till she comes we cannot begin.’ Then the landlord mounted his mare, cried ‘Home!’ and when he was there tied her up in the stable and went to bed.
“In the morning his servant-man said to him: ‘There is a mare in the stable.’ ‘Yes,’ replied the master; ‘it is mine.’ So he sent for a smith, and made him shoe the mare. Now, whatever is done to a witch while she is in the form of an animal remains on or in her when she resumes her natural shape.
“Then he went out and assembled a judicial or legal commission. He led the members to his house, told them all his story, led forth the mare, and took off the halter. She became a woman as before, but horse-shoes were affixed to her feet and hands. She began to weep and wail, but the judge was pitiless. He had her thrown into a pit full of quicklime, and thus she was burnt to death. And since that time people break the shells of eggs after eating their contents, lest witches should make jars or pots of them.”
The following story on the same subject is from a different source:—
“There was once a gypsy girl who was very clever, and whenever she heard people talk about witches she remembered it well. One day she took an egg-shell and made a small round hole in it very neatly, and ate the yolk and white, but the shell she put on a heap of white sand by a stream, where it was very likely to be seen. Then she hid herself behind a bush. By and by, when it was night, there came a witch, who, seeing the shell, pronounced a word over it, when it changed to a beautiful boat, into which the witch got and sailed on the water, over the sea.
“The girl remembered the word, and soon ate another egg and turned it into a boat. Whenever she willed it went over the world to places where fruit and flowers abounded, or where people gave her much gold for such things as knives and scissors. So she grew rich and had a fine house. The boat she hid away carefully in a bush.
“There was a very envious, wicked woman, whom the girl had befriended many a time, and who hated her all the more for it. And this creature set to work, spying and sneaking, to find out the secret of the girl’s prosperity. And at last she discovered the boat, and, suspecting something, hid herself in the bush hard by to watch.
“By and by the girl came with a basket full of wares for her trade, and, drawing out the boat, said, ‘To Africa!’—when off it flew. The woman watched and waited. After a few hours the girl returned. Her boat was full of fine things, ostrich feathers and gold, fruit and strange flowers, all of which she carried into her house.
“Then the woman put the boat on the water, and said, ‘To Africa!’ But she did not know the word by means of which it was changed from an egg-shell, and which made it fly like thought. So as it went along the woman cried, ‘Faster!’ but it never heeded her. Then she cried again in a great rage, and at last exclaimed, ‘In God’s name get on with you!’ Then the spell was broken, and the boat turned into an egg-shell, and the woman was drowned in the great rolling sea.”
Egg-lore is inexhaustible. The eggs of Maundy Thursday (Witten Donnertag), says a writer in The Queen, protect a house against thunder and lightning, but, in fact, an egg hung up is a general protection, hence the ostrich eggs and cocoanuts of the East. Some other very interesting items in the communication referred to are as follows:—
“Witches and Eggs.—‘To hang an egg laid on Ascension Day in the roof of a house,’ says Reginald Scot in 1584, ‘preserveth the same from all hurts.’ Probably this was written with an eye to the ‘hurts’ arising from witchcraft, in connection with which eggs were supposed to possess certain mysterious powers. In North Germany, if you have a desire to see the ladies of the broomstick on May Day, their festival, you must take an egg laid on Maundy Thursday, and stand where four roads meet; or else you must go into church on Good Friday, but come out before the blessing. It was formerly quite an article of domestic belief that the shells must be broken after eating eggs, lest the witches should sail out to sea in them; or, as Sir Thomas Browne declared, lest they ‘should draw or prick their names therein, and veneficiously mischief’ the person who had partaken of the egg. North Germans, ignoring this side of the question, say, ‘Break the shells or you will get the ague;’ and Netherlanders advise you to secure yourself against the attacks of this disagreeable visitor by eating on Easter Day a couple of eggs which were laid on Good Friday.
“Scottish Superstitions.—Scotch fishers, who may be reckoned among the most superstitious of folks, believe that contrary winds and much consequent vexation of spirit will be the result of having eggs on board with them; while in the west of England it is considered very unlucky to bring birds’ eggs into the house, although they may be hung up with impunity outside. Mr. Gregor, in his ‘Folklore of the North-East of Scotland,’ gives us some curious particulars concerning chickens, and the best methods of securing a satisfactory brood. The hen, it seems, should be set on an odd number of eggs, or the chances are that most, if not all, will be addled—a mournful prospect for the henwife; also they must be placed under the mother bird after sunset, or the chickens will be blind. If the woman who performs this office carries the eggs wrapped up in her chemise, the result will be hen birds; if she wears a man’s hat, cocks. Furthermore, it is as well for her to repeat a sort of charm, ‘A’ in thegeethir, A’ oot thegeethir.’
“Unlucky Eggs.—There are many farmers’ wives, even in the present day, who would never dream of allowing eggs to be brought into the house or taken out after dark—this being deemed extremely unlucky. Cuthbert Bede mentions the case of a farmer’s wife in Rutland who received a setting of ducks’ eggs from a neighbour at nine o’clock at night. ‘I cannot imagine how she could have been so foolish,’ said the good woman, much distressed, and her visitor, upon inquiry, was told that ducks’ eggs brought into a house after sunset would never be hatched. A Lincolnshire superstition declares that if eggs are carried over running water they will be useless for setting purposes; while in Aberdeen there is an idea prevalent among the country folks that should it thunder a short time before chickens are hatched, they will die in the shell. The same wiseacres may be credited with the notion that the year the farmer’s gudewife presents him with an addition to his family is a bad season for the poultry yard. ‘Bairns an’ chuckens,’ say they, ‘dinna thrive in ae year.’ The probable explanation being that the gudewife, taken up with the care of her bairn, has less time to attend to the rearing of the ‘chuckens.’
“Fortune-telling in Northumberland.—Besides the divination practised with the white of an egg, which certainly appears of a vague and unsatisfactory character, another species of fortune-telling with eggs is in vogue in Northumberland on the eve of St. Agnes. A maiden desirous of knowing what her future lord is like, is enjoined to boil an egg, after having spent the whole day fasting and in silence, then to extract the yolk, fill the cavity with salt, and eat the whole, including the shell. This highly unpalatable supper finished, the heroic maid must walk backwards, uttering this invocation to the saint:—
“ ‘Sweet St. Agnes, work thy fast,
If ever I be to marry man,
Or man be to marry me,
I hope him this night to see.’ ”
Friedrich and others assert that the saying in Luke xi. 12—“Or if he shall ask an egg shall he give him a scorpion?”—is a direct reference to ancient belief that the egg typified the good principle, and the scorpion evil, and which is certainly supported by a cloud of witnesses in the form of classic folk-lore. The egg, as a cosmogenic symbol, and indicating the origin of all things, finds a place in the mythologies of many races. These are indicated with much erudition by Friedrich, “Symbolik der Natur,” p. 686.
In Lower Alsatia it is believed that if a man will take an Easter egg into the church and look about him, if there be any witches in the congregation he may know them by their having in their hands pieces of pork instead of prayer-books, and milk-pails on their heads for bonnets (Wolf, “Deutsche Mährchen und Sagen,” p. 270). There is also an ancient belief that an egg built into a new building will protect it against evil and witchcraft. Such eggs were found in old houses in Altenhagen and Iserlohen, while in the East there is a proverb, “the egg of the chamber” (“Hamasa” of Abu Temman, v. Rückert, Stuttgart, 1846), which seems to point to the same practice.
The Romans expressed a disaster by saying, “Ovum ruptum est” (“The egg is smashed”). Among other egg-proverbs I find the following:—
His eggs are all omelettes (French); i.e., broken up.
Eggs in the pan give pancakes but nevermore chicks (Low German).
Never a chicken comes from broken eggs (Low German).
Bad eggs, bad chickens. Hence in America “a bad egg” for a man who is radically bad, and “a good egg” for the contrary.
Eggs not yet laid are uncertain chickens; i.e., “Do not count your chickens before they are hatched.”
Tread carefully among eggs (German).
The egg pretends to be cleverer than the hen.
He waits for the eggs and lets the hen go.
He who wants eggs must endure the clucking of the hen (Westphalian).
He thinks his eggs are of more account than other people’s hens.
One rotten egg spoils all the pudding.
Rotten eggs and bad butter always stand by one another; or “go well together.”
Old eggs, old lovers, and an old horse,
Are either rotten or for the worse.
(Original:
Alte Eyer
Alte Freier—
Alter Gaul
Sind meistens faul.)
“All eggs are of the same size” (Eggs are all alike), he said, and grabbed the biggest.
As like as eggs (Old Roman).
As sure as eggs.
His eggs all have two yolks.
If you have many eggs you can have many cakes.
He who has many eggs scatters many shells.
To throw an egg at a sparrow.
To borrow trouble for eggs not yet hatched.
Half an egg is worth more than all the shell.
A drink after an egg, and a leap after an apple.
A rotten egg in his face.
In the early mythology, the egg, as a bird was hatched from it, and as it resembled seeds, nuts, &c., from which new plants come, was regarded as the great type of production. This survives in love-charms, as when a girl in the Tyrol believes she can secure a man’s love by giving him a red Easter egg. This giving red eggs at Easter is possibly derived from the ancient Parsees, who did the same at their spring festival. Among the Christians the reproductive and sexual symbolism, when retained, was applied to the resurrection of the body and the immortality of the soul. Hence Easter eggs. And as Christ by His crucifixion caused this, or originated the faith, we have the ova de crucibus, the origin of which has puzzled so many antiquaries; for the cross itself was, like the egg, a symbol of life, in earlier times of reproduction, and in a later age of life eternal. These eggs are made of a large size of white glass by the Armenian Christians.
[1] “Südslavische Hexensagen, Mittheilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien.” xiv. Bande, 1884. “Medizinische Zaubersprüche aus Slavonien, Bosnien, der Hercegovina und Dalmatien.” Wien, 1887. “Sreča, Glück und Schicksal im Volksglauben der Südslaven.” Wien, 1886. “Südslavische Pestsagen.” Wien, 1883. [↑]
[2] “Witch. Mediæval English wicche, both masculine and feminine, a wizard, a witch. Anglo-Saxon wicca, masculine, wicce, feminine. Wicca is a corruption of wítga, commonly used as a short form of witega, a prophet, seer, magician, or sorcerer. Anglo-Saxon witan, to see, allied to wítan, to know. Similarly Icelandic vitki, a wizard, is from vita, to know. Wizard, Norman-French wischard, the original Old French being guiscart, sagacious. Icelandic, vizkr, clever or knowing, … with French suffix ard as German hart, hard, strong” (Skeat, “Etymol. Dictionary”). That is wiz-ard, very wise. Wit and wisdom here are near allied to witchcraft, and thin partitions do the bounds divide. [↑]
[3] For a very interesting account of the mysterious early dwarfs of Great Britain the reader may consult “Earth Houses and their Inhabitants,” by David MacRitchie, in “The Testimony of Tradition.” London: Trübner and Co., 1890. [↑]
[4] The many superstitions relating to cutting nails may be referred in part to the very wild legend of the ship Naglfara given in Sturleson’s “Edda.”
“Then in that Twilight of the Gods (the Norse Day of Judgment) will come the ship Naglfara, which is made of dead men’s nails. In that sea it will go forth. Hrymer steereth it. And for this cause no man should die with his nails unshorn, for so the ship is made, and the gods would fain put that off as long as possible” (“Edda, Gylfesgynning,” 26th tale). [↑]
LAPLAND MAGIC DRUM.
CHAPTER V.
CHARMS OR CONJURATIONS TO CURE OR PROTECT ANIMALS.
From the earliest ages a drum or tambourine has formed such an indispensable adjunct of Shamanic sorcery among Tartars, Lapps, Samoyedes, Eskimo, and Red Indians, that, taking it with other associations, I can hardly believe that it has not been transmitted from one to the other. In Hungary the gypsies when they wish to know if an invalid will recover, have recourse to the cováçanescro buçlo (chovihanescro būklo) or “witch-drum.” This is a kind of rude tambourine covered with the skin of an animal, and marked with stripes which have a special meaning. On this are placed from nine to twenty-one seeds of the thorn-apple (stramonium). The side of the drum is then gently struck with a little hammer, and according to the position which the seeds take on the marks, the recovery or death of the patient is predicted. The following is a picture of a gypsy drum as given by Dr. Wlislocki.
The wood for this is cut on Whitsunday. A is turned towards the fortune-teller; nine seeds are now thrown on the drum, and with the left hand, or with a hammer held in it, the tambourine is tapped. Should all the seeds come within the four lines all will go well, especially if three come within a, d, e, f. If two roll into the space between a, i, it is lucky for a woman, between i and f for a man. But if nearly all fall outside of b, c, g, h, all is unfavourable. The same divination is used to know whether animals will get well, and where stolen property is concealed. All of this corresponds exactly to the use of the same instrument by the Laplanders for the same purposes. The thorn-apple is a very poisonous plant, and the gypsies are said to have first brought it to England. This is not true, but it is extremely possible that they used it in stupefying, killing, and “bewitching.” It is very much employed at present by the Voodoo poisoners in America.
The Turks are a Tartar race, and the drum is used among them very generally for magical purposes. I have one of these tambouri which, I was assured when I bought it, was made for incantations. It is of a diamond shape, has parchment on both sides, and is inscribed with the name Allah, in Arabic, and the well-known double triangle of Solomon, with the moon and star.
To keep domestic animals from straying or being stolen, or falling ill, they are, when a gypsy first becomes their owner, driven up before a fire by his tent. Then they are struck with a switch, which is half blacked with coal, across the back, while the following is repeated:—
“Ač tu, ač kathe!
Tu hin mange!
Te Nivasa the jiánen—
Ná dikh tu ádálen!
Trin lánca hin mánge,
Me pçándáv tute:
Yeká o devlá, ávri
O Kristus, trite Maria!”
“Stay thou, stay here!
Thou art mine!
And the Nivasi when they go—
Thou shalt not see them!
Three chains I have,
I bind thee:
One is God, the other (beyond)
The Christ, the third, Maria!”
To charm a horse, they draw, with a coal, a ring on the left hoof and on the right a cross, and murmur:—
“Obles, obles te obles!
Ač tu, ač tù máy sástes
Ná th’ ávehás beng tute
Devlá, devlá ač tute!
Gule devlá bishálá
E gráyeskro perá
Miseçescro dád!
Niko mánushenge áč
Káske me dáv, leske ač
Shukáres tu áč,
Voyesá te láčcs ač,
Ashunen eftá Pçuvuse:
Eftá láncá hin mánge,
Ferinen ádálá
Táysá, táysá e pedá!”
“Round, round, and round!
Be thou, be thou very sound
The devil shall not come to thee,
God, God shall be with thee!
Sweet God drive away
From the horse’s body
The Father of Evil!
Be to (go not to) any other man
To whom I give (sell) unto him
Be beautiful!
Frolicsome and good,
Seven spirits of earth hear!
I have seven chains,
Protect this animal
Ever, ever!”
Then a piece of salted bread is given to the horse, and the owner spits seven times into his eyes, by which he is supposed to lose all fear for supernatural beings. According to the gypsies, horses, especially black ones, can see beings which are invisible to human eyes. I have known an old English gypsy who believed that dogs could see ghosts when men could not. The mysterious manner in which dogs and horses betray fear when there is apparently nothing to dread, the howling of the former by night, and the wild rushes of the latter, doubtless led to this opinion. The bread and salt will recall to the reader the fact that the same was given at the ancient mysteries apparently for the purpose of strengthening the neophyte so that he should not fear the supernatural beings whom he was supposed to meet. It is curious to find this peculiar form of the sacrament administered to a horse. Another protective charm is common among the Southern Hungarian gypsies. The dung of a she-goat dried and powdered is sifted on a horse’s back and this spell recited:—
“Miseçes prejiá,
Andrál t’re perá!
Trádá čik busčákri
Miseçes perákri,—
Andral punrá, andral dumno,
Andral yákhá, andral kánná!
Nevkerádyi av ákána,
Ač tu, ač tu čá mánge:
Áč tu, áč tu, áč káthe!”
“Evil be gone
From thy belly!
Drive away she-goat’s dung
Evil from the belly,
From the feet, from the back,
From the eyes, from the ears!
New-born be now,
Be thou, be thou only mine:
Stay thou, stay thou, stay here!”
There is evidently a relation here between the dung of the she-goat and certain ancient symbols. Whatever was a sign of fruitfulness, generation, or productiveness, whether it was set forth by the generative organs, sexual passion, or even manure which fertilises, was connected with Life which is the good or vital principle opposed to death. As the goat was eminently a type of lechery, so the she-goat, owing to the great proportion of milk which she yielded, set forth abundance; hence the cornucopia of Amalthea, the prototype of the she-goat Heidrun of the Northern mythology, who yielded every day so much milk that all the Einheriar, or dwellers in Valhall, could satisfy themselves therewith.[1] But the forms or deities indicating life were also those which shielded and protected from evil, therefore Here, the mother of life and of birth, had in Sparta a shrine where she-goats were sacrificed to her, while at Canuvium the statue of Juno Sospita (who was also Here), was covered with a she-goat’s skin. It is in the ancient sense of fertility identified with protection, that the she-goat’s dung is used to exorcise evil from the horse by the gypsies. There is, in fact, in all of these charms and exorcisms a great deal which evidently connects them with the earliest rites and religions.
In the Hungarian gypsy-tribe of the Kukuya, the following method of protecting horses is used: The animal is placed by the tent-fire and there a little hole is dug before him into which ninefold grass and some hairs from his mane and tail are put. Then his left fore-hoof is traced on the ground, and the earth within it is carefully taken out and shaken into the hole, while these lines are repeated:—
“Yeká čunul yeká bál,
Tute e bokh náñi sál,
Ko tut čorel, the merel
Sar e bálá, čunulá,
Pal e pçuv the yov ável!
Pçuvus, adalen tute,
Sástes gráy ác mánge!”
“A straw, a hair!
May you never be hungry!
May he who steals you die!
Like the hair and the straw,
May he go to the ground!
Earth, these things to thee!
May a sound horse be mine!”
If the animal be a mare and it is desired that she shall be with foal, they give her oats to eat out of an apron or a gourd, and say:—
“Trin kánályá, trin jiuklá,
Jiánen upre pláyá!
Cábá, pçares hin perá!
Trin kánályá, trin jiuklá
Jiánen tele pláyá,
É çevá ándrasaváren
Yek čumut ándre çasáren,
Tre perá sik pçáreven!”
“Three asses, three dogs,
Eat, fill thy belly with young!
Three asses, three dogs,
Go down the hill,
They close the holes,
They put the moon in (them)
Thy belly be soon fruitful!”
“The moon has here,” remarks Wlislocki, “a phallic meaning, the mention of the ass, and the use of the gourd and apron are symbols of fertility. Vide De Gubernatis, ‘Animals in Indian Mythology,’ in the chapter on the ass.”
There is another formula for protecting and aiding cattle, which is practised among other races besides that of the gypsies; as, for instance, among the Slovacks of Northern Hungary. This I shall leave in the original:—
“Dieses Verwahrungsmittel besteht darin, dass dem gekauften weiblichen Thiere der Mann den blanken Hintern zeigt, einem männlichen Thiere aber eine weibliche Person. Hiebei werden die Worte gesagt:—
“Sár o kár pál e punrá,
Kiyá mánge ác táysá!
Wie der Schwantz am Bein,
Sollst du stets bei mir sein!”
Or else:—
“Sár e minč pal e per,
Kiyá mánge ác buter!
Wie das Loch im Leib,
Also bei mir bleib!”
To secure swine to their owner a hole is dug in the turf which is filled with salt and charcoal dust, which is covered with earth, and these words uttered:—
“Adá hin tute
Ná ává pál menge
Dáv tute, so kámáv
Čores tuna muká
Hin menge trin láncá,
Trin máy láce Urmá,
Ke ferinen men!”
“This is thine,
Come not to us!
I give thee what I can
Oh Spirit of earth, hear!
Let not the thief go!
We have three chains,
Three very good fairies
Who protect us.”
If the swine find the hole and root it up—as they will be tolerably certain to do owing to their fondness for salt and charcoal—they will not be stolen or run away.
The Urmen, or Fairies, are supposed to be very favourable to cattle, therefore children who torment cows are told “Urme tute ná bica somnakune pçábáy”—“The fairies will not send you any golden apples!” If the English gypsies had the word Urme (and it may be that it exists among them even yet), this would be, “I Urme ná bitcher tute sonnakai pábya!”
But the mighty charm of charms to protect cattle from theft is the following: Three drops of blood are made to fall from the finger of a little child on a piece of bread which is given to the animal to eat, with these words:—
“Dav tute trinen rátá
Ternes te láces ávná!
Ko tut čorel, ádáleske
Hin rát te más shutyárdye!
Káná rátá te rátá
Paltire per ávná,
Yákh te yákh te báre yákh
Sikoves çál te çál
Ko kámel tut te çál!”
“I give three (drops of) blood
To become young and good;
Who steals thee to him
Shall be (is) blood and flesh dried up!
When blood and blood
Pass into thy belly,
Fire and fire and great fire
Shall devour and devour all
Who will eat thee!”
This incantation takes us back to grim old heathenism with hints of human sacrifice. When the thief was suspected or privately detected it is probable that a dose of some burning poison made good the prediction. “The word young” remarks Dr. Wlislocki, “may be here understood to mean innocent, since, according to ancient belief, there was a powerful magic virtue in the blood of virgins and of little children. Every new tent is therefore sprinkled by the gypsies with a few drops of a child’s blood to protect it from magic or any other accident.” So in prehistoric times, and through the Middle Ages, a human being was often walled up alive in the foundations of a castle to insure its durability. (Vide P. Cassel, “Die Symbolik des Blutes,” p. 157.)
When the wandering, or tent-gypsies, find that cattle are ill and do not know the nature of the disease, they take two birds—if possible quails, called by them bereçto or füryo—one of which is killed, but the other, besprinkled with its blood, is allowed to fly away. With what remains of the blood they sprinkle some fodder, which is put before the animal, with the words:—
“So ándre tu miseç hin
Avri ává!
Káthe ker ná ávlá,
Miseçeske!
Káná rátá ná ávná,
Násvályipen ná ávná!
Miseç, tu ávri ává,
Ada ker ná láce;
Dáv rátá me káthe!”
“What in thee is evil
Come forth!
Here is no home
For the evil one!
When (drops of) blood come not,
Sickness comes not,
Thou evil one, come forth!’
“Trin párne, trin kále,
Trin tçule páshlajen káthe,
Ko len hádjinel
Ač kivá mánge!”
“Three white, three black,
Three fat lie together here.
Whoever disturbs them
Remain to me! (Be mine!)”
To insure pigs thriving by a new owner, some charcoal-dust is mingled with their food and these words spoken:—
“Nivaseske ná muká,
The çál t’re çábená!
Miseç yákhá tut díkhen,
The yon káthe mudáren,
Tu atunci çábá len!”
“Do not let the Nivasi
Eat thy food,
Evil eyes see thee,
And they here shall perish,
Then do thou eat them!”
As a particularly powerful conjuration against thieves, the owner runs thrice, while quite naked, round the animal or object which he wishes to protect, and repeats at every turn:—
“Oh coreyá ná prejiá.
Dureder ná ává!
T’re vástá, t’re punrá
Avená kirñodyá
Te ádá pedá láves!”
“Oh, thief, do not go,
Further do not come!
Thy hands, thy feet
Shall decay
If thou takest this animal!”
Another “thieves’ benediction” is as follows: The owner goes at midnight with the animal or object to be protected to a cross-roads, and while letting fall on the ground a few hairs of the beast, or a bit of the thing whatever it be, repeats:—
“Ada hin tute,
Ná ává pál menge,
Dav tute, so kámáv;
Pçuvuseyá áshuná!”
“This home is not good,
Here I give (thee) blood!”
“The gypsies call the quail the devil’s bird (Ciriclo bengeskro), and ascribe diabolic properties to it. (Vide Cassel, 6 and 162.) The daughters of the Nivasi appear as quails in the fields by day, but during the night they steal the corn. To keep them away it is held good during sowing-time to place in each of the four corners of the field, parts of a quail, or at least some of the feathers of a black hen which has never laid an egg. This superstition is also current among the Roumanian peasants of the Siebenbürgen.”
The primitive meaning of the myth may perhaps be found in the Greek tradition which regarded the quail, because it was a bird of passage, as a type of revival of spring or of life. Hercules awakes from his swoon when his companion Iolaus (from the Greek ιουλος, youth), holds a quail to his nose. Hercules suffered from epilepsy, for which disease the ancients thought the brain of a quail was a specific. The placing pieces of a quail, by the gypsies, in the corners of a field when corn is sown, connects the bird with spring. Artemis, a goddess of spring and life, was called by the Romans Ortygyia, from ορτυξ, a quail. Therefore, as signifying new life, the quail became itself a cure for many diseases. And it seems to be like the Wren, also a bird of witchcraft and sorcery, or a kind of witch itself. It is a protector, because, owing to its pugnacity, it was a type of pluck, battle and victory. In Phœnicia it was sacrificed to Hercules, and the Romans were so fanatical in regard to it that Augustus punished a city-father for serving upon his table a quail which had become celebrated for its prowess. And so it has become a devil’s bird among the gypsies because in the old time it was regarded as a devil of a bird for fighting.
The gypsies are hardly to be regarded as Christians, but when they wish to contend against the powers of darkness they occasionally invoke Christian influences. If a cow gives bloody milk it is thought to be caused by her eating Wachtelkraut, or quail weed, which is a poison. In such a case they sprinkle the milk on a field frequented by quails and repeat:—
“Dav rátá tumenge
Adá ná hin láče!
Ráyeskro Kristeskro rátá
Adá hin máy láce
Adá hin ámenge!”
“I give to you blood,
Which is not good!
The Lord Christ’s blood
Is truly good,
That is ours!”
If a cow makes water while being milked, she is bewitched, and it is well in such a case to catch some of the urine, mix it with onion-peelings and the egg of a black hen. This is boiled and mixed with the cow’s food while these lines are repeated:—
“Ko ándré hin, avriává,
Trin Urma cingárden les,
Trin Urma tráden les
Andre yándengré ker
Beshel yov ándre ker
Hin leske máy yakhá,
Hin leske máy páña!”
“Who is within, let him come out!
Three Urme call him,
Three Urme drive him
Into the egg-shell house,
There he lives in the house;
He has much fire,
He has much water!”
Then half the shell of the egg of the black hen is thrown into a running stream and the other half into a fire.
Next to the Nivasi and Pçuvuse, or spirits of earth and air, and human sorcerers or witches, the being who is most dreaded as injuring cattle is the Chagrin or Cagrino. These demons have the form of a hedgehog, are of yellowish colour, and are half a yard in length, and a span in breadth. “I am certain,” says Wlislocki, “that this creature is none other than the equally demoniac being called Harginn, still believed in by the inhabitants of North-western India. (Vide Liebrecht, p. 112, and Leitner, ‘Results of a Tour in Dardistan Kashmir,’ &c., vol. i. p. 13.) The exact identity of the description of the two, as well as that of the name, prove that the gypsies brought the belief from their Indian home.” It may here be observed that the Indian name is Harginn, and the true gypsy word is pronounced very nearly like ‘Hágrin—the o being an arbitrary addition. The transposition of letters in a word is extremely common among the Hindu gypsies. The Chagrin specially torments horses, by sitting on their backs and making water on their bodies. The next day they appear to be weary, sad, sick, and weak, bathed in sweat, with their manes tangled. When this is seen the following ceremony is resorted to: The horse is tied to a stake which has been rubbed with garlic juice, then a red thread is laid in the form of a cross on the ground, but so far from the heels of the horse that he cannot disturb it. And while laying it down the performer sings:—
“Sáve miseç ač káthe,
Ác ándre lunge táve,
Andre leg páshader páñi.
De tu tire páñi
Andre çuča Cháriñeyá,
Andre tu sik mudárá!”
“All evil stay here,
Stay in the long thread,
In the next brook (water).
Give thy water,
Jump in Chagrin!
Therein perish quickly!”
Of the widely-spread and ancient belief in the magic virtues of garlic and red wool I have elsewhere spoken. That witches and goblins or imps ride horses by night and then restore them in the morning to their stalls in a wretched condition—trembling, enfeebled, and with tangled manes—is believed all the world over, and it would probably be found that the Chagrin also gallops them.
Another charm against this being consists of taking some of the hair of the animal, a little salt, and the blood of a bat, which is all mixed with meal and cooked to a bread. With this the foot of the horse is smeared, and then the empty pipkin is put into the trunk of a high tree while these words are uttered:—
“Ač tu čin kathe,
Čin ádá tçutes ávlá!”
“Stay so long here,
Till it shall be full!”
The blood of the bat may be derived from an Oriental belief that the bat being the most perfect of birds, because it has breasts and suckles its young, it is specially adapted to magical uses. In the Tyrol he who bears the left eye of a bat may become invisible, and in Hesse he who wears the heart of a bat bound to his arm with red thread will always win at cards. The manes of the horses which have been tangled and twisted by the Chagrin must not be cut off or disentangled unless these words are spoken:—
“Čin tu jid’, cin ádá bálá jiden.”
“So long live thou, long as these hairs shall live.”
It is an European belief that knots of hair made by witches must not be disentangled. The belief that such knots are made intentionally by some intelligence is very natural. I have often been surprised to find how frequently knots form themselves in the cord of my eye-glass, even when pains are taken at night to lay it down so as to be free of them. Apropos of which I may mention that this teasing personality of the eye-glass and cord seems to have been noted by others. I was once travelling on the Nile in company with a Persian prince, who became convinced that his eye-glass was very unlucky, and therefore threw it into the river.
The Chagrin specially torments mares which have recently foaled; therefore it is held needful, soon after the birth, to put into the water which the mother drinks glowing hot coals, which are thrice taken from the fire. With these are included pieces of iron, such as nails, knives, &c., and the following words are solemnly murmured:—
“Piyá tu te ña ač sovnibnastár!”
“Drink, and do not be sleepy!”
Many readers may here observe that charcoal and iron form a real tonic, or very practical strengthening dose for the enfeebled mare. But here, as in many cases medicine makes a cure and the devil or the doctor gets the credit. The Chagrin is supposed to attack horses only while they are asleep. Its urine often causes swellings or sores. These are covered by day with a patch of red cloth, which is stuck at night into a hole in a tree, which is closed with a cork, while these words are pronounced:—
“Ač tu káthe
Čin áulá táv pedá
Čin pedá yek ruk
Čin ruk yek mánush
Ko mudarel tut.”
“Remain thou here
Till the rag become an animal,
Till the animal, a tree,
Till the tree, a man,
Who will destroy thee!”
Dr. Wlislocki suggests that “the idea of the tree’s becoming a man, is derived from the old gypsy belief that the first human beings were made from the leaves of trees,” and refers to what he has elsewhere written on a tradition of the creation of the world, as held by Transylvanian gypsies. The following is a children’s song, in which the belief may be traced:—
“Amaro dád jál ándro bes
Čingerel odoy čaves,
Del dáyákri andre pádá
Yek čavoro ádá ávla.”
“Our father went into a wood,
There he cut a boy,
Laid it in mother’s bed,
So a boy comes.”
The Greeks believed that man was made from an ash-tree, and the Norsemen probably derived it from the same source with them. In 1862 I published in The Continental Magazine (New York) a paper on the lore connected with the ash, in which effort was made to show that in early times in India the Banyan was specially worshipped, and that the descendants of men familiar with this cult had, after migrating to the Far West, transferred the worship and traditions of the banyan to the ash. It has been observed that the ash-tree sometimes—like the banyan—sends its shoots down to the ground, where they take root. The Algonkin Indians seem to have taken this belief of man’s origin from the ash from the Norsemen, as a very large proportion of their myths correspond closely to those of the Edda. But, in brief, if the Greeks and Norsemen were of Aryan origin, and had ever had a language in common, they probably had common myths.
The following is the remedy for the so-called Würmer, or worms, i.e., external sores. Before sunrise wolf’s milk (Wolfsmilch, rukeskro tçud) is collected, mixed with salt, garlic, and water, put into a pot, and boiled down to a brew. With a part of this the afflicted spot is rubbed, the rest is thrown into a brook, with the words:—
“Kirmora jánen ándre tçud
Andrál tçud, andré sir
Andrál sir, andré páñi,
Panensá kiyá dádeske,
Kiyá Niváseske
Pçándel tumen shelehá
Eñávárdesh teñá!”
“Worms go in the milk,
From the milk into the garlic,
From the garlic into the water,
With the water to (your) father,
To the Nivasi,
He shall bind you with a rope,
Ninety-nine (yards long).”
A common cure of worms in swine among the Transylvanian tent-gypsies is to stand ere the sun rises before a çadcerli, or nettle, and while pouring on it the urine of the animal to be cured, repeat:—
“Láče, láče detehárá!
Hin mánge máy bute trásha
Kirmora hin [báleceske],
Te me penáv, penáv tute!
Káles hin yon, loles, párnes,
Deisislá hin yon mulánes!”
“Good, good morrow!
I have much sorrow.
Worms are in [my swine to-day]
And I say, to you I say,
Black are they or white or red
By to-morrow be they dead!”
The nettle has its own peculiar associations. According to the gypsies it grows chiefly in places where there is a subterranean passage to the dwellings of the Pçuvus, or Earth-fairies, therefore it is consecrated to them and called Kásta Pçuvasengré, Pcuvus-wood. Hence the gypsy children while gathering nettles for pigs sing:—
“Čádcerli ná pçábuvá!
André ker me ná jiáv,
Kiyá Pçuvus ná jiáv,
Tráden, tráden kirmorá!”
“Nettle, nettle do not burn,
In your house no one shall go,
No one to the Pcuvus goes,
Drive, drive away the worms!”
“The nettle,” says Friedrich (“Symbolik der Natur,” p. 324), “because it causes a burning pain is among the Hindoos a demoniac symbol, for, as they say, the great serpent poured out its poison on it. But as evil is an antidote for evil, the nettle held in the hand is a guard against ghosts, and it is good for beer when laid upon the barrel.” “From its employment as an aphrodisiac, and its use in flagellation to restore sexual power, it is regarded as sacred to Nature by the followers of a secret sect or society still existing in several countries, especially Persia” (MS. account of certain Secret Societies). The gypsies believe that the Earth-fairies are the foes of every kind of worm and creeping insect with the exception of the snail, which they therefore call the “gráy Pçuvusengré,” the Pçuvus-horse. Gry-puvusengree would in English gypsy mean the earthy-horse. English gypsies, and the English peasantry, as well as gypsies, call snails “cattle, because they have horns.” Snails are a type of voluptuousness, because they are hermaphrodite, and exceedingly giving to sexual indulgence, so that as many as half a dozen may be found mutually giving and taking pleasure. Hence in German Schnecke, a snail, is a term applied to the pudendum muliebre. And as anything significant of fertility, generation, and sexual enjoyment was supposed to constitute a charm or amulet against witchcraft, i.e., all evil influences, which are allied to sterility, chastity, and barrenness, a snail’s shell forms a powerful fetish for a true believer. The reference to white, black, or red in the foregoing charm, or rather the one before it, refers, says Dr. Wlislocki, to the gypsy belief that there are white, black, and red Earth-fairies. A girl can win (illicit) love from a man by inducing him to carry a snail shell which she has had for some time about her person. To present a snail shell is to make a very direct but not very delicate declaration of love to any one. I have heard of a lady who caused an intense excitement in a village by collecting about a hundred large snails, gilding their shells, and then turning them loose in several gardens, where their discovery excited, as may be supposed, great excitement among the finders.
If pigs lose their appetites a brew is made of milk, charcoal dust, and their own dung, which is put before them with the words: “Friss Hexe und verreck!”
“In this place I must remark that the Transylvanian tent-gypsies use for grumus merdœ also the expression Hirte (feris)” (Wlislocki). To cure a cough in animals one should take from the hoofs of the first riding horse, dirt or dust, and put it into the mouth of the suffering animal with the words:—
“Prejiál te náñi yov ável!”
“May he go away and never return!”
To have a horse always in good spirits and lively during the waning moon his spine is rubbed with garlic, while these words are uttered:—
“Miseç ándre tut,
O beng the çal but!
Lačes ándre tut
Ačel ándre tut!”
“(What is) evil in thee,
May the devil eat it much!
(What is) good in thee,
May it remain in thee!”
But it is far more effective when the garlic is put on a rag of the clothes of one who has been hanged, and the place rubbed with it: in which we have a remnant of the earliest witchcraft, before Shamanism, which had recourse to the vilest and most vulgar methods of exciting awe and belief. This is in all probability the earliest form in which magic, or the power of controlling invisible or supernatural influences manifested itself, and it is very interesting to observe that it still survives, and that the world still presents every phase of its faiths, ab initio.
There is a very curious belief or principle attached to the use of songs in conjuring witches, or in averting their own sorcery. It is that the witch is obliged, willy nilly, to listen to the end to what is in metre, an idea founded on the attraction of melody, which is much stronger among savages and children than with civilized adults. Nearly allied to this is the belief that if the witch sees interlaced or bewildering and confused patterns she must follow them out, and by means of this her thoughts are diverted or scattered. Hence the serpentine inscriptions of the Norsemen and their intertwining bands which were firmly believed to bring good luck or avert evil influence. A traveller in Persia states that the patterns of the carpets of that country are made as bewildering as possible “to avert the evil eye.” And it is with this purpose that in Italian, as in all other witchcraft, so many spells and charms depend on interwoven braided cords.
“Twist ye, twine ye, even so,
Mingle threads of joy and woe.”
The basis for this belief is the fascination, or instinct, which many persons, especially children, feel to trace out patterns, to thread the mazes of labyrinths or to analyze and disentangle knots and “cat’s cradles.” Did space permit, nor inclination fail, I could point out some curious proofs that the old belief in the power of long and curling hair to fascinate was derived not only from its beauty but also because of the magic of its curves and entanglements.
The gypsies believe that the Earth-spirits are specially interested in animals. They also teach women the secrets of medicine and sorcery. There are indications of this in the negro magic. Miss Mary Owen, an accomplished Folk-lorist of St. Joseph, Missouri, who has been deeply instructed in Voodooism, informs me that a woman to become a witch must go by night into a field and pull up a weed by the roots. From the quantity of soil which clings to it, is inferred the degree of magic power which the pupil will attain. I am not astonished to learn that when this lady was initiated, the amount of earth collected was unusually great. In such cases the Pchuvus (or Poovus in English gypsy), indicate their good-will by bestowing “earth,” which, from meaning luck or good-fortune, has passed in popular parlance to signifying money.
[1] “Geit suer Heidrun heitr stendr uppi a Valholl …. En or spenum hennar rennr moilk … tháer ero sva miklar at allir einheria verda fuldrucknir af.” (“A ewe named Heidrun stands up in Valhalla. And from her udders runs milk; there is so much that all the heroes may drink their fill of it”). (Snorro Sturleson’s “Edda,” 20th tale). [↑]
CHAPTER VI.
OF PREGNANCY AND CHARMS, OR FOLK-LORE CONNECTED WITH IT—BOARS’ TEETH AND CHARMS FOR PREVENTING THE FLOW OF BLOOD.
Like all Orientals the gypsy desires intensely to have a family. Superstition comes in to increase the wish, for a barren woman in Eastern Europe is generally suspected of having had intercourse with a vampire or spirit before her marriage, and she who has done this, willingly or unconsciously, never has children. They have recourse to many magic medicines or means to promote conception; one of the most harmless in Hungary is to eat grass from the grave in which a woman with child has been buried. While doing this the woman repeats:—
“Dui riká hin mire minč,
Dui yārá hin leskro kor,
Avnás dui yek jelo,
Keren ákána yek jeles.”
Or else the woman drinks the water in which the husband has cast hot coals, or, better still, has spit, saying:—
“Káy me yákh som
Ac tu ángár,
Káy me brishind som,
Ǎc tu pāni!”
“Where I am flame
Be thou the coals!
Where I am rain
Be thou the water!”
Or at times the husband takes an egg, makes a small hole at each end, and then blows the yolk and white into the mouth of his wife who swallows them.
There are innumerable ways and means to ensure pregnancy, some of which are very dangerous. Faith in the so-called “artificial propagation” is extensively spread. “Will der Zigeuner einen Sohn erzielen, so gürtet er sich mit dem Halfterzaume eines männlichen Pferdes und umgekehrt mit dem einer Stute, will er eine Tochter erzeugen.” (“Gebräuche d. Trans. Zig.” Dr. H. von Wlislocki. “Ill. Zeitschrift. Band,” 51. No. 16.)
If a gypsy woman in Transylvania wishes to know whether she be with child, she must stand for nine evenings at a cross-road with an axe or hammer, which she must wet with her own water, and then bury there. Should it be dug up on the ninth morning after, and found rusty, it is a sign that she is “in blessed circumstances.”
To bring on the menses a gypsy woman must, while roses are in bloom, wash herself all over with rose-water, and then pour the water over a rose-bush. Or she takes an egg, pours its contents into a jug, and makes water on it. If the egg swims the next morning on the surface she is enceinte; if the yolk is separate from the white she will bear a son, if they are mingled a daughter. In Tuscany women wishing for children go to a priest, get a blessed apple and pronounce over it an incantation to Santa Anna, which was probably addressed in Roman days to Lucina, who was very probably, according to the Romagna dialect, lu S’anna—Santa Anna herself. I have several old Roman spells from Marcellus, which still exist word for word in Italian, but fitted to modern usage in this manner like old windows to new houses.
Should a woman eat fish while pregnant the child will be slow in learning to speak, but if she feed on snails it will be slow in learning to walk. The proverbs, “Dumb as a fish,” and “Slow as a snail,” appear here.
To protect a child against the evil eye it is hung with amulets, generally with shells (die eine Aehnlichkeit mit der weiblichen Scham haben). And these must be observed on all occasions, and for everything, ceremonies, of which there are literally hundreds, showing that gypsies, notwithstanding their supposed freedom from conventionalisms, are, like all superstitious people, harassed and vexed to a degree which would seem incredible to educated Europeans, with observances and rites of the most ridiculous and vexatious nature. The shells alluded to are, however, of great interest, as they indicate the transmission of the old belief that symbols typical of generation, pleasure, and reproductiveness, are repugnant to witchcraft which is allied to barrenness, destruction, negation, and every kind of pain and sterility.
Hence a necklace of shells, especially cowries or snail shells, or the brilliant and pretty conchiglie found in such abundance near Venice, are regarded as protecting animals or children from the evil eye, and facilitating love, luxury, and productiveness. I have read an article in which a learned writer rejects with indignation the “prurient idea” that the cowrie, which gave its name porcellana to porcelain, derived it from porcella, in sensu obsceno; porcella being a Roman word not only for pig but for the female organ. But every donkey-boy in Cairo could have told him that the cowrie is used in strings on asses as on children because the shell has the likeness which the writer to whom I refer rejects with indignation. The pig, as is well known, is a common amulet, the origin thereof being that it is extremely prolific. It has within a few years been very much revived in silver as a charm for ladies, and may be found in most shops where ornaments for watch-chains are sold. The boar’s tooth, as I have before mentioned, has been since time immemorial a charm; I have found them attached to chatelaines and bunches of keys, especially in Austria, from one to four or five centuries past. They are found in prehistoric graves. The tusk is properly a male emblem; a pig is sometimes placed on the base. These are still very commonly made and sold. I saw one worn by the son of a travelling basket-maker, who spoke Romany, and I purchased several in Vienna (1888), also in Copenhagen in 1889. In Florence very large boars’ tusks are set as brooches, and may be found generally in the smaller jewellers’ shops and on the Ponte Vecchio. They are regarded as protective against malocchio—a general term for evil influences—especially for women during pregnancy, and as securing plenty, i.e., prosperity and increase, be it of worldly goods, honour, or prosperity. There is in the museum at Budapest a boar’s tusk, mounted or set as an amulet, which is apparently of Celtic origin, and which certainly belongs to the migration of races, or a very early period. And it is in this eastern portion of Europe that it is still most generally worn as a charm.
BOAR’S TOOTH. VIENNA.
In connection with pregnancy and childbirth there is the profluvium, excessive flow of blood, or menses or hemorrhages, for which there exist many charms, not only among gypsies but all races. This includes the stopping any bleeding—an art in which Scott’s Lady of Deloraine was an expert, and which many practised within a century.
“Tom Potts was but a serving man,
And yet he was a doctor good,
He bound a handkerchief on the wound,
And with some kind of words he staunched the blood.”
What these same kind of words were among old Germans and Romans may be learned from the following: Jacob Grimm had long been familiar with a German magic spell of the eleventh century—ad stringendum sanguinem, or stopping bleeding—but, as he says, “noch nicht zu deuten vermochte,” could not explain them. They were as follows:—
“Tumbo saz in berke,
Mit tumbemo kinde in arme,
Tumb hiez der berc
Tumb hiez daz kint,
Der heiligo Tumbo
Versegne dise wunta.”
“Tumbo (i.e., dumm or stupid) sat in the hill
With a stupid child in arms,
Dumb (stupid) the hill was called
Dumb was called the child,
The holy Tumbo (or dumb).
Heal (bless) this wound!”
Some years after he found the following among the magic formulas of Marcellus Burdigalensis:—
“Carmen utile profluvio mulieri:—
“Stupidus in monte ibat,
Stupidus stupuit,
Adjuro te matrix
Ne hoc iracunda suscipias.
“Pari ratione scriptum ligabis.”
I.e.: “A song useful for a flow of blood in woman:—
“The stupid man went into the mountain,
The stupid man was amazed;
I adjure thee, oh womb,
Be not angry!”
“Which shall also be bound as a writing,” i.e., according to a previous direction that it shall be written on virgin parchment, and bound with a linen cord about the waist of him or of her—quæ patietur de qualibet parte corporis sanguinis fluxum—who suffers anywhere from flow of blood.
It is possible that the Stupidus and his blessing of women has here some remotely derived reference to the reverence amounting to worship of idiots in the East, who are described as being surrounded in some parts of India by matrons seeking for their touch and benediction, and soliciting their embraces. This is effected very often in an almost public manner; that is to say, by a crowd of women closely surrounding the couple, i.e., the idiot or lunatic and one of their number are joined, so that passers-by cannot see what is going on. The children born of these casual matches are not unusually themselves of weak mind, but are considered all the more holy. This recalls the allusion in the charm:—
“Stupid sat in the hill
With a stupid child in arms.”
This obscure myth of the stupid god appears to be very ancient.
“This Tritas is called intelligent. How then does he appear sometimes stupid? The language itself supplies the explanation. In Sanskrit bâlas means both child and stolid, and the third brother is supposed to be stolid because, at his first appearance especially, he is a child. (Tritas is one of the three brothers or gods, i.e., the trinity).” (“Zoological Mythology,” by Angelo de Gubernatis, 1872).
I am indebted to the as yet unpublished collection of Gypsyana made by Prof. Anton Herrmann for the following:—
There is a superstition among our gypsies that if the shadow of a cross on a grave falls on a woman with child she will have a miscarriage, and this seems to be peculiarly appropriate to girls who have “anticipated the privileges of matrimony.” The following rhyme seems to describe the hesitation of a girl who has gone to a cross to produce the result alluded to, but who is withheld by love for her unborn infant:—
“Cigno trusšul pal handako
Hin ada ušalinako;
The žiav me pro ušalin,
Ajt’ mange lašavo na kin.
Sar e praytin kad’ chasarel,
Save šile barvāl marel,
Pal basavo te prasape,
Mre čajori mojd kāmāle.”
“Cross upon a grave so small
Here I see thy shadow fall,
If it fall on me they say
All my shame will pass away.
As the autumn leaf is blown,
By the wind to die alone,
Yet in shame and misery,
My baby will be dear to me!”
There is a belief allied to this of the power of the dead in graves to work wonders, to the effect that if any one plucks a rose from a grave, he or she will soon die. In the following song a gypsy picks a rose from the grave of the one he loved, hoping that it will cause his death:—
“Cignoro hrobosa
Hin sukares rosa
Mange la pchagavas,
Doi me na kāmavas.
Beš’las piranake,
Hrobas hin joy mange,
Pchgavas, choč žanav
Pal lele avava
Te me ne brinzinav.
The me počivinav.”
“On her little tomb there grows
By itself a lovely rose,
All alone the rose I break,
And I do it for her sake.
I sat by her I held so dear,
Now her grave and mine are near,
I break the rose because I know
That to her I soon must go,
Grief cannot my spirit stir,
Since I know I go to her!”
M. Kounavine (contribution by Dr. A. Elysseeff, Gypsy-Lore Journal, July, 1890), gives the following as a Russian gypsy spell against barrenness:—
“Laki, thou destroyest and dost make everything on earth; thou canst see nothing old, for death lives in thee, thou givest birth to all upon the earth for thou thyself art life. By thy might cause me —— to bear good fruit, I who am deprived of the joy of motherhood, and barren as a rock.”
According to Dr. Elysseeff, Laki is related to the Indian goddess Lakshmi, although differing from her in character. Another incantation of the same nature is as follows:—
“Thou art the mother of every living creature and the distributor of good: thou doest according to thy wisdom in destroying what is useless or what has lived its destined time; by thy wisdom thou makest the earth to regenerate all that is new …. Thou dost not seek the death of any one, for thou art the benefactress of mankind.”
CHAPTER VII.
THE RECOVERY OF STOLEN PROPERTY—LOVE-CHARMS—SHOES AND LOVE-POTIONS, OR PHILTRES.
When a man has lost anything, or been robbed, he often has in his own mind, quite unconsciously, some suspicion or clue to it. A clever fortune-teller or gypsy who has made a life-long study of such clues, can often elicit from the loser, hints which enable the magician to surmise the truth. Many people place absolute confidence in their servants, and perhaps suspect nobody. The detective or gypsy has no such faith in man, and suspects everybody. Where positive knowledge cannot be established there is, however, another resource. The thief is often as superstitious as his victim. Hence he fears that some mysterious curse may be laid on him, which he cannot escape. In the Pacific Islands, as among negroes everywhere, a man will die if taboo or voodoo attaches to the taking of objects which have been consecrated by a certain formula. Therefore such formulas are commonly employed. Among the Hungarian gypsies to recover a stolen animal, some of its dung is taken and thrown to the East and the West with the words:—
“Kay tut o kam dikhel:
Odoy ává kiyá mánge!”
“Where the sun sees thee,
Hence return to me!”
But when a horse has been stolen, they take what is left of his harness, bury it in the earth and make a fire over it, saying:—
“Kó tut cordyás
Nasvales th’ ávlás
Leske sor ná ávlás,
Tu ná ač kiyá leske
Avá sástes kiyá mánge!
Leskro sor káthe pashlyol
Sár e tçuv avriurál!”
“Who stole thee
Sick may he be
May his strength depart!
Do not thou remain by him,
Come (back) sound to me,
His strength lies here
As the smoke goes away!”
To know in which direction the stolen thing lies, they carry a sucking babe to a stream, hold it over the water and say:—
“Pen mánge, oh Nivaseya
Čaveskro vástehá
Kay hin m’ro gráy,
Ujes hin čavo,
Ujes sár o kam
Ujes sár pán̄i
Ujes sár čumut
Ujes sár legujes?
Pen mánge, oh Niváseyá,
Cáveskro vastehá
Kay hin m’ro gráy!”
“Tell me, oh Nivaseha,
By the child’s hand!
Where is my horse?
Pure is the child
Pure as the sun,
Pure as water,
Pure as the moon,
Pure as the purest.
Tell me, oh Nivaseha,
By the child’s hand!
Where is my horse?”
In this we have an illustration of the widely spread belief that an innocent child is a powerful agent in prophecy and sorcery. The oath “by the hand” is still in vogue among all gypsies. “Apo miro dadeskro vast!” (“By my father’s hand!”) is one of their greatest oaths in Germany, (“Die Zigeuner,” von Richard Liebich), and I have met with an old gypsy in England who knew it.
If a man who is seeking for stolen goods finds willow twigs grown into a knot, he ties it up and says:—
“Me avri pçándáv čoreskro báçht!”
“I tie up the thief’s luck!”
There is also a belief among the gypsies that these knots are twined by the fairies, and that whoever undoes them undoes his own luck, or that of the person on whom he is thinking. (Vide Rocholz, “Alemannisches Kinderlied und Kinderspiel aus der Schweiz,” p. 146). These willow-knots are much used in love-charms. To win the love of a maid, a man cuts one of them, puts it into his mouth, and says:—
“T’re báçt me çáv,
T’re baçt me piyáv,
Dáv tute m’re baçt,
Káná tu mánge sál.”
“I eat thy luck,
I drink thy luck;
Give me that luck of thine,
Then thou shalt be mine.”
Then the lover, if he can, secretly hides this knot in the bed of the wished-for bride. It is worth noting that these lines are so much like English Gypsy as it was once spoken that there are still men who would, in England, understand every word of it. Somewhat allied to this is another charm. The lover takes a blade of grass in his mouth, and turning to the East and the West, says:—
“Kay o kám, avriável,
Kiya mánge lele beshel!
Kay o kám tel’ ável,
Kiya lelákri me beshav.”
“Where the sun goes up
Shall my love be by me!
Where the sun goes down
There by her I’ll be.”
Then the blade of grass is cut up into pieces and mingled with some food which the girl must eat, and if she swallow the least bit of the grass, she will be gewogen und treugesinnt—moved to love, and true-hearted. On which Dr. Wlislocki remarks on the old custom “also known to the Hindoos,” by which any one wishing to deprecate the wrath of another, or to express complete subjection, takes a blade of grass in his mouth. Of which Grimm writes: “This custom may have sprung from the idea that the one conquered gave himself up like a domestic animal to the absolute power of another. And with this appears to be connected the ancient custom of holding out grass as a sign of surrender. The conquered man took the blade of grass in his mouth and then transferred it to his conqueror.”
If a gypsy girl be in love she finds the foot-print of her “object,” digs out the earth which is within its outline and buries this under a willow-tree, saying:—
“Upro pçuv hin but pçuvá;
Kás kámáv, mange th’ ávlá!
Bárvol, bárvol, sálciye,
Brigá ná hin mánge!
Yov tover, me pori,
Yov kokosh, me cátrá,
Ádá, ádá me kamav!”
“Many earths on earth there be,
Whom I love my own shall be,
Grow, grow willow tree!
Sorrow none unto me!
He the axe, I the helve,
He the cock, I the hen,
This, this (be as) I will!”
Another love-charm which belongs to ancient black witchcraft, and is known far and wide, is the following: When dogs are coupling (Wenn Hund und Hündin bei der Paarung zusammenhängen) the lover suddenly covers them with a cloth, if possible, one which is afterwards presented to the girl whom he seeks, while he says:—
“Me jiuklo, yoy jiukli,
Yoy tover, me pori,
Me kokosh, yoy cátrá,
Ádá, ádá me kamáv!”
“I the dog, she the bitch,
I the helve, she the axe,
I the cock (and) she the hen,
That, that I desire.”
He or she who finds a red ribbon, tape, or even a piece of red stuff of any kind, especially if it be wool, will have luck in love. It must be picked up and carried as an amulet, and when raising it from the ground the finder must make a wish for the love of some person, or if he have no particular desire for any one, he may wish for luck in love, or a sweetheart. This is, I believe, pretty generally known in some form all over the world. A yellow ribbon or flower, especially if it be floating on water, presages gold; a white object, silver, or peace or reconciliation with enemies.
It is also lucky for love to find a key. In Tuscany there is a special formula which must be spoken while picking it up. Very old keys are valuable amulets. Those who carry them will learn secrets, penetrate mysteries, and succeed in what they undertake.
If you can get a shoe which a girl has worn you may make sad havoc with her heart if you carry it near your own. Also hang it up over your bed and put into it the leaves of rue.
During November, 1889, not a few newspaper commentators busied themselves with conjectures as to why a Scotch constable buried the boots of a murdered man. That it was done through some superstitious belief is conceded; but what the fashion of the superstition is seems unknown. It originated, beyond question, in the old Norse custom of always burying the dead in their shoes or with them. For they believed that the deceased would have, when he arrived in the other world, to traverse broad and burning plains before he could reach his destination, be it Valhalla or the dreary home of Hel; and to protect his feet from the fire his friends bound on them the “hell-shoon.” Other cares were also taken: and in the saga of Olof Tryggvasen we are told that one monarch was thoughtfully provided with a cow; while the Vikings were buried in their ships, so that they could keep on pirating “for ever and ever.”
The superstition of the burial of the boots probably survives in England. It is about seventeen years since the writer heard from an old gypsy that when another gypsy was “pûvado,” or “earthed,” a very good pair of boots was placed by him in the grave. The reason was not given; perhaps it was not known. These customs often survive after the cause is forgotten, simply from some feeling that good or bad luck attends their observance or the neglect of it. Many years since a writer in an article on shoes in The English Magazine stated that, “according to an Aryan tradition, the greater part of the way from the land of the living to that of death lay through morasses and vast moors overgrown with furzes and thorns. That the dead might not pass over them bare-foot, a pair of shoes was laid with them in the grave.”
The shoe was of old in many countries a symbol of life, liberty, or entire personal control. In Ruth we are told that “it was the custom in Israel concerning changing, that a man plucked off his shoe and delivered it to his neighbour.” So the bride, who was originally always a slave, transferred herself by the symbol of the shoe. When the Emperor Waldimir made proposals of marriage to the daughter of Ragnald, she replied scornfully that she would not take off her shoes to the son of a slave. Gregory of Tours, in speaking of wedding, says: “The bridegroom, having given a ring to the bride, presents her with a shoe.”
As regards the Scandinavian hel-shoe, or hell-shoon, Kelley, in his “Indo-European Folk-lore,” tells us that a funeral is still called a dead shoe in the Henneberg district; and the writer already cited adds that in a MS. of the Cotton Library, containing an account of Cleveland in Yorkshire, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, there is a passage which illustrates this curious custom. It was quoted by Sir Walter Scott in the notes to “Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border,” and runs thus:—
“When any dieth certaine women sing a song to the dead bodie, reciting the journey that the partye deceased must goe; and they are of beliefe that once in their lives it is goode to give a pair of new shoes to a poor man; forasmuch as before this life they are to pass bare-foote through a great lande, full of thornes and furzen—excepte by the meryte of the almes aforesaid they have redeemed the forfeyte—for at the edge of the launde an oulde man shall meet them with the same shoes that were given by the partie when he was lyving, and after he hath shodde them dismisseth them to go through thick and thin without scratch or scalle.
This must be a very agreeable reflection to all gentlemen who have bestowed their old boots on waiters, or ladies who have in like fashion gifted their maids. It is true, the legend specifies new shoes; but surely a pair of thirty-shilling boots only half worn count for as much as a new pair of half a sovereign chaussures. However, if one is to go “through thick and thin without scratch or scalle,” it may be just as well to be on the safe side, and give a good new extra stout pair to the gardener for Christmas. For truly these superstitions are strange things, and no one knows what may be in them.
There are one or two quaint shoe stories of the olden time which may be of value to the collector. It befell once in the beginnings of Bohemia, that, according to Schafarik (“Slawische Alterthümer,” vol. ii. p. 422), Lïbussa, queen of that land, found herself compelled by her council to wed. And the wise men, being consulted, declared that he who was to marry the queen would be found by her favourite horse, who would lead the way till he found a man eating from an iron table, and kneel to him. So the horse went on, and unto a field where a man sat eating a peasant’s dinner from a ploughshare. This was the farmer Prschemischl. So they covered him with the royal robes and led him to the queen expectant. But ere going he took his shoes of willow-wood and placed them in his bosom and kept them to remind him ever after of his low origin. It will, of course, at once strike the reader, as it has the learned, that this is a story which would naturally originate in any country where there are iron ploughshares, horses, queens, and wooden shoes: and, as Schafarik shrewdly suggests, that it was all “a put-up job;” since, of course, Prschemischl was already a lover of the queen, the horse was trained to find him and to kneel before him, and, finally, that the ploughshare and wooden shoes were the prepared properties of the little drama. The only little flaw in this evidence is the name Prschemischl, which, it must be admitted, is extremely difficult to get over.
The Seven League Boots and the shoes of Peter Schlemihl, which take one over the world at will, have a variation in a pair recorded in another tale. There was a beautiful and extremely proud damsel, who refused a young man with every conceivable aggravation of the offence, informing him that when she ran after him, and not before that, he might hope to marry her; and at the same time meeting a poor old gypsy woman who begged her for a pair of old shoes. To which the proud Princess replied:—
“Shoes here, shoes there;
Give me a couple, I’ll give thee a pair.”
To which the old gypsy, who was a witch, grimly muttered, “I’ll give thee a pair which——” The rest of the expression was really too unamiable to repeat. Well, the youth and the witch met, and, going to the lady’s shoemaker, “made him make” a superbly elegant pair of shoes, which were sent to the damsel as a gift. Such a gift! No sooner were they put on than off they started, carrying the Princess, malgré elle, over hill and dale. By and by she saw that a man—the man, of course, whom she had refused—was in advance of her. As in the song of the Cork Leg, “the shoes never stopped, but kept on the pace.” And the young man led her to a lonely castle and reasoned with her. And as she had promised to marry should she ever run after him, and as she had pursued him a whole day, she kept her word. The shoes she sent to the witch filled with gold; and they were wedded, and all went as merry as a thousand grigs in a duck-pond.
The shoe, as has been shown by a Danish writer in a book chiefly devoted to the subject, is a type of life, especially as shown in productiveness and fertility. Hence old shoes and grain are thrown after a bride, as people say, for luck; but the Jews do it crying, “Peru urphu”—“Increase and multiply.” For this, and much more, the reader may consult that wonderful treasury of Folk-lore, “Die Symbolik und Mythologie der Natur,” J. B. Friedrich, Würzburg, 1859. To which we would add our mite by remarking as a curious confirmation of this theory, that—
There was an old woman who lived in a shoe,
Who had so many children she didn’t know what to do.
This passes now for a mere nursery-rhyme; but doubtless there are those who will trace it back to the early morning of mythology, and prove that it was once a Himaritic hymn, sung to some Melitta who has long passed away down the back entry of time.
For several additional Hungarian gypsy love-charms and spells, collected by Dr. Wlislocki, published in Ethnographia, and subsequently in The Gipsy-Lore Journal for June, 1890, I am greatly indebted to the kindness of Mr. D. MacRitchie:—
“The gypsy girls of Transylvania believe that spells to ‘know your future husband’ can be best carried out on the eves of certain days, such as New Year, Easter, and Saint George. ‘On New Year’s Eve they throw shoes or boots on a willow tree, but are only allowed to throw them nine times.’ Compare this with the throwing of the old shoe after the bride in many countries. ‘If the shoe catches in the branches the girl who threw it will be married within a year.’
“On the same eve they go to a tree and shake it by turns, singing:—
“ ‘Per de, per de prájtina,
Varekaj hin, hász kāmav?
Basá, párro dzsiuklo,
Pirano dzsāl mai szigo.’
“ ‘Scattered leaves around I see,
Where can my true lover be?
Ah, the white dog barks at last!
And my love comes running fast!’
“If during the singing the bark of a dog should be heard, the damsel will be ‘wedded and bedded ere New Year comes again. This is virtually the same with a charm practised in Tuscany, which from other ancient witness I believe to be of Etruscan origin. Allied to this is the following: On the night of Saint George’s Day (query, Saint George’s Eve?) gypsy girls blindfold a white dog, then, letting it loose, place themselves quietly in several places. She to whom the dog runs first will be the first married. Blindman’s buff was anciently an amorous, semi-magical, or witches’ game, only that in place of the dog a man was blindfolded.
“ ‘Or the girl pulls a hair from her head, fastens a ring to it, and dangles it in a jug. The ring vibrates or swings, and so often as it touches the side of the jug so many years will it be before she marries.’ This is an ancient spell of Eastern origin. As performed according to old works the thread must be wound around the ring-finger and touch the pulse. On the edge of a bowl the letters of the alphabet, or numerals, are marked, and the ring swinging against these spells words or denotes numbers. The touching of the latter indicates the number of lovers a girl is to have.
“Early on Whitsunday morning the girls go out, and if they see clouds in the East they throw twigs in that direction, saying:—
“ ‘Predzsia, csirik leja,
Te ná tráda m’re píranes.’
“ ‘Fly my bird—fly, I say,
Do not chase my love away.’
“For they think that if on Whitsun-morn there are many clouds in the East few girls will be married during the coming year. This peculiar, seemingly incomprehensible, custom of the gypsies originated in an old belief, the germ of which we find in the Hindoo myth, according to which the spring morning which spreads brightness and blessings descends from the blue bird of heaven, who, on the other hand, also represents night or winter. Special preparations are made so that the predictions shall be fulfilled. On the days mentioned the girls are neither allowed to wash themselves, nor to kiss any one, nor go to church. At Easter, or on the Eve of Saint George, the girl must eat fish, in order to see the future in her dreams.
“On Easter morning the girls boil water, in the bubbles of which they try to make out the names of their future husbands.
“To find out whether the future husband is young or old the girl must take nine seeds of the thorn-apple, ploughed-up earth of nine different places, and water from as many more. With these she kneads a cake, which is laid on a cross-road on Easter or Saint George’s morning. If a woman steps first on the cake her husband will be a widower or an old man, but if a man the husband will be single or young.
“To see the form of a future husband a girl must go on the night of Saint George to a cross-road. Her hair is combed backwards, and, pricking the little finger of the left hand, she must let three drops of blood fall on the ground while saying:—
“ ‘Mro rat dav piraneszke,
Kász dikhav, avava adaleske.’
“ ‘I give my blood to my loved one,
Whom I shall see shall be mine own!’
“Then the form of her future husband will rise slowly out of the blood and fade as slowly away. She must then gather up the dust, or mud-blood, and throw it into a river, otherwise the Nivashi, or Water-spirits, will lick up the blood, and the girl be drowned within the year. It is said that about twenty years ago the beautiful Roszi (Rosa), the daughter of Peter Danku, the waywode, or chief of the Kukuja tribe, was drowned during the time of her betrothal because when she performed this ceremony she had neglected to gather up the sprinkled blood.
“If a girl wishes to see the form of her future husband, and also to know what luck awaits her love, she goes on any of the fore-named nights to a cross-road, and sits down on the ground, putting before her a fried fish and a glass of brandy. Then the form of her future husband will appear and stand before her for a time, silent and immovable. Should he then take the fish the marriage will be happy, but if he begin with the brandy it will be truly wretched. But if he takes neither, one of the two will die during the year.
“That the laying of cards, the interpretation of dreams, the reading of the future in the hand, and similar divinations are constantly practised is quite natural, but it would lead us too far to enlarge on all these practices. But there are charms to win or cause love which are more interesting. Among these are the love-potions or philtres, for preparing which gypsies have always been famed.
“The simplest and least hurtful beverage which they give unknown to persons to secure love is made as follows:—On any of the nights mentioned they collect in the meadows gander-goose (Romání, vast bengeszkero—devil’s hand; in Latin, Orchis maculata; German, Knabenkraut), the yellow roots of which they dry and crush and mix with their menses, and this they introduce to the food of the person whose love they wish to secure.”
Of the same character is a potion which they prepare as follows: On the day of Saint John they catch a green frog and put it in a closed earthen receptacle full of small holes, and this they place in an ant-hill. The ants eat the frog and leave the skeleton. This is ground to powder, mixed with the blood of a bat and dried bath-flies and shaped into small buns, which are, as the chance occurs, put secretly into the food of the person to be charmed.
There is yet another charm connected with this which I leave in the original Latin in which it is modestly given by Dr. Wlislocki: “Qualibet supradictarum noctium occiduntur duo canes nigri, mas et femina, quorum genitalia exstirpata ad condensationem coquntur. Hujus materiæ particula consumpta quemvis invincibili amore facit exardescare in eam eamve, qui hoc medio prodigioso usus est.”
It may be remarked that these abominable charms are also not only known to the Tuscan witches of the present day, but are found in Voodoo sorcery, and are indeed all over the world. To use revolting means in black sorcery may be, or perhaps certainly is, spontaneous-sporadic, but when we find the peculiar details of the processes identical, we are so much nearer to transmission or history that the burden of disproving must fall on the doubter.
“To the less revolting philtres belongs one in which the girl puts the ashes of a burnt piece of her dress which had been wet with perspiration and has, perhaps, hair adhering to it, into a man’s food or drink (also Tuscan).
“To bury the foot of a badger (also Voodoo), or the eye of a crow, under one’s sleeping-place is believed to excite or awaken love.
“According to gypsy belief one can spread love by transplanting blood, perspiration, or hair into the body of a person.
“By burning the hair, blood, or saliva of any one, his or her love can be extinguished.
“The following is a charm used to punish a faithless lover. The deceived maid lights a candle at midnight and pricks it several times with a needle, saying:—
“ ‘Pchāgerāv momely
Pchāgera tre vodyi!’
“ ‘Thrice the candle’s broke by me
Thrice thy heart shall broken be!’
“If the faithless lover marries another, the girl mixes the broken shell of a crab in his food or drink, or hides one of her hairs in a bird’s nest. This will make the marriage unhappy, and the husband will continually pine for his neglected sweetheart.”
This last charm is allied to another current among the Slavonians, and elsewhere mentioned, by which it is believed that if a bird gets any of a man’s hair and works it into a nest he will suffer terribly till it is completely decayed.
CHAPTER VIII.
ROUMANIAN AND TRANSYLVANIAN SORCERIES AND SUPERSTITIONS, CONNECTED WITH THOSE OF THE GYPSIES.
In her very interesting account of Roumanian superstitions, Mrs. E. Gerard (“The Land Beyond the Forest”), finds three distinct sources for them: firstly, the indigenous, which seems to have been formed by or adapted to the wild and picturesque scenery and character of the country; secondly, those derived from the old German customs and beliefs brought by the so-called Saxon, in reality Lower Rhenish colonists; and thirdly, the influence of the gypsies, “themselves a race of fortune-tellers and witches.” All these kinds of superstition have twined and intermingled, acted and reacted upon one another so that in many cases it becomes a difficult matter to determine the exact parentage of some particular belief or custom.
It may be often difficult to ascertain in what particular country or among what people a superstition was last found, but there is very little trouble when we compare the great body of all such beliefs of all races and ages and thereby find the parent sources. It is not many years since philologists, having taken up some favourite language—for instance, Irish—discovering many words in many tongues almost identical with others in “Earse,” boldly claimed that this tongue was the original of all the others. Now we find the roots of them all in the Aryan. So when we examine Folk-lore, it is doubtless of great importance that we should learn where a tradition last lived; but we must not stop there—we must keep on inquiring till we reach the beginning. As a rule, with little exception, when we find anywhere the grosser forms of fetish and black witchcraft, we may conclude that we have remains of the world’s oldest faith, or first beginning of supernaturalism in suffering and terror, a fear of mysterious evil influences. For with all due respect to the fact that such superstitions might have sprung up sporadically wherever similar causes existed to create them, it is, in the first place, a very rare chance that they should assume exactly like forms. Secondly, we must consider that as there are even now millions of people who receive with ready faith and carefully nurse these primæval beliefs, so there has been from the beginning of time abundant opportunity for their transmission and growth. Thirdly, nothing is so quickly transmitted as Folk-lore, which in one sense includes myths and religion. If jade was in the prehistoric stone age carried from Iona or Tartary all over Europe, it is even more probable that myths went with it quite as far and fast.
It is not by loose, fanciful, and careless guess-work as to how the resemblance of Greek or Norse legends to those of the Red Indians is due to similar conditions of climate and life, that we shall arrive at facts; neither will the truth be ascertained by assuming that there was a certain beginning of them all in a certain country, or that they were all developed out of one mythology, be it solar or Shemitic, Hindoo or Hebrew. What we want is impartial examination—comparison and analysis. On this basis we find that all the Folk-lore or magic of Europe, and especially of its Eastern portion, has a great deal which is derived from black witchcraft, or from the succeeding Shamanism. When we find that a superstition is based on fertility, the “mystery of generation,” or “Phallic worship”—as, for instance, wearing boars’ teeth or a little pig for a charm—we may conclude that it is very ancient, but still not older than the time when wise men had begun to reflect on the mysteries of birth and death and weave them into myths. The exorcism of diseases as devils, and the belief that they, in common with other evils, may be drummed, or smoked, or incanted away into animals, trees, and streams, belongs in most cases to Shamanism. In all probability the oldest sorcery of all was entirely concerned with driving out devils and injuring enemies—just as most of the play of small boys runs to fighting or the semblance of it, or as the mutual relations of most animals in the lower stages consist of devouring one another. This was the very beginning of the beginnings, and it would be really marvellous that so much of it has survived were it not that to the one who is not quite dazzled or blinded by modern enlightenment there is still existent a great outer circle of human darkness, and that this darkness may be found in thousands of intermittent varying shadows or marvellous chiaroscuro, even in the brightest sun-pictures of modern life. As I write I have before me a copy of the Philadelphia Press, of April 14, 1889, in which a J. C. Batford, M.D., advertises that if any one will send him two two-cent postage stamps—i.e., twopence—“with a lock of your hair, name, age, and sex,” he will send a clairvoyant diagnosis of your disease. This divining by the lock of hair is extremely ancient, and had its origin in the belief that he who could obtain one from an enemy could reach his soul and kill him. From communicating a disease by means of such a lock, and ascertaining what was the matter with a man, in the same manner, was a very obvious step forward.
Of all people living in Europe the peasantry of Italy and Sicily and the gypsies seem to have retained most of this Shamanism and witchcraft, and as the latter have been for centuries its chief priests, travelling here and there disseminating it, we may conclude that even where they did not originate it they have been active in keeping the old faith alive. In Roumania, where the gypsy is called in to conjure on all occasions, “people believe themselves to be surrounded by whole legions of devils, witches, and goblins.” There is scarcely a day or hour in which these bad spirits have not power, “and a whole complicated system, about as laborious as the mastering an unknown language, is required in order to teach an unfortunate peasant to steer clear of the dangers by which he supposes himself to be beset.”
On Wednesday and Friday no one should use needle or scissors, bake bread, or sow flax. No bargain should ever be concluded on a Friday, and Venus, here called Paraschiva, to whom this day is sacred, punishes all infractions of the law. There was among the Wends a flax-goddess, Pscipolnitza, and the shears as emblematic of death are naturally antipathetic to Venus, the source of life. Whether Mars has anything in common with Mors I know not, but in Roumania he is decidedly an evil spirit of death, whence Marti, or Tuesday, is one, when spinning is positively prohibited (here we have Venus again), and washing the hands and combing the hair are not unattended with danger. Whence it appears that the devil agrees with not a few saints in detesting neatness of the person. And as it is unlucky to wash anything on Saturday, or to spin on Thursday, or to work in the fields on Thursday between Easter and Pentecost, it will be seen that Laziness and Dirt have between them a fine field in Roumania. Add to this that, as in Russia, more than half the days in the year are Saints’ days, or fast days or festivals on which it is “unlucky” to work at all, and we find that industry cannot be said to be much encouraged by Faith in any of its forms. This belief in holy days which bring ill-luck to those who work on them, which is still flourishing in every country in the world, goes back to time whereof the memory of man hath naught to the contrary. A distinct difference is here to be observed however between naturally resting from work on certain days, which is of course an inherent instinct in all mankind, and the declaring such rest to be obligatory, and its infraction punishable by death, disaster, and bad luck, and still more the increasing such Sabbaths to such an extent as to interfere with industry, or the turning them into fast days or Saints’ days with “observances.” Here the old Shamanism comes in, if not the evil witchcraft itself which exacted penance and fasting, and ceremonies to exorcise the devils. The first belief was that evil spirits inflicted pain on man, and that man, by efforts which cost him suffering, could repel or retaliate on them. This was simple action and reaction, and the repulsion was effected with starving, enduring smoke, or using repulsive and filthy objects. Out of this in due time came penance of all kinds.
The Oriental or Greek Church is found at every turn, even more than the Catholic, interchanged, twined, and confused with ancient sorcery. Theodore, like Saint Simeon and Anthony in Tuscany, is very much more of a goblin than a holy man. His weakness is young women, and sometimes in the shape of a beautiful youth, at others of a frightful monster, he carries off those who are found working on his day—that is the 23rd of January. Theodore, according to the Solar mythologists personifies the sun. (De Gubernatis, “Zoological Mythology,” vol. ii. p. 296). In any case the saint who seizes girls is the Hindoo Krishna or his prototype, and therefore may have come through the gypsies. The overworked solar myth derives some support from the fact that among the Serbs on Theodore’s day the Sintotere—or centaur, as the name declares—who is half horse and half man, rides over the people who fall in his power. The Centaurs were connected with the “rape of maidens,” as shown in the legend of the Lapithæ, and it is very probable that Theodore himself is, in the language of the Western Americans, “half a horse,” which they regard as the greatest compliment which can be paid to a man.[1]
“Wonderful potions and salves,” says Mrs. Gerard, “composed of the fat of bears, dogs, snakes, and snails, with the oil of rain-worms, spiders, and midges, rubbed into a paste, are concocted by these Bohemians (i.e., gypsies). Saxon and Roumanian mothers are often in the habit of giving a child to be nursed for nine days to some Tzigane women supposed to have power to undo the spell.”
These revolting ingredients are not the result of modern invention, but relics of the primitive witchcraft or Ur-religion, which was founded on pain, terror, and the repulsive. Among other Roumanian-Romany traditions are the following:—
Swallows here as elsewhere are luck-bringing birds, and termed Galiniele lui Dieu—fowls of the Lord. So in England we hear that:—
“The robin and the wren
Are God Almighty’s cock and hen.”
There is always a treasure to be found where the first swallow is seen. Among the Romans when it was observed one ran to the nearest fountain and washed his eyes, and then during the whole year to come, dolorem omnem oculorum tuorum hirundines auferant—the swallows will carry away all your complaints of the eyes.
The skull of a horse over the gate of a courtyard, or the bones of fallen animals buried under the doorstep are preservatives against ghosts. In Roman architecture the skulls of oxen, rams, and horses continually occur as a decoration, and they are used as charms to-day in Tuscany. Black fowls are believed to be in the service of witches. The skull of a ram placed at the boundary of a parish in Roumania keeps off disease from cattle; it was evidently a fetish in all ages. In Slavonian, Esthonian, and Italian tales black poultry occur as diabolical—to appease the devil a black cock must be sacrificed. But in Roumania the (black) Brahmaputra fowl is believed, curiously enough, to be the offspring of the devil and a Jewish girl—truly an insignificant result of such clever parentage.
A cow that has wandered away will be safe from witches if the owner sticks a pair of scissors or shears in the centre crossbeam of the dwelling-room. The Folk-lore of shears is extensive; Friedrich derives it from the cutting of the threads of life by the Fates. Thus Juno appears on a Roman coin (Eckhel, “Numis. Vet.” viii. p. 358) as holding the shears of death. The swallow is said in a Swedish fairy tale to have been the handmaid of the Virgin Mary, and to have stolen her scissors, for which reason she was turned into a bird—the swallow’s tail being supposed to resemble that article. Gypsies in England use the shears in incantations.
A whirlwind denotes that the devil is dancing with a witch, and he who approaches too near it may be carried off bodily to hell (as has indeed happened to many a wicked Pike in a cyclone or blizzard in Western America), though he may escape by losing his cap.
It is very dangerous to point at a rainbow or an approaching thunderstorm. Probably the devil who here guides the whirlwind or directs the storm regards the act as impolite. He punishes those who thus indicate the rainbow by a gnawing disease. Lightning is averted by sticking a knife in a loaf of bread and spinning the two on the floor of the loft of the house while the storm lasts. The knife appears not only in many gypsy spells, but in the Etruscan-Florentine magic.
The legends of Domdaniel and the College of Sorcery in Salamanca appear in the gypsy Roumanian Scholomance, or school which exists somewhere far away deep in the heart of the mountains, “where the secrets of nature, the language of animals, and all magic spells are taught by the devil in person.” Only ten scholars are admitted at a time, and when the course of learning has expired nine are dismissed to their homes, but the tenth is detained by the professor in payment. Henceforth, mounted on an ismeju, or dragon, he becomes the devil’s aide-de-camp, and assists him in preparing thunderbolts and managing storms and tempests. “A small lake, immeasurably deep, high up in the mountains, south of Hermanstadt, is supposed to be the caldron in which the dragon lies sleeping and where the thunder is brewed.”
“Whoever turns three somersaults the first time he hears thunder will be free from pains in the back during the twelvemonth.” Of this prescription—which reads as if it had originated with Timothy, in “Japhet in Search of a Father,” when he practised as a mountebank—it may be said that it is most unlikely that any person who is capable of putting it in practice should suffer with such pains.
To be free from headache rub the forehead with a piece of iron or stone. This may be a presage of the electric cure or of that by “metallic tractors.”
It is unfortunate in all Catholic countries to meet with a priest or nun, especially when he or she is the first person encountered in the morning. In Roumania this is limited to the Greek popa. But to be first met by a gypsy on going forth is a very fortunate omen indeed. According to a widely-spread and ancient belief it is also very lucky to meet with any woman of easy virtue—the easier the better. This is doubtless derived from the ancient worship of Venus, and the belief that any thing or person connected with celibacy and chastity, such as a nun, is unlucky. It would appear from this that the Roumanians, or their gypsy oracles, have formed an opinion that their own popas are strictly abstinent as regards love, while Protestant priests marry and are accordingly productive. Why the Catholic clergy are included with the latter is not at all clear. It is lucky also to meet a gypsy at any time, and doubtless this belief has been well encouraged by the Romany.
“It’s kushti bak to wellán a Rom,
When tute’s a pirryin pré the drom.”
“When you are going along the street
It’s lucky a gypsy man to meet.”
Likewise, it is lucky to meet with a woman carrying a jug full of water, &c., but unlucky if it be empty. So in the New Testament the virgins whose lamps were full of oil received great honour. The lamp was an ancient symbol of life; hence it is very often found covered with aphrodisiac symbols or made in Phallic forms. It is barely possible that common old popular simile of “Not by a jug-full”—meaning “not by a great deal”—is derived from this association of a full vessel with abundance.
It is a Roumanian gypsy custom to do homage to the Wodna zena, or “Water-woman” (Hungarian gypsy, Nivashi), by spilling a few drops of water on the ground after filling a jug, and it is regarded as an insult to offer drink without observing this ceremony. A Roumanian will never draw water against the current (also as in the Hungarian gypsy charms), as it would provoke the water-spirit. If water is drawn in the night-time, whoever does so must blow three times over the brimming jug, and pour a few drops on the coals.
The mythology of the Roumanians agrees with that of the gypsies. It is sylvan, and Indian. In deep pools of water lurks the dreadful balaur or Wodna muz—i.e., the Waterman (Muz is both gypsy and Slavonian)—who lies in wait for victims. In every forest lives the mama padura, or weshni dye—“the forest mother”—who is believed to be benevolent to human beings, especially towards children who have lost their way in the wood. But the Panusch is an amorous spirit who, like the wanton satyrs of old, haunts the silent woodland shades, and lies in wait for helpless maids. “Surely,” observes Mrs. Gerard, “this is a corruption of ‘great Pan,’ who is not dead after all, but merely banished to the land beyond the forest.” What a find this would have been for Heine when writing “The Gods in Exile”!
“In deep forests and lonely mountain gorges there wanders about a wild huntsman of superhuman size.” He appears to be of a mysterious nature, and is very seldom seen. Once he met a peasant who had shot ninety-nine bears, and warned him never to attempt to kill another. But the peasant disregarded his advice, and, missing his aim, was torn in pieces by the bear.
Very singular is the story that this Lord of the Forest once taught a hunter—that if he loaded his gun on New Year’s Night with a live adder he would never miss a shot during the ensuing year. It is not probable that he was told to put a live and “wiggling” snake into his gun. The story of itself suggests the firing out the ramrod for luck. It has been observed by C. Lloyd Morgan that if a drop of the oil of a foul tobacco pipe be placed in the mouth of a snake the muscles instantly become set in knotted lumps and the creature becomes rigid. If much is given the snake dies, but if only a small amount is employed it may be restored. This, as Mr. Oakley has suggested, may explain the stories of Indian snake-charmers being able to turn a snake into a stick. It is performed by spitting into the snake’s mouth and then placing the hand on its head till it becomes stiffened. “The effect may be produced by opium or some other narcotic.” And it may also occur to the reader that the jugglers who performed before Pharaoh were not unacquainted with this mystery. It is probable that the hunter in the gypsy Roumanian story first gave his adder tobacco before firing it off.
The Om ren, or wild man, is a malevolent forest spectre, the terror of hunters and shepherds. He is usually seen in winter, and when he finds an intruder on his haunts, he tears up pine trees by the roots with which he slays the victim, or throws him over a precipice, or overwhelms him with rocks. In every detail he corresponds to a being greatly feared by the Algonkin Indians of America.
The oameni micuti, or “small men,” are grey-bearded dwarfs, dressed like miners. They are the kobolds or Bergmännchen of Germany. They seldom harm a miner, and when one has perished in the mine they make it known to his family by three knocks on his door. They may be heard quarrelling among themselves and hitting at one another with their axes, or blowing their horns as a signal of battle. These “horns of Elf-land blowing” connect them with the Korriagan of Brittany, who are fairies who always carry and play on the same instrument. Prætorius devotes a long chapter to all the learning extant on the subject of these Bergmännrigen, or Subterraneans.
The mountain monk is the very counterpart of Friar Rush in English fairy-lore, and is also of Indian origin. He delights in kicking over water-pails, putting out lamps, and committing mischief, merry, mad, or sad. Sometimes he has been known to strangle workmen whom he dislikes, though, on the other hand, he often helps distressed miners by filling their empty lamps or guiding those who have lost their way. But he always bids them keep it a secret, and if they tell they suffer for it.
Gana is queen of the witches, and corresponds to the Diana of the Italians. Gana is probably only a variation of the word Diana. Among the Wallachians this goddess is in fact known as Dina and Sina. She, like the wilde Jäger, rushes in headlong hunt over the heavens or through the skies followed by a throng of witches and fairies. “People show the places where she has passed, and where the grass and leaves are dry” (Friedrich). She is a powerful enchantress, and is strongest in her sorcery about Easter-tide. To guard against her the Wallachians at this time carry a piece of lime-tree or linden wood. She is a beautiful but terrible enchantress, who presides over the evil spirits who meet on May eve. She was the ruler of all Transylvania (a hunting country) before Christianity prevailed there. Her beauty bewitched many, but whoever let himself be lured into drinking mead from her urus (or wild ox) drinking-horn perished. She is like the Norse Freya, a cat goddess, and seems to be allied to the Chesme, or cat, or fountain-spirit of the Turks. According to ancient Indian mythology the moon is a cat who chases the mice (stars) of night, and in the fifth book of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” when the gods fled from the giants Diana took the form of a cat:—
“Fele soror Phœbi, nivea Saturni a vacca
Pisce Venus latuit.”
(V. 325, 332.)
“According to the Hellenic cosmogony the sun and moon created the animals—the sun creating the lion and the moon the cat” (De Gubernatis, “Zoological Mythology,” ii. 58). Gertrude, the chief sorceress or queen of the witches in old German lore, appears when dead as surrounded by mice; she is, in fact, a cat. The Turkish Chesme, or fountain-cat, inveigles youths to death like the Gana, Diana, or Lorelei, who does the same, and is also a water-sprite.
The Dschuma is a fierce virgin, or sometimes an old witch, who is incarnate disease, such as the cholera. She is supposed to suffer from cold and nakedness, and may be heard at night when disease is raging, wailing for want. Then the maidens make garments and hang them out; but it is a most effective charm when seven old women spin, weave, and sew for her a scarlet shirt all in one night without once speaking.
A curious book might be written on the efficacy of nakedness in witch-spells. In some places in Roumania there is a spirit always naked (at least appearing such), who requires a new suit of clothes every year. These are given by the inhabitants of the district haunted by such an elf, who on New Year’s Night lay them out in some place supposed to be frequented by him or her.
In 1866, in a Wallachian village in the district of Bihar, to avert the cholera, six youths and maidens, all quite naked, traced with a ploughshare a furrow round their village to form a charmed circle over which the disease could not pass.
When the land is suffering from long droughts the Roumanians ascribe it to the gypsies, who by occult means make dry weather in order to favour their own trade of brickmaking. When the necessary rain cannot be obtained by beating the guilty Tziganes, the peasants resort to the Papaluga, or Rain-maiden. For this they strip a young gypsy girl stark-naked, and then cover her up in flowers and leaves, leaving only the head visible. Thus adorned the Papaluga, or Miss Jack-in-the-Green, is conducted with music round the village, every person pouring water on her as she passes. When a gypsy girl cannot be had, or the Tziganes are supposed to be innocent, a Roumanian maiden may be taken. This custom is very widely spread.
Forty years ago there was a strange mania in the northern cities of the United States for “fast” girls of the most reckless kind to go out naked very late by night into the street to endeavour to run around a public square or block of houses and regain their homes without being caught by the police. I suspect that superstition suggested this strange risk. It is an old witch-charm that if a girl can, when the moon is full, go forth and run around a certain enclosure, group of trees, or dwelling, without being seen, she will marry the man whom she loves. There are also many magical ceremonies which, to ensure success, must be performed in full moonlight and when quite naked. “Among the Saxons in Transylvania when there is a very severe drought it is customary in some places for several girls, led by an old woman, and all of them absolutely naked, to go at midnight to the courtyard of some peasant and steal his harrow. With this they walk across fields to the nearest stream, where the harrow is put afloat with a burning light on each corner” (Mrs. Gerard, “Land Beyond,” &c.). This is evidently the old Hindoo floating of lamps by maidens on the Ganges, and in all probability of gypsy importation.
She who will pronounce a certain spell, strip herself quite naked, and can steal into the room where a man is lying sound asleep and can clip from his head a lock of hair and escape without awakening him or meeting any one will obtain absolute mastery over him, or at least over his affections. The hair must be worn in a bag or ring on the person. But woe unto her who is caught, since in that case the enchantment “all goes the other way.” Once a beautiful but very poor Hungarian maid gave all she had to a young gypsy girl for a charm to win the love of a certain lord, and was taught this, which proved to be a perfect success. Having clipped the lock of hair she wove it in a ring and wedded him. After a time she died, and the gypsy being called in to dress the corpse found and kept the ring. Then the lord fell in love with the gypsy and married her. But ere long she too died, and was buried, and the ring with her. And from that day the lord seemed as if possessed to sit by her grave, and finally built a house there, and never seemed happy save when in it.
“If a Roumanian maid,” says Mrs. Gerard, “desires to see her future husband’s face in the water she has only to step naked at midnight into the nearest lake or river, or, if she shrink from this, let her take a stand on the more congenial dung-hill with a piece of Christmas cake in her mouth, and as the clock strikes twelve listen attentively for the first sound of a dog’s bark. From whichever side it proceeds will also come the expected suitor.”
A naked maid standing on a “congenial dung-hill” with a piece of Christmas cake in her mouth would be a subject for an artist which should be eagerly seized in these days when “excuses for the nude in art” are becoming so rare. It is worth observing that this conjuration is very much like one observed in Tuscany, in which Saint Anthony is invoked to manifest by a dog’s barking at night, as by other sounds, whether the applicant, or invoker, shall obtain her desire.
At the birth of a child in Wallachia every one present takes a stone and throws it behind him, saying, “This into the jaws of the Streghoi”[2]—“a custom,” says Mrs. Gerard, “which would seem to suggest Saturn and the swaddled up stones.” It is much more suggestive of the stones thrown by Deucalion and Pyrrha. Strigoi is translated as “evil spirits”—it is evidently, originally at least, the streghe, or witches of Italy, from the Latin strix, the dreaded witch-bird of Ovid. “Festus derives the word à stringendo from the opinion that they strangle children.” Middle Latin strega (Paulus Grillandus). For much learning on this subject of the Strix the reader may consult De Gubernatis, “Myth of Animals,” vol. ii. p. 202.
“As long as the child is unbaptized it must be carefully watched for fear lest it be changed or stolen away.” This is common to Christians, heathen, and gypsies to watch it for several days. “A piece of iron, or a broom laid beneath the pillow will keep spirits away.” So in Roumania and Tuscany. Quintus Serenus, however, recommends that when the striga atra presses the infant, garlic be used, the strong odour of which (to their credit be it said) is greatly detested by witches.
“The Romans used to cook their cœna demonum for the house-spirits, and the Hindoos prepared food for them.” From them it has passed through the gypsies to Eastern Europe, and now the Roumanian, who has by a simple ceremony made a contract with the devil, receives from him an attendant spirit called a spiridsui or spiridush which will
“Serve his master faithfully
For seven long year,”
but in return expecting the first mouthful of every dish eaten by his master.
“So many differing fancies have mankind,
That they the master-sprites may spell and bind.”
Nearly connected with the Roumanian we have the beliefs in magic of the Transylvanian Saxons, all of them shared with the gypsies and probably partially derived from them. Many people must have wondered what could have been the origin of the saying in reference to a very small place that “there was not room to swing a cat in it.” “But I don’t want to swing a cat in it,” was the very natural rejoinder of a well-known American litterateur to this remark applied to his house. It is possible that we may find the origin of this odd saying in a superstition current in Transylvania, whither it in all probability was carried by the gypsies, whose specialty it is to bear the seeds of superstitions about here and there as the winds do those of plants. In this country it is said that if a cat runs away, when recovered she must be swung three times round to attach her to the dwelling. The same is done by a stolen cat by the thief if he would retain it. Truly this seems a strange way to induce an attachment—or pour encourager les autres. It is evident, however, that to the professional cat-stealer the size of his room must be a matter of some importance. It is a pity that this saying and faith were unknown to Moncrief-Maradan, “the Historiogriffe of Cats,” (“Œuvres,” Paris, 1794), who would assuredly have made the most of it.
As regards entering new houses in Transylvania the rule is not “Devil take the hindmost,” but the foremost. The first person or being who enters the maiden mansion must die, therefore it is safe to throw in a preliminary dog or cat. The scape-cat is, however, to be preferred.
I can remember once, when about six years of age, looking down into a well in Massachusetts and being told that the reflection which I saw was the face of a little boy who lived there. This made a deep impression on me, and I reflected that it was very remarkable that the dweller in the well could assume the appearance of every one who looked at him. In Transylvania it is, says Mrs. E. Gerard, “dangerous to stare down long into a well, for the well-dame who dwells at the bottom is easily offended. But children are often curious, and so, bending over the edge, they call out mockingly, ‘Dame of the Well, pull me down into it!’ and then run away rapidly.”
Whoever has been robbed and wishes to find the thief should take a black hen, and for nine Fridays must with the hen fast strictly; the thief will then either bring back the plunder or die. This is called “taking up the black fast” against any one. It is said that a peasant of Petersdorf returned one day from Bistritz with 200 florins, which he had received for oxen. Being very tipsy he laid down to sleep, having first hidden his money in a hole in the kitchen wall. When he awoke he missed his coin, and having quite forgotten what he had done with it believed it had been stolen. So he went to an old Wallachian, probably a gypsy, and induced him to take up the black fast against the thief. But as he himself had the money the spell worked against him and he grew weaker and pined away as it went on. By some chance at the last moment he found his money, but it was too late, and he died. Pages of black hen-lore may be gathered from the works of Friedrich, De Gubernatis and others; suffice it to say that Bubastis, the Egyptian moon-goddess, appears to have been the original mistress of the mysterious animal, if not the black hen as well as cat herself, and mother of all the witches.
Magic qualities are attached in Hungary as in Germany to the lime or linden tree; in some villages it is usual to plant one before a house to prevent witches from entering. From very early times the lime tree was sacred to Venus among the Greeks, as it was to Lada among the Slavonians. This, it is said, was due to its leaves being of the shape of a heart. In a Slavonian love-song the wooer exclaims:—
“As the bee is drawn by the lime-perfume (or linden-bloom)
My heart is drawn by thee.”
This was transmitted to Christian symbolism, whence the penance laid by Christ on Mary Magdalen was that “she should have no other food save lime-tree leaves, drink naught except the dew which hung on them, and sleep on no other bed save one made of its leaves” (Menzel, “Christliche Symbolik,” vol. ii. p. 57). “For Magdalena had loved much, therefore her penance was by means of that which is a symbol of love.”
Mrs. Gerard tells us that “a particular growth of vine leaf, whose exact definition I have not succeeded in rightly ascertaining, is eagerly sought by Saxon girls in some villages. Whoever finds it, puts it in her hair, and if she then kisses the first man she meets on her way home she will soon be married. A story is related of a girl, who having found this growth, meeting a nobleman in a carriage stopped the horses and begged leave to kiss him.” To which he consented. This particular growth, unknown to Mrs. Gerard, is when the leaves or tendrils or shoots form a natural knot. Among the gypsies in Hungary, as may be elsewhere read, such knots in the willow are esteemed as of great magic efficacy in love. A knot is a symbol of true love in all countries.
“This knot I tie, this knot I knit,
For that true love whom I know not yet.”
On Easter Monday in Transylvania the lads run about the towns and villages sprinkling with water all the girls or women whom they meet. This is supposed to cause the flax to grow well. On the following day the girls return the attention by watering the boys. “This custom, which appears to be a very old one,” says Mrs. Gerard, “is also prevalent among various Slav races, such as Poles and Serbs. In Poland it used to be de rigeur that water be poured over a girl who was still asleep, so in every house a victim was selected who had to feign sleep and patiently receive the cold shower-bath, which was to ensure the luck of the family during the year. The custom has now become modified to suit a more delicate age, and instead of formidable horse-buckets of water, dainty little perfume squirts have come to be used in many places.” As the custom not only of sprinkling water, but also of squirting or spraying perfumes is from ancient India (as it is indeed prevalent all over the East), it is probable that the gypsies who are always foremost in all festivals may have brought this “holi” custom to Eastern Europe. Of late it has extended to London, as appears by the following extract from The St. James’s Gazette, April, 1889.
“The newest weapon of terror in the West End is the ‘scent revolver.’ Its use is simple. You dine—not wisely but the other thing—and then you stroll into the Park, with your nickel-plated scent revolver in your pocket. Feeling disposed for a frolic, you walk up to a woman, present your weapon, pull the trigger, and in a moment she is drenched, not with gore but with scent, which is nearly as unpleasant if not quite so deadly. Mr. Andrew King, who amused himself in that way, has been fined 10s. at Marlborough Street. Let us hope that the ‘revolver’ was confiscated into the bargain.”
One way of interrogating fate in love affairs is to slice an apple in two with a sharp knife; if this can be done without cutting a seed the wish of the heart will be fulfilled. Of yore, in many lands the apple was ever sacred to love, wisdom, and divination. Once in Germany a well-formed child became, through bewitchment, sorely crooked and cramped; by the advice of a monk the mother cut an apple in three pieces and made the child eat them, whereupon it became as before. In Illzach, in Alsace, there is a custom called “Andresle.” On Saint Andrew’s Eve a girl must take from a widow, and without returning thanks for it, an apple. As in Hungary she cuts it in two and must eat one half of it before midnight, and the other half after it; then in sleep she will see her future husband. And there is yet another love-spell of the split apple given by Scheible (“Die gute alte Zeit,” Stuttgart, 1847, p. 297) which runs as follows:—
“On Friday early as may be,
Take the fairest apple from a tree,
Then in thy blood on paper white
Thy own name and thy true love’s write,
That apple thou in two shalt cut,
And for its cure that paper put,
With two sharp pins of myrtle wood
Join the halves till it seem good,
In the oven let it dry,
And wrapped in leaves of myrtle lie,
Under the pillow of thy dear,
Yet let it be unknown to her;
And if it a secret be
She soon will show her love for thee.”
Similar apple sorceries were known to the Norsemen. Because the apple was so nearly connected with love and luxury—“Geschlechtsliebe und Zeugungslust”—those who were initiated in the mysteries and vowed to chastity were forbidden to eat it. And for the same reason apples, hares, and Cupids, or “Amorets,” were often depicted together. In Genesis, as in the Canticles of Solomon, apples, or at least the fruit from which the modern apple inherited its traditions are a symbol of sexual love. In Florence women wishing for children go to a priest and get from him a blessed apple, over which they pronounce an incantation to Santa Anna—la San’ Na—who was the Lucina of the Latins.
[1] Though not connected with this work, I cannot help observing that this extraordinary simile probably originated in a very common ornament used as a figure-head, or in decorations, on Mississippi steamboats, as well as ships. This is the sea-horse (hippocampus), which may be often seen of large size, carved and gilt. Its fish tail might be easily confused with that of an alligator. Prætorius (1666) enumerates, among other monsters, the horse-crocodile. [↑]
[2] Schott, “Wallachische Mährchen,” p. 297. Stuttgart, 1845. [↑]
CHAPTER IX.
THE RENDEZVOUS OR MEETINGS OF WITCHES, SORCERERS, AND VILAS.—A CONTINUATION OF SOUTH SLAVONIAN GYPSY-LORE.
In Eastern Europe witches and their kin, or kind, assemble on the eve of Saint John and of Saint George, Christmas and Easter, at cross-roads on the broad pustas, or prairies, and there brew their magic potions. This, as Dr. Krauss observes, originated in feasts held at the same time in pre-Christian times. “So it was that a thousand years ago old and young assembled in woods or on plains to bring gifts to their gods, and celebrated with dances, games, and offerings the festival of spring, or of awaking and blooming Nature. These celebrations have taken Christian names, but innumerable old heathen rites and customs are still to be found in them.” It may be here observed that mingled with these are many of a purely gypsy-Oriental origin, which came from the same source and which it remains for careful ethnologists and critical Folk-lorists to disentangle and make clear. The priestesses of prehistoric times on these occasions performed ceremonies, as was natural, to protect cattle or land from evil influences. To honour their deities the “wise women” bore certain kinds of boughs and adorned animals with flowers and wreaths. The new religion declared that this was all sorcery and devil-work, but the belief in the efficacy of the rites continued. The priestesses became witches, or Vilas, the terms being often confused, but they were still feared and revered.
In all the South Slavonian country the peasants on Saint George’s Day adorn the horns of cattle with garlands, in gypsy Indian style, to protect them from evil influences. I have observed that even in Egypt among Mahometans Saint George is regarded with great reverence, and I knew one who on this day always sacrificed a sheep. The cow or ox which is not thus decorated becomes a prey in some way to witches. The garlands are hung up at night over the stable door, where they remain all the ensuing year. If a peasant neglects to crown his cow, he not only does not receive a certain fee from its owner, but is in danger of being beaten. On the same day the shepherdess, or cow-herd, takes in one hand salt, in the other a potsherd containing live coals. In the coals roses are burned. By this means witches lose all power over the animal. Near Karlstadt the mistress of the family merely strikes it with a cross to produce the same effect.
Among the Transylvanian Hungarian gypsies there is a magical ceremony performed on Saint George’s Day, traces of which may be found in England. Then the girls bake a peculiar kind of cake, in which certain herbs are mixed, and which Dr. von Wlislocki declares has an agreeable taste. This is divided among friends and foes, and it is believed to have the property of reconciling the bitterest enemies and of increasing the love of friends. But it is most efficient as a love-charm, especially when given by women to men. The following gypsy song commemorates a deed of this kind by a husband, who recurred to it with joy:—
“Kásáve romñi ná jidel,
Ke kásávo maro the del;
Sar m’re gule lele pekel
Káná Sváto Gordye ável.
“Furmuntel bute luludya
Furmuntel yoy bute charma
Andre petrel but kámábe
Ko chal robo avla bake.”
“No one bakes such bread as my wife, such as she baked me on St. George’s Day. Many flowers and dew were kneaded into the cake with love. Whoever eats of it will be her slave.”
In England I was told by an old gypsy woman named Lizzie Buckland, that in the old time gypsy girls made a peculiar kind of cake, a Romany morriclo, which they baked especially for their lovers, and used to throw to them over the hedge by night. To make it more acceptable, and probably to facilitate the action of the charm, they would put money into the cake. It was observed of old among the Romans that fascinatio began with flattery, compliments, and presents!
On the night of Saint John the witch climbs to the top of the hurdle fence which surrounds the cow-yard, and sings the following spell:—
“K meni sir,
K meni maslo,
K meni puter,
K meni mleko
Avam pak kravsku kožu!”
“To me the cheese,
To me the tallow (or meat),
To me the butter,
To me the milk,
To you only the cowhide.”
Or, as it may be expressed in rhyme:—
“The cheese, meat, butter, and milk for me,
But only the cowhide left for thee.”
Then the cow will die, the carcass be buried, and the skin sold. To prevent all this the owner goes early on St. John’s Day to the meadow and gathers the morning dew in a cloak. This he carries home, and after binding the cow to a beam washes her with it. She is then milked, and it is believed that if all has gone right she will yield four bucketsful.
In the chapter on “Conjurations and Exorcisms among the Hungarian Gypsies,” I have mentioned the importance which they attach to the being born a seventh or twelfth child. This is the same throughout South Slavonia, where the belief that such persons in a series of births are exceptionally gifted is “shared by both gypsies, with whom it probably originated, and the peasants. What renders this almost certain is that Dr. Krauss mentions that the oldest information as to the subject among the Slavs dates only from 1854, while the faith is ancient among the gypsies. He refers here to the so-called Kerstniki, who on the eve of St. John do battle with the witches. Krstnik is a Greek word, meaning, literally, one who has been baptized. But the Krstnik proper is the youngest of twelve brothers, all sons of the same father. There appears to be some confusion and uncertainty among the Slavs as to whether all the twelve brothers or only the twelfth are “Krstnik”—according to the gypsy faith it would be the latter. These “twelvers” are the great protectors of the world from witchcraft.[1] But they are in great danger on Saint John’s Eve, for then the witches, having most power, assail them with sticks and stakes, or stumps of saplings, for which reason it is usual in the autumn to carefully remove everything of the kind from the ground.
A krstnik is described by Miklošič as “Človek kterega vile obljubiju”—“A man who has won the love of a Vila.” The Vila ladies, or a certain class of them, are extremely desirous of contracting the closest intimacy—in short, of becoming the mistresses, of superior men. The reader may find numerous anecdotes of such amours in the “Curiosa” of Heinrich Kornmann, 1666, and in my “Egyptian Sketch Book” (Trübner & Co., London, 1874). In the heathen days, as at present among all gypsies and Orientals, it was believed to be a wonderfully lucky thing for a man to get the love of one of these beautiful beings. What the difficulties were which kept them from finding lovers is not very clear, unless it were that the latter must be twelfth sons, or, what is far more difficult to find, young men who would not gossip about their supernatural sweethearts to other mortals, who would remain true to them, and who finally would implicitly obey all their commands and follow their advice. There is a vast array of tales—Gypsy, Arab, Provençal, Norman, German, and Scandinavian, which show that on these points the Vila, or forest-maiden, or spirit of earth or air, or fairy, was absolutely exacting and implacable, being herself probably allowed by occult laws to contract an intimacy only with men of a high order, or such as are—
“Few in a heap and very hard to find.”
On the other hand, the Vila yearns intensely for men and their near company, because there is about those who have been baptized a certain perfume or odour of sanctity, and as the unfortunate nymph is not immortal herself, she likes to get even an association or sniff of it from those who are. According to the Rosicrucian Mythology, as set forth in the “Undine” of La Motte Fouqué, she may acquire a soul by marrying a man who will be faithful to her—which accounts for the fact that so few Undines live for ever. However this may be, it appears that the Krstniki are specially favoured, and frequently invited by the Vilas to step in—generally to a hollow tree—and make a call. The hollow tree proves to be a door to Fairyland, and the call a residence of seven days, which on returning home the caller finds were seven years, for—
“When we are pleasantly employed, time flies.”
These spirits have one point in common with their gypsy friends—they steal children—with this difference, that the Vila only takes those which have been baptized, while the gypsy—at present, at least—is probably not particular in this respect. But I have very little doubt that originally one motive, and perhaps the only one which induced these thefts, was the desire of the gypsies, as heathens and sorcerers, to have among them, “for luck,” a child which had received the initiation into that mysterious religion from which they were excluded, and which, as many of their charms and spells prove, they really regarded as a higher magic. It is on this ground only, or for this sole reason, that we can comprehend many of the child-stealings effected by gypsies; for it is absolutely true that, very often when they have large families of their own, they will, for no apparent cause whatever, neither for the sake of plunder, profit, or revenge, adopt or steal some poor child and bring it up, kindly enough after their rough fashion; and in doing this they are influenced, as I firmly believe, far more by a superstitious feeling of bāk, or luck, and the desire to have a Mascot in the tent, than any other. That children have been robbed or stolen for revenge does not in the least disprove what I believe—that in most cases the motive for the deed is simply superstition.
On the eve of Saint George old women cut thistle-twigs and bring them to the door of the stall. This is only another form of the nettle which enters so largely into the Hungarian gypsy incantations, and they also make crosses with cowdung on the doors. This is directly of Indian origin, and points to gypsy tradition. Others drive large nails into the doors—also a curious relic of a widely-spread ancient custom, of which a trace may be found in the Vienna Stock im Eisen, or trunk driven full of nails by wandering apprentices, which may be seen near the church of Saint Stephen. But the thistle-twigs are still held to be by far the most efficacious. In Vinica, or near it, these twigs are cut before sunset. They are laid separately in many places, but are especially placed in garlands on the necks of cattle. If a witch, in spite of these precautions, contrives to get into the stable, all will go wrong with the beasts during the coming year.
Now there was once a man who would have none of this thistle work—nay, he mocked at those who believed in it. So it came to pass that all through the year witches came every night and milked his cows. And he reflected, “I must find out who does this!” So he hid himself in the hay and kept sharp watch. All at once, about eleven o’clock, there came in a milk-pail, which moved of its own accord, and the cows began to let down their milk into it. The farmer sprang out and kicked it over. Then it changed into a tremendous toad which turned to attack him, so that in terror he took refuge in his house. That proved to be a lucky thing for him. A week after came the day of Saint George. Then he hung thistle-twigs on his stable door, and after that his cows gave milk in plenty.
Witches may be seen on Saint George’s Day, and that unseen by them if a man will do as follows: He must rise before the sun, turn all his clothes inside out and then put them on. Then he must cut a green turf and place it on his head. Thus he becomes invisible, for the witches believe he is under the earth, being themselves apparently bewitched by this.
Very early on the day of Saint George, or before sunrise, the witches climb into the church belfry to get the grease from the axle on which the bell swings, and a piece of the bell-rope, for these things are essential to them. Dr. Krauss observes that in the MS. from which he took this, schmierfetet or axle-grease, is indicated by the word svierc, “in which one at once recognizes the German word schwartz, a black.” It is remarkable that the Chippeway and other Algonkin Indians attach particular value to the black dye made from the grease of the axle of a grindstone.
The extraordinary pains which they took to obtain this had attracted the attention of a man in Minnesota, who told me of it. It required a whole day to obtain a very little of it. The Indians, when asked by curious white people what this was for, said it was for dyeing baskets, but, as my informant observed, the quantity obtained was utterly inadequate to any such purpose, and even better black dyes (e.g., hickory bark and alum) are known to, and can be very easily obtained by, them. The real object was to use the grease in “medicine,” i.e., for sorcery. The eagerness of both witches in Europe and Indians in America to obtain such a singular substance is very strange. However, the idea must be a recent one among the Indians, for there were certainly no grindstones among them before the coming of the white men.
“For all that I can tell, said he,
Is that it is a mystery.”
Heathens though they be, many gypsies have a superstitious belief in the efficacy of the sacramental bread and wine, and there are many instances of their stealing them for magical purposes. So in the Middle Ages witches and sorcerers used these objects for the most singular purposes, Paulus Grillandus, in his “Tractatus de Hereticis et Sortilegiis,” &c. (Lyons, 1547), assuring his readers that he had known a witch who had two holy wafers inscribed with magical characters which she used for debauching innocent girls and betraying them to men, and that it was a belief that if a woman had the sacred oil fresh on her lips no man could refrain from kissing her. This is the union of two kinds of magic; a view which never once occurred to theological writers. And here I may appropriately mention that while the proofs of this work were passing through my hands accident threw into my way an extremely rare work, which illustrates to perfection the identity of popular and ecclesiastical sorcery. This is entitled “De Effectibus Magicis, ac de Nuce Maga Beneventana,” “Six Books of Magic Effects and of the Witch Walnut-tree of Benevento. A work necessary, joyous, and useful to Astrologists, Philosophers, Physicians, Exorcists, and Doctors, and Students of Holy Scriptures. By the Chief Physician, Peter Piperno.” It appears to have been privately printed at Naples in 1647, and came from a conventual library. It bore, written on a fly-leaf, the word Proibito.
In it every kind of disorder or disease is declared to be caused by devils and witches. The author believes with Delrio that disease entered into the world as a consequence of sin (referenda sit ad primæ nostræ matris peccatum)—a view held by John Milton; hence, of course, all disease is caused solely by the devil. In his volume of two hundred large and close pages, our Peter Piperno displays a vast erudition on the origin of devils and diseases, is bitter on the rival school of magical practitioners who use cures and incantations unlike his own, and then gives us the name and nature of all diseases, according to the different parts of the body, &c., the medical prescriptions proper for them, and what is, in his opinion, most needful of all, the incantation or exorcism to be pronounced. Sometimes there are several of these, as one for making up a pill, another on taking it, &c. There are also general conjurations—I mean benedictions—for the medicines altogether or in particular, such as the Benedictio Syruporum, “The Blessing of the Syrups,” and there is a very affecting and appropriately moving one for making or taking Castor Oil, and oils of all kinds, as follows:—
“Benedictio Olei.
“This begins with the In nomine Patris, &c., and Adjutorium nostrum, &c., and then:
“I exorcise you all aromatics, herbs, roots, seeds, stones, gums, and whatever is to be compounded with this oil, by God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, by the God triune yet one, by the holy and single Trinity, that the impure Spirit depart from you, and with it every incursion of Satan, every fraud of the Enemy, every evil of the Devil, and that mixed with oil you may free the subject from all infirmities, incantations, bindings, witchcrafts, from all diabolical fraud, art, and power, by the merits of our Lord Jesus Christ and the most beloved Virgin Mary, and of all the saints. Amen.”
The curses for the devils of colds, fevers, rheumatisms, gouts, stomach-aches, &c., are awful, both in number, length, and quality; enough to frighten a cowboy or “exhort an impenitent mule” into docility. There is the Exorcismus terribilis, or “Terrible Exorcism” of Saint Zeno, in which the disorder is addressed literally as “A dirty, false, heretical, drunken, lewd, proud, envious, deceitful, vile, swindling, stupid devil”—with some twenty more epithets which, if applied in these our days to the devil himself, would ground an action for libel and bring heavy damages in any court. It is to be remarked that in many prescriptions the author adds to legitimate remedies, ingredients which are simply taken from popular necromancy, or witchcraft, as for instance, rue—fugæ dæmonum—verbena, and artemisia, all of which are still in use in Tuscany against sorcery and the evil eye.
The really magical character of these exorcisms is shown by the vast array of strange words used in them, many of which have a common source with those used by sorcerers of the Cabalistic or Agrippa school, such as Agla, Tetragrammaton, Adonai, Fons, Origo, Serpens, Avis, Leo, Imago, Sol, Floy, Vitis, Mons, Lapis, Angularis, Ischyros, Pantheon, all of which are old heathen terms of incantation. These are called in the exorcism “words by virtue of which”—per virtutem istorum verborum—the devils are invited to depart. The whole is as much a work of sorcery as any ever inscribed in a catalogue of occulta, and it was as a specimen of occulta that I bought it.
[1] In Northern Sagas it appeared that Berserkers, or desperate warriors, frequently bound themselves together in companies of twelve. Vide the Hervor Saga, Olaf Tryggvason’s and the Gautrek Saga. So there were the twelve Norse gods and the twelve apostles. [↑]
CHAPTER X.
OF THE HAUNTS, HOMES, AND HABITS OF WITCHES IN THE SOUTH SLAVIC LANDS.—BOGEYS AND HUMBUGS.
The witches in Slavonian gipsy-lore have now and then parties which meet to spin, always by full moonlight on a cross-road. But it is not advisable, says Krauss, to pass by on such occasions, as the least they do to the heedless wayfarer is to bewitch and sink him into a deep sleep. But they are particularly fond of assembling socially in the tops of trees, especially of the ash, walnut, and linden or lime kinds, preferring those whose branches grow in the manner here depicted.
It is but a few days ago, as I write, that I observed all along the route from Padua to Florence thousands of trees supporting vines, which trees had been trained to take this form, the farmers being as much influenced by “luck” in so doing as utility; for it is not really essential that the tree shall so exactly receive this shape, to hold a vine, as is proved by the fact that there are plantations here and there where this method of training the trees is not observed. It is very suggestive of the triçula or trident of Siva, which originated the trushul, or cross of the gypsies. As regards the properties of the ash tree Krauss remarks that “roots with magic power grew under ash trees,” and quotes a song of a maiden who, having learned that her lover is untrue, replies:—
“Ima trava u okolo Save,
I korenja okolo jasenja,”
“There are herbs by the Save,
And roots around ash trees,”
—meaning that she can prepare a love-potion from these. There is in the Edda a passage in which we are also told that there are magic powers in the roots of trees, the reference being probably to the ash, and possibly to the alraun, or images made of its roots, which are sometimes misnamed mandrakes.
Other resorts of Slavonian gypsy witches are near or in deep woods and ravines, also on dung-hills, or places where ashes, lye, or rubbish is thrown, or among dense bushes. Or as soon as the sun sets they assemble in orchards of plum trees, or among ancient ruins, while on summer nights they hold their revels in barns, old hollow trees, by dark hedges or in subterranean caverns. The peasants greatly dread dung-hills after dark, for fear of cruel treatment by them. When a wild wind is blowing the witches love dearly to dance. Then they whirl about in eddying figures and capers, and when the sweat falls from them woe to the man who treads upon it!—for he will become at once dumb or lame, and may be called lucky should he escape with only an inflammation of the lungs. In fact, if a man even walks in a place where witches have been he will become bewildered or mad, and remain so till driven homeward by hunger. But such places may generally be recognized by their footprints in the sand; for witches have only four toes—the great toe being wanting. These mysterious four toe-tracks, which are indeed often seen, are supposed by unbelievers to be made by wild geese, swans, or wild ducks, but in reply to this the peasant or gypsy declares that witches often take the form of such fowl. And there is, moreover, much Rabbinical tradition which proves that the devil and his friends have feet like peacocks, which are notoriously birds of evil omen, as is set forth by a contributor to The St. James’s Gazette, November 16, 1888:—
“Again, take peacocks. Nobody who has not gone exhaustively into the subject can have any adequate idea of the amount of general inconvenience diffused by a peacock. Broken hearts, broken limbs, pecuniary reverses, and various forms of infectious disease have all been traced to the presence of a peacock, or even a peacock feather, on the premises.”
The evil reputation of the peacock is due to his having been the only creature who was induced to show Satan the way into Paradise. (For a poem on this subject, vide “Legends of the Birds,” by C. G. Leland, Philadelphia, 1864).
If any one should by chance pop in—like Tam O’Shanter—to an assembly of witches, he must at once quickly cover his head, make the sign of the cross, take three steps backwards and a fourth forwards. Then the witches cannot injure him. Should a gentleman in London or Brighton abruptly intrude into a five o’clock tea, while Peel or Primrose witches are discussing some specially racy scandal, he should, however, make instantly so many steps backwards as will take him to his overcoat or cane, and then, after a turn, so many down-stairs as will bring him into the street.
If any man should take in his hand from the garden fence anything which a witch has laid there, he will in the same year fall sick, and if he has played with it he must die. There be land-witches and water-witches—whoever goes to swim in a place where these latter are found will drown and his body never be recovered. Sometimes in these places the water is very deep, but perfectly clear, in others it is still and very muddy, to which no one can come within seven paces because of an abominable and stifling vapour. And, moreover, as a dead cat is generally seen swimming on the top of such pools, no one need be endangered by them.
The fact that the gypsy and South Slavonian or Hungarian Folklore is directly derived from classic or Oriental sources is evident from the fact that the Shemitic-Persian devil, who is the head and body of all witchcraft in Western Europe, very seldom appears in that of the Eastern parts. The witches there seem invariably to derive their art from one another; even in Venice they have no unusual fear of death or of a future state. A witch who has received the gift or power of sorcery cannot die till she transfers it to another, and this she often finds it difficult to do, as is illustrated by a story told me in Florence in 1886 by the same girl to whom I have already referred.
“There was a girl here in the city who became a witch against her will. And how? She was ill in a hospital, and by her in a bed was una vecchia, ammalata gravamente, e non poteva morire—an old woman seriously ill, yet who could not die. And the old woman groaned and cried continually, ‘Oimé! muoio! A chi lasció? non diceva che.’ ‘Alas! to whom shall I leave?’—but she did not say what. Then the poor girl, thinking of course she meant property, said: ‘Lasciate à me—son tanto povera!’ (‘Leave it to me—I am so poor.’) At once the old woman died, and ‘La povera giovana se é trovato in eredita delta streghoneria’—the poor girl found she had inherited witchcraft.
“Now the girl went home, where she lived with her brother and mother. And having become a witch she began to go out often by night, which the mother observing, said to her son, ‘Qualche volta tu troverai tua sorella colla pancia grossa.’ (‘Some day you will find your sister with child.’) ‘Don’t think such a thing, mamma,’ he replied. ‘However, I will find out where it is she goes.’
“So he watched, and one night he saw his sister go out of the door, sullo punto delta mezza notte—just at midnight. Then he caught her by the hair, and twisted it round his arm. She began to scream terribly, when—ecco! there came running a great number of cats—e cominciarono a miolare, e fare un gran chiasso—they began to mew and make a great row, and for an hour the sister struggled to escape—but in vain, for her hair was fast—and screamed while the cats screeched, till it struck one, when the cats vanished and the sorella was insensible. But from that time she had no witchcraft in her, and became a buona donna, or good girl, as she had been before—‘come era prima.’ ”
It is very evident that in this story there is no diabolical agency, and that the witchcraft is simply a quality which is transferred like a disease, and which may be removed. Thus in Venice—where, as is evident from the works of Bernoni, the witches are of Gypsy-Slavic-Greek origin—a witch loses all her power if made to shed even one drop of blood, or sometimes if she be defeated or found out to be a witch. In none of these countries has she received the horrible character of a mere instrument of a stupendous evil power, whose entire will and work is to damn all mankind (already full of original sin) to eternal torture. For this ne plus ultra of horror could only result from the Hebrew-Persian conception of perfect malignity, incarnate as an anti-god, and be developed by gloomy ascetics who begrudged mankind every smile and every gleam of sunlight. In India and Eastern Europe the witch and demon are simply awful powers of nature, like thunder and pestilence, darkness and malaria, they nowhere appear as aiming at destroying the soul. For such an idea as this it required a theology and mythology emanating from the basis of an absolutely perfect monotheos, which gave birth to an antithesis; infinite good, when concentrated, naturally suggesting a shadow counterpart of evil. In Eastern Europe the witch is, indeed, still confused with the Vila, who was once, and often still is, a benevolent elementary spirit, who often punishes only the bad, and gladly favours the good. It is as curious as it is interesting to see how, under the influence of the Church, everything which was not directly connected with the current theology was made to turn sour and bitter and poisonous, and how darkness and frost stole over flowery fields which once were gay in genial sunshine. It is a necessary result that in attaining higher ideals the lesser must fade or change. Devilism, or the dread of the child and savage of the powers of darkness and mysterious evil, ends by incarnating all that is painful or terrible in evil spirits, which suggest their opposites. From Devilism results Polytheism, with one leading and good spirit, who in time becomes supreme. Then we have Monotheism. But as evil still exists, it is supposed that there are innately evil powers or spirits who oppose the good. By following the same process the leader of these becomes an anti-type, Lucifer, or Satan, or arch-devil, the result being Dualism. In this we have a spirit endowed with incredible activity and power, who is only not omnipotent, and whose malignity far transcends anything attributed to the gods or devils of Polytheism. His constant aim is to damn all mankind to all eternity, and his power is so great that to save even a small portion of mankind from this fate, God himself, or His own Son, must undergo penance as a man—an idea found in the Buddhism of India. This is all the regular and logical sequence of Fetishism and Shamanism. Witchcraft, and the tales told of it, follow in the path of the religion of the age. In the earliest time women were apparently the only physicians—that is to say magicians—and as man was in his lowest stage the magic was a vile witchcraft. Then came the Shaman—a man who taught in Animism a more refined sorcery, which was, however, as yet the only religion. But the witch still existed, and so she continued to exist, pari passu, through all the developments of religion. And to this, day every form and phase of the magician and witch exist somewhere, it sometimes happening that traces of the earliest and most barbarous sorcery are plain and palpable in the most advanced faith. There may be changes of name and of association, but in simple truth it is all “magic” and nothing else.
Gypsy, Hungarian, Slavonian, Indian, and Italian witches, however they may differ from those of Western Europe on theological grounds, agree with them in meeting for the purposes of riotous dancing and debauchery. It has been observed that this kind of erotic dancing appears to have been cultivated in the East, and even in Europe, from the earliest times, by a class of women who, if not absolutely proved to be gypsies, had at any rate many points of resemblance with them. “The Syrian girl who haunts the taverns round,” described by Virgil, suggests the Syrian and Egyptian dancer, who is evidently of Indo-Persian—that is to say of Nuri, or gypsy—origin. The Spanish dancing girls of remote antiquity have been conjectured to have come from this universal Hindoo Romany stock. I have seen many of the Almeh in Egypt—they all seemed to be gypsyish, and many were absolutely of the Helebi, Nauar, or Rhagarin stocks. This is indeed not proved—that all the deliberately cultivated profligate dancing of the world is of Indo-Persian, or gypsy origin, but there is a great deal, a very great deal, which renders it probable. And it is remarkable that it occurred to Pierre Delancre that the Persian ballerine had much in common with witches. Now the dancers of India are said to have originated in ten thousand gypsies sent from Persia, and who were of such vagabond habits that they could not be persuaded to settle down anywhere. Of these Delancre says:—
“The Persian girls dance at their sacrifices like witches at a Sabbat—that is naked—to the sound of an instrument. And the witches in their accursed assemblies are either entirely naked or en chemise, with a great cat clinging to their back, as many have at divers times confessed. The dame called Volta is the commonest and the most indecent. It is believed that the devil taught three kinds of dances to the witches of Ginevra, and these dances were very wild and rude, since in them they employed switches and sticks, as do those who teach animals to dance.
“And there was in this country a girl to whom the devil had given a rod of iron, which had the power to make any one dance who was touched with it. She ridiculed the judges during her trial, declaring they could not make her die, but they found a way to blunt her petulance.
“The devils danced with the most beautiful witches, in the form of a he-goat, or of any other animal, and coupled with them, so that no married woman or maid ever came back from these dances chaste as they had gone. They generally dance in a round, back to back, rarely a solo, or in pairs.
“There are three kinds of witch-dances; the first is the trescone alia Boema, or the Bohemian rigadoon” (perhaps the polka), “the second is like that of some of our work-people in the country, that is to say by always jumping” (this may be like the Tyrolese dances), “the third with the back turned, as in the second rigadoon, in which all are drawn up holding one another by the hand, and in a certain cadence hustling or bumping one another, deretano contro deretano. These dances are to the sound of a tambourine, a flute, a violin, or of another instrument which is struck with a stick. Such is the only music of the Sabbat, and all witches assert that there are in the world no concerts so well executed.”
“A tambourine, a violin, a flute,” with perhaps a zimbel, which is struck with a stick. Does not this describe to perfection gypsy music, and is not the whole a picture of the wildest gypsy dancing wherever found? Or it would apply to the Hindoo debauches, as still celebrated in honour of Sakktya, “the female principle” in India. In any case the suggestion is a very interesting one, since it leads to the query as to whether the entire sisterhood of ancient strolling, licentious dancers, whether Syrian, Spanish, or Egyptian, were not possibly of Indian-gypsy origin, and whether, in their character as fortune-tellers and sorceresses, they did not suggest the dances said to be familiar to the witches.
Mr. David Ritchie, the editor, with Mr. Francis Groome, of the Journal of the Gypsy-Lore Society, has mentioned (vol. i. No. 2) that Klingsohr, a reputed author of the “Nibelungen Lied,” was described as a “Zingar wizard” by Dietrich the Thuringian. Like Odin, this Klingsohr rode upon a wolf—a kind of steed much affected by witches and sorcerers. There is an old English rhyming romance in which a knight is represented as disguising himself as an Ethiopian minstrel. These and other stories—as, for instance, that of Sir Estmere—not only indicate a connection between the characters of minstrel and magician, but suggest that some kind of men from the far East first suggested the identity between them. Of course there have been wild dancers and witches, and minstrel-sorcerers, or vates, prophet-poets, in all countries, but it may also be borne in mind that nowhere in history do we find the female erotic dancer and fortune-teller, or witch, combined in such vast numbers as in India and Persia, and that these were, and are, what may be truly called gypsies. Forming from prehistoric times a caste, or distinct class, it is very probable that they roamed from India to Spain, possibly here and there all over Europe. The extraordinary diplomatic skill, energy, and geographic knowledge displayed by the first band of gypsies who, about 1417, succeeded in rapidly obtaining permits for their people to wander in every country in Europe except England, indicate great unity of plan and purpose. That these gypsies, as supposed sorcerers, appearing in every country in Europe, should not have influenced and coloured in some way the conceptions of witchcraft seems to be incredible. If a superstitious man had never before in his life thought of witches dancing to the devil’s music, it might occur to him when looking on at some of the performances of Spanish and Syrian gypsy women, and if the man had previously been informed—as everybody was in the fifteenth century or later—that these women were all witches and sorceresses, it could hardly fail to occur to him that it was after this fashion that the sisters danced at the Sabbat. Of which opinion all that can be said is, that if not proved it is extremely possible, and may be at least probed and looked into by those of the learned who are desirous of clearly establishing all the grounds and origins of ancient religious beliefs and superstitions, in which pies it may be found that witches and gypsies have had fingers to a far greater extent than grave historians have ever imagined.
The English gypsies believe in witches, among their own people, and it is very remarkable that in such cases at least as I have heard of, they do not regard them as âmes damnées or special limbs of Satan, but rather as some kinds of exceptionally gifted sorceresses or magicians. They are, however, feared from their supposed power to make mischief. Such a witch may be known by her hair, which is straight for three or four inches and then begins to curl—like a waterfall which comes down smoothly and then rebounds roundly on the rocks. It may be here remarked that all this gypsy conception of the witch is distinctly Hindoo and not in the least European or of Christians, with whom she is simply a human devil utterly given over to the devil’s desires. And it is very remarkable that even the English gypsies do not associate such erring sisters—or any other kind—with the devil, as is done by their more cultivated associates.
The witch, in gypsy as in other lore, is a haunting terror of the night. It has not, that I am aware, ever been conjectured that the word Humbug is derived from the Norse hum, meaning night, or shadows (tenebræ) (Jonæo, “Icelandic Latin glossary in Niall’s Saga”), and bog, or bogey, termed in several old editions of the Bible a bug, or “bugges.” And as bogey came to mean a mere scarecrow, so the hum-bugges or nightly terrors became synonymes for feigned frights. “A humbug, a false alarm, a bug-bear” (“Dean Milles MS.” Halliwell). The fact that bug is specially applied to a nocturnal apparition, renders the reason for the addition of hum very evident.
There is a great deal that is curious in this word Bogey. Bug-a-boo is suggestive of the Slavonian Bog and Buh, both meaning God or a spirit. Boo or bo is a hobgoblin in Yorkshire, so called because it is said to be the first word which a ghost or one of his kind utters to a human being, to frighten him. Hence, “he cannot say bo to a goose.” Hence boggart, bogle, boggle, bo-guest, i.e., bar-geist, boll, boman, and, probably allied, bock (Devon), fear. Bull-beggar is probably a form of bu and bogey or boge, allied to boll (Northern), an apparition.
CHAPTER XI.
GYPSY WITCHCRAFT.—THE MAGICAL POWER WHICH IS INNATE IN ALL MEN AND WOMEN—HOW IT MAY BE CULTIVATED AND DEVELOPED—THE PRINCIPLES OF FORTUNE-TELLING.
Women excel in the manifestation of certain qualities which are associated with mystery and suggestive of occult influences or power. Perhaps the reader will pardon me if I devote a few pages to what I conceive to be, to a certain degree, an explanation of this magic; though, indeed, it may be justly said that in so doing we only pass the old boundary of “spiritual” sorcery to find ourselves in the wider wonderland of Science.
Whether it be the action of a faculty, a correlative action of physical functions, or a separate soul in us, the fact is indisputable that when our ordinary waking consciousness or will goes to sleep or rest, or even dozes, that instant an entirely different power takes command of the myriad forces of memory, and proceeds to make them act, wheel, evolute, and perform dramatic tricks, such as the Common Sense of our daily life would never admit. This power we call the Dream, but it is more than that. It can do more than make Us, or Me, or the Waking Will, believe that we are passing through fantastic scenes. It can remember or revive the memory of things forgotten by us; it can, when he is making no effort, solve for the geometrician problems which are far beyond his waking capacity—it sometimes teaches the musician airs such as he could not compose. That is to say, within ourself there dwells a more mysterious Me, in some respects a more gifted Self. There is not the least reason, in the present state of Science, to assume that this is either a “spiritual” being or an action of material forces. It puzzled Wigan as the dual action of the brain; and a great light is thrown on it by the “Physiology” of Carpenter and the “Memory” of David Kay (one of the most remarkable works of modern times), as well as in the “Psycho Therapeutics” of Dr. Tuckey.
This power, therefore, knows things hidden from Me, and can do what I cannot. Let no one incautiously exclaim here that what this really means is, that I possess higher accomplishments which I do not use. The power often actually acts against Me—it plays at fast and loose with me—it tries to deceive me, and when it finds that in dreams I have detected a blunder in the plot of the play which it is spinning, it brings the whole abruptly to an end with the convulsion of a nightmare, or by letting the curtain fall with a crash, and—scena est deserta—I am awake! And then “how the phantoms flee—how the dreams depart!” as Westwood writes. With what wonderful speed all is washed away clean from the blackboard! Our waking visions do not fly like this. But—be it noted, for it is positively true—the evanescence of our dreams is, in a vast majority of instances, exactly in proportion to their folly.
I am coming to my witchcraft directly, but I pray you have patience with my proeme. I wish to narrate a dream which I had a few years ago (September 5, 1887), which had an intensity of reality. Dreams, you know, reader, vary from rainbow mist to London fog, and so on to clouds, or mud. This one was hard as marble in comparison to most. A few days previously I had written a letter to a friend, in which I had discussed this subject of the dual-Me, and it seemed as if the Dream were called forth by it in answer.
I thought I was in my bed—a German one, for I was in Homburg vor der Höhe—yet I did not know exactly where I was. I at once perceived the anomaly, and was in great distress to know whether I was awake or in a dream. I seemed to be an invalid. I realized, or knew, that in another bed near mine was a nurse or attendant. I begged her to tell me if I were dreaming, and to awake me if I were. She tried to persuade me that I was in my ordinary life, awake. I was not at all satisfied. I arose and went into the street. There I met with two or three common men. I felt great hesitation in addressing them on such a singular subject, but told them that I was in distress because I feared that I was in a dream, and begged them to shake or squeeze my arm. I forget whether they complied, but I went on and met three gentlemen, to whom I made the same request. One at once promptly declared that he remembered me, saying that we had met before in Cincinnatti. He pressed my arm, but it had no effect. I began to believe that I was really awake. I returned to the room. I heard a child speaking or murmuring by the nurse. I asked her again to shake my hand. This she did so forcibly that I was now perfectly convinced that it was no dream. And the instant it came home to me that it was a reality, there seized me the thrill or feeling as of a coming nightmare—and I awoke!
Reviewing my dream when awake, I had the deepest feeling of having been joué or played with by a master-mocker. I recalled that, when I rose in my night-robe from the bed, I did not dress—and yet found myself fully dressed when in the street. Then I remembered that when I returned to America, in 1879, I was in great apprehension lest I should have trouble and delay with our sixteen trunks, because there was under my charge a lady who was dying. To my great relief and amazement, the officer whose duty it was to search claimed me as an old acquaintance, who had met me and T. Buchanan Read, the poet, in Cincinnatti in 1864. But what impressed me most of all, at once, was that the whole was caused by, and was a keen and subtle mockery of my comments in my letter, of the other Ego, and of its sarcastic power. For I had been led, step by step, through the extremest doubt, to a full conviction of being awake, and then dismissed, as it were, with a snap or sneer into wakefulness itself!
Now this Dream Artist is, to judge by his works, a very different kind of a person from Me. We are not sympathetic, and herein lies a great and serious subject of study. “Dreams,” says a writer, “are the novels which we read when we are fast asleep,” and, at the risk of receiving punishment, I declare that my writer belongs to a school of novelists with which I have no feelings in common. If, as everybody assumes, it is always I who dream—only using other material—how is it that I always invariably disagree with, thwart, contradict, vex, and mock myself? I had rather be hanged and be done with it, before I would wrong my worst enemy with such pitiful, silly, degrading dreams and long-forgotten follies, as I am called on to endure. If this alter-ego were a lunatic, he could not be a more thoroughly uncongenial inmate of my brain than he often is. Our characters are radically different. Why has he a mind so utterly unlike mine? His tastes, his thoughts, dispositions, and petty peculiarities are all unlike mine. If we belonged to the same club, I should never talk with him.
Now we are coming to our Witchcraft. This alter-ego does not confine himself to dreams. A lunatic is a man who dreams wide-awake. He has lost his will or the controlling power resulting from the just co-relation of brain forces. Then the stored-up images stray out and blend. I have dreamed of telling or seeing things and of acting them at the same time. A fish and a watch and a man may seem to be the same thing at once in a dream, as they often are to a waking lunatic. A poet is a man who dreams wide-awake; but he can guide his dreams or imaginings to symmetrical form, and to a logical conclusion or coherence. With the painter and sculptor it is the same. When the alter-ego works harmoniously with the waking will, we call it Imagination.
But when the alter-ego draws decidedly on latent forces, or powers unknown to the waking Me, I am amazed. He does it often enough, that is certain. Then we have Mystery. And it is out of this that men have drawn the conclusion that they have two or three souls—an astral spirit, a power of prophecy, the art of leaving the body, and the entire machinery of occultism. Physiology is probably on the high road to explain it all, but as yet it is not explained.
Meanwhile it steals into our waking life in many ways. It comes in emotions, presentiments, harp tones, mystical conceptions, and minglings of images or ideas, and incomprehensible deductions, which are sometimes, of course, prophetic. It has nothing in common with common sense; therefore it is to some un-common sense, or to others non-sense. Sometimes it is one or the other. Agreeable sensations and their harmony become the Beautiful. These blend and produce a general æsthetic sense. It becomes mystical, and is easily worked on by the alter-ego. The most inspired passages of every poet on the beauty of Nature betray clearly the influence and hidden power of the Dream in waking life. Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, were all waking dreamers de la première force.
He who has heard an Æolian harp play—and I have heard the seven of Justinus Kerner in the old castle of Weibertreu when I was his guest—if he be a “tone-artist,” has often caught series of chords which were almost melodies. This music has the same relation to definite composition which the dream has to waking common sense. There are two things which I do not understand. One is, why composers of music make so little use of the suggestive Æolian harp; the second is, why decorative designers never employ the folding mirror[1] to produce designs. The one is an exact counterpart of the other, and both are capable of revealing inexhaustible harmonies, for both are deeply in accordance with the evolving processes of Nature.
The poetic or artistic faculty is, we therefore assume, the action on the myriad cells of memory by a strange—sometimes apparently involuntary—fantastic power, which is at the same time higher and lower than common sense or waking consciousness. Every image which man has received from sensation lies stored away in a cell, and is, in fact, a memory by itself. There is a faculty of association or sympathy by which groups of these images are called up, and there is perception which receives them, more or less vividly, like a photographic plate. When awake, Will, or coherent Common Sense, regulates all this machinery. When asleep, the Images seem to steal out and blend and frisk about by themselves in quaint dances, guided apparently by a kind of power whom I have conventionally called the alter-ego. This power throws open brain or memory-cells, which waking Common Sense has forgotten; in their chaotic or fantastic searches and mingling they produce poetry; they may chance on prophecy, for if our waking self had at command the immense latent knowledge in which these elves revel, it would detect sequences and know to what many things would lead, now unto us all unknown.
I once knew a nobleman who inherited in Italy a palace which he had never seen. There were in it three hundred rooms, and it had belonged to a family which had for six hundred years collected and handed down to their descendants every kind of object, as if they had been magpies or ravens. The heir, as a grave, earnest man, only concerned himself with the armoury and picture gallery and principal rooms. But his young daughter Bertha ranged all over the place and made hundreds of the most singular discoveries. One day she came to me very much delighted. She had found an obscure room or garret, in which there were ranged about on shelves, “sitting up and all looking at her,” several hundred old dolls and marionettes. For two hundred years or more the family had kept its old dolls. In this case the father was the waking reason, the rooms the brain cells, and Bertha the sprite who ranges over all and knows where to find forgotten images in store. Many of those whom we meet in dreams are like the ghosts of dolls.
This is the only true Night side of Nature, but its shadows and dusky twilight, and strangely-hued chiaroscuros and long pauses of gloom, come constantly into the sunlight of our waking life. Some lives have too much of it, some too little. Some receive it in coarse and evil forms, as lunatics, and sufferers from mania à potu; some canny people—happy Scotchmen, for instance—succeed in banishing it from life as nearly as is possible for a human being to do. Now to speak clearly, and to recapitulate distinctly, I set forth the following propositions:—
I. We have a conscious will which, whether it be an independent incomprehensible spirit, or simply the correlative result or action of all our other brain powers, exists, and during our waking hours directs our thoughts and acts. While it is at work in the world with social influences, its general tendency is towards average common sense.
II. This conscious will sleeps when we sleep. But the collective images which form memory, each being indeed a separate memory, as an aggregate of bees’ cells form a comb, are always ready to come forth, just as honey is always sweet, limpid, and fluid. There is between them all an associative faculty, or a strange and singular power, which begins to act when the will sleeps. Whether it be also an independent Self which plays capriciously while conscious will sleeps, or a result of correlated forces, it is not as yet possible to determine. What we know is, that it calls forth the images by association, and in a fantastic, capricious manner, imitates and combines what we have experienced, or read, or thought, during our waking hours.
III. Our waking will can only realize or act on such images as it has kept familiarly before it, or such as have been so often recalled that they recur spontaneously. But all the treasures of memory seem to be available to the dream ruler, and with them a loose facile power of grouping them into kaleidoscopic combinations. Thus, if one could imagine a kaleidoscope which at every turn made varied groups of human or other figures in different attitudes, with changing scenery; and then suppose this to be turned round by some simple vital or mechanical action, he would have an idea of the action of dreams. It is probable that the radical function of the dream-power is to prevent images from becoming utterly forgotten or rusty; and by exercising the faculty of facile or chance combination to keep awake in man originality and creativeness. For it is almost certain that, but for the intrusion of this faculty into our waking thoughts, man would become a mere animal, without an idea beyond the joint common appetites, instincts, and emotions of the lowest of his kind.
IV. The dream-power intrudes more or less into all waking life. Then it acts, though irregularly, yet in harmony, with conscious will. When it is powerful and has great skill in forming associations of images—and by images I mean, with Kay, “ideas”—and can also submit these to waking wisdom, the result is poetry or art. In recalling strange, beautiful images, and in imagining scenes, we partly lapse into dreaming; in fact, we do dream, though conscious will sits by us all the time and even aids our work. And most poets and artists, and many inventors, will testify that, while imagining or inventing, they abstract the “mind” from the world and common-place events, seek calm and quiet, and try to get into a “brown study,” which is a waking dream. That is to say, a condition which is in some respects analogous to sleep is necessary to stimulate the flow and combination of images. This brown study is a state of mind in which images flow and blend and form new shapes far more easily than when Will and Reason have the upper hand. For they act only in a conventional beaten track, and deal only with the known and familiar.
V. Magic is the production of that which is not measured by the capacity of the conscious working will. The dream spirit, or that which knows all our memories, and which combines, blends, separates, scatters, unites, confuses, intensifies, beautifies, or makes terrible all the persons, scenes, acts, events, tragedies, or comedies known to us, can, if it pleases, by instantaneous reasoning or intuition, perceive what waking common sense does not. We visit a sick man, and the dream spirit, out of the inexhaustible hoards of memory aided by association, which results in subtle, occult reasoning, perceives that the patient will die in a certain time, and this result is served up in a dramatic dream. The amount of miracles, mysteries, apparitions, omens, and theurgia which the action of these latent faculties cause, or seem to cause, is simply illimitable, for no man knows how much he knows. Few, indeed, are the ordinary well-educated Europeans of average experience of life, whose memories are not inexhaustible encyclopædias, and whose intellects are not infinite; if all that is really in them could be wakened from slumber, “know thyself” would mean “know the universe.” Now, there are people who, without being able to say why, are often inspired by this power which intuitively divines or guesses without revealing the process to common sense. They look into the eye of a person—something in glances and tones, gestures, mien, and address, suggests at once an assertion or a prediction which proves to be true. Considering that the dream-power has millions of experiences or images at its command, that it flits over them all like lightning, that it can combine, abstract, compare, and deduct, that it being, so to speak, more of a thaumaturgical artist than anything else, excels waking wisdom in subtle trickery, the wonder is, not that we so often hear of marvellous, magical, inexplicable wonders, but that they are not of daily or hourly occurrence. When we think of what we might be if we could master ourselves, and call on the vast sea of knowledge which is in the brain of every one who reads these lines, to give strict reckoning of its every wave and every drop of water, and every shell, pebble, wreck, weed, or grain of sand over which it rolls, and withal master the forces which make its tides and storms, then we may comprehend that all the wonder-working power attributed to all the sorcerers of olden time was nothing compared to what we really have within us.
It is awful, it is mysterious, it is terrible to learn this tremendous truth that we are indeed within ourselves magicians gifted with infinite intellectual power—which means the ability to know and do all things. In the past men surmised the existence of this infinite memory, this power of subtle research and combination, but between them and the truth in every land and time interposed the idea of objective spiritual or supernatural existences whose aid or medium was necessary to attain to wisdom. Outside of us was always Somebody Else to be invoked, conciliated, met in vision or trance, united to in spiritual unity or syncope. Sometimes they hit upon some form of hypnotism or mesmerism, opiates or forced swoons and convulsions, and so extorted from the nerves and dream-power some of their secrets which were all duly attributed to the “spirits.” But in the whole range of occult literature from Hermes Trismegistus down to Madame Blavatsky there is not a shade of a suspicion that all the absolutely authentic marvels of magic began and ended with man himself.
Least of all did any speculator yet conjecture how to set forth on the path which leads us to this wonderland. For there is a way to it, and a power to master the infinite stores of memory and render the dream-power a willing servant, if we take the pains to do it. Firstly—as may be found asserted, and I think fairly proved, in my work on “Practical Education,” and in the “Memory of David Kay” (London, 1888)—every child by a very easy gradual process, simply that of learning by heart, and reviewing, can develope its memory to such a degree that all which that child reads, hears, or sees can be literally retained for life. Secondly, quickness of perception, which is allied to memory, can be taught so as to develope intuitive observation and intelligence to an equally incredible extent. Thirdly—and for this I have had abundant personal experience—every child can learn Design and the Minor Arts or develope the Constructive faculties, and by doing this alone a pupil becomes exceptionally clever in all studies. The proof of this is that the 200 pupils who attended an industrial or art school in Philadelphia took precedence in studies among 110,000 others in the public schools.
If all the stores of our memory were distinctly cognized by our waking will when they first came into our possession, we should have the first great element of power beyond all our present dreams of greatness. That this can be done has been recognized by many of the most advanced thinkers of the day. If a child be trained to exercise quickness of perception so that at last it observes and remembers everything—and experiment has proved this also—it will make the Dream Power a waking power absolutely in harmony and accordance with waking wisdom or conscious will. For the reason why the capricious, wild, strange fitful faculty has always remained foreign to us, is because in all our culture we have never sought to subdue and train the powers allied to it. Catch and tame one water-fairy, says the Red Indian legend, and you may get all her sisters. Waking quickness of perception is a wonderful ability. It can be trained to flit like lightning over illimitable fields of thought (supplied by a vast memory), and with them it spontaneously developes comparison and deduction. Now all of this is marvellously akin to the habitual action of the dream power plus that of reflection. And it is not possible to conceive that with waking quickness of perception, or voluntary subtlety of thought, cultivated in infancy to the highest power, its twin which sports in sleep should not feel its influence and act under it.
The result of this culture would inevitably be that the marvels, mysteries, and magic as they seem to us of the dream, or intuitive power, would be perfectly under our waking control, or to such an extent that we could secure all that is profitable in them. It is a very curious fact that while Reflection or Waking Wisdom slumbers, Quickness of Perception or Perception and Association seem to be always awake—in dreams or waking. A very extended series of observations has convinced me that the acquisition of a very great degree of Observation itself, or of Attention, is as possible as to learn French, and no harder; yet as a branch of study it literally does not exist. As a writer in the New York Tribune remarks: “In fact, observation is almost an atrophied faculty, and when a writer practises it for the purposes of his art, we regard the matter as in some sense wonderful.” Interest, as Maudsley has shown, is a natural result of Attention, and the two generate Will. Whether we can actually control the Dream-power is not as yet proved by experiment. All that we can say is that it is probable. But that this power manifests itself in waking hours when it submits to Reflection, is an established fact. It shows itself in all imagination, in all originality, brave art or “fantasy.” Therefore it is no extravagant deduction to conclude that all of its action which now seems so wonderful, and which has furnished the ground-work for what we call magic, is perfectly within our grasp, and may be secured by simple methods of training which require only perseverance to perfect them.
The gypsy fortune-teller is accustomed for years to look keenly and earnestly into the eyes of those whom she dukkers or “fortune-tells.” She is accustomed to make ignorant and credulous or imaginative girls feel that her mysterious insight penetrates “with a power and with a sign” to their very souls. As she looks into their palms, and still more keenly into their eyes, while conversing volubly with perfect self-possession, ere long she observes that she has made a hit—has chanced upon some true passage or relation to the girl’s life. This emboldens her. Unconsciously the Dream Spirit, or the Alter-Ego, is awakened. It calls forth from the hidden stores of Memory strange facts and associations, and with it arises the latent and often unconscious quickness of Perception, and the gypsy actually apprehends and utters things which are “wonderful.” There is no clairvoyance, illumination or witchcraft in such cases. If such powers existed as they are generally understood to do, we should for one case of curious prediction hear of twenty thousand. But the Dream-power is at best fitful, irregular and fantastic in its action; it is at all times untrustworthy, for it has never been trained unless of yore by Chaldæan priests and magi. In some wonderful way facts do, however, manifest themselves, evoked out of the unknown by “occult,” though purely material, mental faculties; and the result is that wonder at the inexplicable—which makes miracles—until we are accustomed to them.
That gypsy women often do surmise or arrive at very curious and startling truths I know by my own experience, and also know that I myself when reading character in people’s hands according to the laws laid down in books on chiromancy, when I have felt deeply interested, or as one may say excited or inspired, and have gone a little beyond mere description into conjecture and deduction, have been amazed at my own successes. It happened once that when in company with several ladies it was proposed after lunch to go to a gypsy camp on the Thames, and have fortunes told. Among these ladies was one of a very imaginative temperament, who had not only lived many years in the East, but had resided several winters as a guest in Arab families. As she was very much disappointed at not finding the gypsies, I offered to tell her fortune by onomancy, i.e., by taking the letters of her name according to numbers, and deducing from them her past and future. This I did in a most reckless manner, freely setting down whatever came into my mind. It seems to me now that a kind of inspiration suggested what I wrote and predicted. What was my amazement to hear the lady declare that all which had been written as to her past life was literally true, and I saw that she was simply awed at my supposed power of prediction, and had the fullest faith in what I had declared as regarded the future. What I had intended for a jest or mere entertainment turned out to be serious enough. And reflecting on the evil consequences of such belief on a person who naturally attributed it all to magic, I deeply regretted what I had done, and have not since attempted any renewal of such oracle-work. It had previously occurred that I wrote out such a prediction for another lady which I did not clearly explain to her, but in which there was a regular recurrence and repetition of something unfortunate. This was shown in after years, and the troubles all came to pass as I had written. Now the more I studied this case the more I was convinced that it was based on unconscious observation, comparison, and deduction. Fichte has said that no bird can fly beyond itself, but the mind sometimes does actually precede its own conscious reasoning and throw back facts to it.
It may be urged by those who still cling to the old-fashioned fetish of a distinction between Spirit and Matter, that this explanation of predictions, oracles, and insight, is simply materialistic and utterly destructive of all the poetry, grandeur, and beauty which is associated with mysterious divination. But for those who believe with Maudsley, et sui generis, that all such distinctions are not seriously worth considering, and to him who can rise to the great philosophy now dawning on the world, there is perceptible in it something far more wonderful and poetical, beautiful and even awful, than ever was known to any occultist of old—for it is scientific and true. It is also true that man can now talk across the world and hear all sounds conveyed to him through the depths of ocean. He can catch these sounds and keep them for centuries. How long will it be before sights, scents, and tastes will be thus transferred, and the man sitting in London will see all things passing in Asia, or wherever it pleases him or an agent to turn a mirror on a view? It will be.[2] Or how long before the discovery of cheap and perfect aerial navigation will change all society and annihilate national distinctions? That, too, will be. These and a thousand stranger discoveries will during the ensuing century burst upon the world, changing it utterly. We go on as of old in our little petty narrow grooves, declaring that this will be, and that will never come to pass, and that this or that kind of hop-scotch lines, and tip-cat and marbles rules, are the eternal laws of humanity, and lo! all the while in his study some man whom you regard as a dreamer or dolt is preparing that which will be felt forever.
One of these great discoveries, and that not the least, will be the development and mastery of memory and perception, attention, interest, and will in children, with the constructive faculty which stimulates the whole by means of easy gradual series of instructions. When this system shall be perfected, we shall advance to understanding, controlling, and disciplining the subtler and stranger powers of the brain, which now puzzle us as dreams, intuitions, poetic inspiration, and prophecy. But this prophecy comes not from it, nor from any vague guessing or hoping. It is based on facts and on years of careful study of a thousand children’s minds, and from a conviction derived from calm observation, that the powers of the human mind are infinite and capable of being developed by science. And they will be!
There is very little knowledge among gypsies of real chiromancy, such as is set forth in the literature of occult or semi-occult science. Two centuries ago, when chiromancy was studied seriously and thoroughly by learned and wise men, the latter compared thousands of hands, and naturally enough evolved certain truths, such as you, reader, would probably evolve for yourself if you would do the same. Firstly they observed, as you may do, that the hand of a boor is not marked like that of a gentleman, nor that of an ignoramus like the palm of an artist or scholar. The line which indicates brain is on an average shorter in women than in men; in almost every instance certain signs infallibly indicate great sensuality, Others show a disposition to dreaminess, sentimentalism, the occult. Now as Love, Wisdom, Strength of Will, or Inertness, are associable with Venus, Apollo, Jupiter, or Saturn, and as astrology was then seriously believed in, it came to pass that the signs of chiromancy were distributed to the seven planets, and supposed to be under their dominion. It was an error, but after all it amounts to a mere classification. Properly considered, the names Jupiter, Saturn, Apollo, Mercury, Venus, and Mars are only synonymes of qualities, meaning masculine virtue and character, aptitude, art, cleverness, sexual passion, and combativeness. He who would, without a trace of superstition, analyze and describe many hands compared with the characters of their owners, would adopt effectively the same arrangement.
When we remember the age in which they lived and the popular yearning for wonders and marvels which then characterized even the wisest men, the old chiromancers were singularly free from superstition. There were many among them who would have regarded with supreme contempt a Desbarolles, with his fortune-telling for twenty francs.
To these truly honest men, the gypsies, with their pretended chiromancy, were at first a great puzzle. The learned Prætorius, in his vast work on Chiromancy and Physiognomy, devotes seventy-five pages to this “foreign element in our midst,” and comes to the conclusion that they are humbugs. They do not know the lines—they know nothing. The intrusion of the latent powers of the mind had no place in the philosophy of Prætorius, therefore he did not perceive the back door by which the Romany slipped into the oracle. Yet there is abundant evidence even in his own valuable collection of the works of his predecessors, that many of them when tempted from merely describing character to straying into prophecy, were guided by something more mysterious than the laws of the lines of life, of the head, heart, the circle of Venus, the “hepatic,” and viâ lactea. The Hungarian gypsies have a system of chiromancy of their own which the reader may find in the book “Vom Wandernden Zigeunervolke,” by Dr. von Wlislocki, Hamburg, 1890. I had translated this and more of the kind for this chapter, but omitted it, thinking, firstly, that its place is supplied by more important matter; and, secondly, because it is, save as perhaps indicative of Indian origin, quite valueless, being merely of the prophetic kind.
I have more than once known gypsies to tell me things of my past life which were certainly remarkable, bewildering, or inexplicable. And for the ordinary seeker of “voonders oopon voonders” it is all-sufficient that a thing shall be beyond clear intelligence. “How do you explain that?” is their crucial question, and their cry of triumph when relating some case of an authentic apparition, a spiritual feat of thaumaturgy, or a dream fulfilled. In fact they would rather not have it explained. I well remember how Professor Joseph Henry, when lecturing on natural science, narrated to us, his hearers, how when he told certain people how certain tricks of a common conjuror were executed, they all protested that it could not be the way it was done. They did not wish to be disillusioned. Raise a man from the dead, make him fly through the air, and it is for everybody a miracle. Give them the power to do the same, and in a month’s time it will be no longer miraculous, but something “in the due course of nature.” And what single fact is there in the due course of nature which is not as inexplicable if we seek for a full explanation of it? Consider this thing every day till you are penetrated with it, bear it in mind constantly, and in due time all phenomena will be miracles. We can apparently get a little nearer to the causes and give our discoveries names, but the primal causes as constantly recede and are continually buried in deeper mystery. But with most people names pass for explanations.
“Can you tell me what a hypothesis is?” asked a young gentleman at a dinner party of a friend who passed for being well-informed. “Hush,” was the reply. “Not now—ladies present.”
“Mon caporal,” asked a French soldier, “can you tell me what is meant by an equilateral?” “Certainly—mais d’abord—do you know Hebrew?” “No.” “Ah, then it would be impossible to explain it to you.”
“What is it that makes people’s heads ache?” inquired an old lady of a youth who had just begun his medical studies. “Oh, it is only the convolution of the anomalies of the ellipsoid,” replied the student. “Just see now what it is to git larnin!” commented the dame. “He knows it all in a straight line?”
The one is satisfied that a hypothesis is something improper, the other that an equilateral is a matter which he might understand if he were as learned as his corporal, and the third is pleased to find that the mystery has at least a name. And human beings are satisfied in the same way as to the mysteries of Nature. Give them a name and assure them that the learned understand it, and they are satisfied.
It is a fundamental principle of human folly to assume that any alleged marvel is a “violation of the laws of Nature,” or the work of supernatural influences, until it is proved not to be such. Nature cannot be violated. She is ever virgin. And “how do you account for that?” is always assumed to be a test question. It cannot be denied that in almost every case, the narrator assumes the absolute truth of all which he states, when, as is well known, even in the most commonplace incidents of ordinary life, such truth can very rarely be obtained. Secondly, he assumes that all the persons who were cognizant of the miracle, or were concerned in it, were not only perfectly truthful, but endowed with perfect perfections, and absolutely sound judgments. If there is the least shadow of a possibility that one of them could have erred in the least particular, the whole must fall to the ground as a proof or test—for we must have irrefragible and complete evidence before we adopt a faith on which all our life may depend. But, thirdly, by asking any one to account for a marvel, he assumes that the one thus called on knows everything short of the supernatural or Infinite, which is simply silly.
But there is a higher source of admiration and wonder than could ever be established by vulgar fetish, Animism, or supernaturalism, and this is to be found in the mysteries of Nature which man has never penetrated, and which, as soon as they are overcome, reveal others far grander or deeper. Thus as Alps rise beyond Alps, and seas of stars and solar systems spread in proportions of compound multiplication, our powers of vision increase. And it often happens to him who looks deeply into causes, that one of the myriad test cases of so-called “supernaturalism,” when it has ignominiously broken down—as all do sooner or later—often reveals a deeper marvel or mystery than it was intended to support. Thus some Red Indians in North America, on being told how certain juggling tricks which they had accepted for magic were performed, calmly replied that it did not make the least difference—that a man must have been a magician (or divinely inspired) to be able to find out such tricks. And I myself knew an Indian trader named Ross, who, being once among a wild tribe, put on a mask of papier maché, which caused tremendous excitement and awe, which was not in the least diminished when he took it off and put it into their hands and explained its nature, for they maintained that the thing which could cause such terror indicated the existence of superior mental power, or magic, in the maker. In which there is, as it seems to me, indications of a much higher wisdom or sagacity than is to be found in the vulgar spiritualist who takes the event or thing itself for the miracle, and who, when found out in his tricks, ignominiously collapses.
The conclusion from all this is, that I have seen and heard of much in gypsy witchcraft and fortune-telling which, while it was directly allied to humbug of the shallowest kind, also rested on, or was inspired by, mental action or power which, in our present state of knowledge, must be regarded as strangely mysterious and of the deepest interest. And this is indeed weird, in the fullest and truest sense, since it is used for prophecy. I will now endeavour to illustrate this.
It is but natural that there should be “something in” gypsy fortune-telling. If the reader were to tell ten fortunes a day for twenty years it would be very remarkable indeed if in that time he had not learned some things which would seem wonderful to the world. He would detect at a glance the credulous, timid, bold, doubtful, refined or vulgar nature, just as a lawyer learns to detect character by cross-examination. Many experiments of late years have gone very far to establish the existence of a power of divining or reading thought; how this is really done I know not; perhaps the experts in it are as ignorant as I am, but it is very certain that certain minds, in some (as yet) marvellous way, betray their secrets to the master. That there are really gypsies who have a very highly cultivated faculty of reading the mind by the eye is certainly true. Sometimes they seem to be themselves uncertain, and see as through a glass darkly, and will reveal remarkable facts doubtfully. I remember a curious illustration of this. Once I was walking near Bath, and meeting a tinker asked him if there were any gypsies in the vicinity. He gave me the address of a woman who lived in a cottage at no great distance. I found it with some trouble, and was astonished on entering at the abominably miserable, reckless, squalid appearance of everything. There was a half or quarter-bred gypsy woman, ragged, dirty, and drunk, a swarm of miserable children, and a few articles of furniture misplaced or upset as if the inmates had really no idea of how a room should be lived in. I addressed the woman civilly, but she was too vulgar and degraded to be capable of sensible or civil conversation with a superior. Such people actually exist among the worst class of vagabonds. But as I, disgusted, was about to leave, and gave her a small gratuity, she offered to tell my fortune, which I declined, whereupon she cried, “You shall see that I know something;” and certainly told me something which astonished me, of an event which had taken place two years before at a great distance. To test her I coolly denied it all, at which she seemed astonished and bewildered, saying, “Can I have made a mistake? You are certainly the person.” All of this may be explained by causes which I shall set forth. But it cannot be too earnestly insisted on to people who habitually doubt, that because a thing can be explained in a certain way (i.e., by humbug) that it necessarily follows that that is the only explanation of it. Yet this is at the present day actually and positively the popular method, and it obtains very largely indeed with the small critics of the “safe school.” Mrs. Million has diamonds; she may have stolen them—a great many people have stolen diamonds—therefore she is probably a thief. The Icelandic sagas describe journies to America; but the writers of the sagas were often mythical, exaggerative, and inaccurate—therefore all they narrate as regards America must be, of course, untrue.
Jack Stripe
Eats tripe,
It is therefore credible
That tripe is edible;
And it follows perforce,
As a matter of course,
That the devil will gripe
All who do not eat tripe.
But I do not insist that there is anything “miraculous” in gypsy fortune-telling. It may be merely the result of great practical experience and of a developed intuition, it may be mind or “thought-reading”—whatever that really is—or it may result from following certain regular rules. This latter method will be pronounced pure humbug, but of that I will speak anon. These rules followed by anybody, even the feeblest dilettante who has only read Desbarolles for drawing-room entertainment, will often astonish the dupe. They are, “in few,” as follows:—
1. It is safe in most cases with middle-aged men to declare that they have had a law-suit, or a great dispute as to property, which has given them a great deal of trouble. This must be impressively uttered. Emphasis and sinking the voice are of great assistance in fortune-telling. If the subject betray the least emotion, or admit it, promptly improve the occasion, express sympathy, and “work it up.”
2. Declare that a great fortune, or something greatly to the advantage of the subject, or something which will gratify him, will soon come in his way, but that he must be keen to watch his opportunity and be bold and energetic.
3. He will have three great chances, or fortunes, in his life. If you know that he has inherited or made a fortune, or had a good appointment, you may say that he has already realized one of them. This seldom fails.
4. A lady of great wealth and beauty, who is of singularly sympathetic disposition, is in love with him, or ready to be, and it will depend on himself to secure his happiness. Or he will soon meet such a person when he shall least expect it.
5. “You had at one time great trouble with your relations (or friends). They treated you very unkindly.” Or, “They were prepared to do so, but your resolute conduct daunted them.”
6. “You have been three times in great danger of death.” Pronounce this very impressively. Everybody, though it be a schoolboy believes, or likes to believe, that he has encountered perils. This is infallible, or at least it takes in most people. If the subject can be induced to relate his hairbreadth escapes, you may foretell future perils.
7. “You have had an enemy who has caused you great trouble. But he—or she—it is well not to specify which till you find out the sex—will ere long go too far, and his or her effort to injure you will recoil on him or her.” Or, briefly, “It is written that some one, by trying to wrong you, will incur terrible retribution.” Or, “You have had enemies, but they are all destined to come to grief.” Or, “You had an enemy but you outlived him.”
8. “You got yourself once into great trouble by doing a good act.”
9. “Your passions have thrice got you into great trouble. Once your inconsiderate anger (or pursuit of pleasure) involved you in great suffering which, in the end, was to your advantage.” Or else, “This will come to pass; therefore be on your guard.”
10. “You will soon meet with a person who will have a great influence on your future life if you cultivate his friendship. You will ere long meet some one who will fall in love with you, if encouraged.”
11. “You will find something very valuable if you keep your eyes open and watch closely. You have twice passed over a treasure and missed it, but you will have a third opportunity.”
12. “You have done a great deal of good, or made the fortune or prosperity of persons who have been very ungrateful.”
13. “You have been involved in several love affairs, but your conduct in all was really perfectly blameless.”
14. “You have great capacity for something, and before long an occasion will present itself for you to exert it to your advantage.”
By putting these points adroitly, and varying or combining them, startling cases of conviction may be made. Yet even into this deception will glide intuition, or the inexplicable insight to character, and the deceiver himself be led to marvel, so true is it that he who flies from Brama goes towards him, let him do what he will, for Truth is everywhere, and even lies lead to it.
The reader has often seen in London Italian women who have small birds, generally parrakeets, or paraquitos, which will for a penny pick out for her or for him slips of paper on which is printed a “fortune.” If he will invest his pence in these he will in most instances find that they “fit his case” exactly, because they are framed on these or other rules, which are of very general application. There was, in 1882, an Italian named Toricelli. Whether he was a descendant of the great natural philosopher of the same name who discovered the law of the vacuum I do not know, but he certainly exhibited—generally in Piccadilly—an ingenious application of it. He had a long glass cylinder, filled with water, in which there was a blown glass image of an imp. By pressing his hand on the top of the cover of the tube the folletto or diavoletto was made to rise or fall—from which the prediction was drawn. It will hardly be believed, but the unfortunate Toricelli was actually arrested by the police and punished for “fortune-telling.”[3] After this he took to trained canaries or parrakeets, which picked out printed fortunes, for a living. Whether the stern arm of British justice descended on him for this latter form of sorcery and crime I do not know.
“Forse fu dal demonio trasportato,
Fiancheggiandosi del’ autorita
Di Origene o di San Girolamo.”
Now it may be admitted that to form such rules (and there are many more far more ingenious and generally applicable) and to put them into practice with tact, adapting them to intuitions of character, not only as seen in the face but as heard in the voice or betrayed by gestures and dress and manner, must in the end develop a power. And, further still, this power by frequent practice enables its possessor to perform feats which are really marvellous and perhaps inexplicable, as yet, to men of science. I have, I think, indicated the road by which they travel to produce this result, but to what they arrived I do not know.
Nor do they all get there. What genius is, physiology, with all the vast flood of light spread by Francis Galton on hereditary gifts, cannot as yet explain. It is an absolute thing of itself, and a “miracle.” Sometimes this wonderful power of prediction and of reading thought and quickly finding and applying rules falls into the hands of a genius. Then all our explanations of “humbug” and “trickery” and juggling fall to the ground, because he or she works what are absolutely as much miracles as if the artist had raised the dead. Such geniuses are the prophets of old; sometimes they are poets. There are as many clearly-defined and admirable predictions as to events in art and politics in the works of Heine, which were fulfilled, as can be found anywhere.
By the constant application of such rules, promptly and aptly, or boldly, the fortune-teller acquires a very singular quickness of perception. There are very few persons living who really know what this means and to what apparently marvellous results constant practice in it may lead. Beginning with very simple and merely mechanical exercises (“Practical Education,” p. 151. London: Whittaker & Co.), perception may be gradually developed until not only the eye and ear observe a thousand things which escape ordinary observation, and also many “images” at once, but finally the mind notes innumerable traits of character which would have once escaped it, combines these, and in a second draws conclusions which would amuse those who are ignorant—as indeed all men are as yet—of the extraordinary faculties latent in every man.
I beg the reader to pay special attention to this fact. There is nothing in all the annals of prophecy, divination, fortune-telling, or prediction, which is nearly so wonderful as what we may all do if we would by practice and exercise bring out of ourselves our own innate power of perception. This is not an assertion based on metaphysical theory; it is founded on fact, and is in strict accordance with the soundest conclusions of modern physiology. By means of it, joined to exercises in memorizing, all that there is in a child of ordinary intellect may be unerringly drawn out; and when in due time knowledge or information is gradually adduced, there is perhaps no limit to what that intellect may become. The study, therefore, of quickness of perception, as set forth or exercised in gypsy fortune-telling, is indeed curious; but to the far-reaching observer who is interested in education it is infinitely more useful, for it furnishes proof of the ability latent in every mind to perform what appear to be more than feats of intelligence or miracles, yet which often are all mere trifles compared to what man could effect if he were properly trained to it.
Sorcery! We are all sorcerers, and live in a wonderland of marvel and beauty if we did but know it. For the seed sprouting from the ground is as strange a truth as though we saw the hosts of heaven sweeping onward in glory, or could commune with fairies, or raise from his grave the master magician of song who laid a curse on all who should dig his dust. But like children who go to sleep in the grand opera, and are wild with delight at Punch, we turn aside from the endless miracle of nature to be charmed and bewildered with the petty thaumaturgy of guitars in the dark, cigarettes, and rope-tying, because it corresponds to and is miracle enough for us. And perhaps it is as well; for much thought on the Infinites made Jean Paul Richter and Thomas Carlyle half mad and almost unfit for common life. Seek truth in Science and we shall be well balanced in the little as well as the great.
[1] Vide “Drawing and Designing.” London: Whittaker & Co., 1888. [↑]
[2] This was written long before I heard that the same idea had occurred to others. [↑]
[3] Another Italian was fined or imprisoned for the same thing in London in July, 1890—i.e., for telling penny fortunes by the same machine. [↑]
CHAPTER XII.
FORTUNE-TELLING (continued).—ROMANCE BASED ON CHANCE, OR HOPE, AS REGARDS THE FUTURE—FOLK- AND SORCERY-LORE—AUTHENTIC INSTANCES OF GYPSY PREDICTION.
It would seem to all who now live that life would be really intolerably dry were it utterly deprived of mystery, marvel, or romance. This latter is the sentiment of hopeful chance allied to the beautiful. Youth is willing or eager to run great risks if the road to or through them passes by dark ravines, under castled rocks—
“o’er dewy grass
And waters wild and fleet”
—and ever has been from the beginning. Now, it is a matter of serious importance to know whether this romance is so deeply inherent in man that it can never be removed. For, rightly viewed, it means current religion, poetry, and almost all art—as art at least was once understood—and it would seem as if we had come, or are coming, to a time when science threatens to deprive us of it all. Such is the hidden fear of many a priest and poet—it may be worth while to consider whether it is all to pass away into earnest prose or assume new conditions. Has the world been hitherto a child, or a youth, were poetry and supernaturalism its toys, and has the time come when it is to put away childish things?
We can only argue from what we are, and what we clearly know or understand. And we know that there are in Nature, though measured by the senses alone, phenomena which awake delightful or terrible, sublime or beautiful, grave or gay feelings, or emotions, which inspire corresponding thoughts. There is for us “an elf-home glory-land,” far over setting suns, mysterious beauty in night and stars in their eternal course, grandeur of God in the ocean, loveliness in woman, chiaroscuro in vapoury valleys and the spray of waterfalls by moonlight, exciting emotions which are certainly not within the domain of science—as yet—and which it is impossible for us, as we are at present constituted, to imagine as regarded entirely from the standpoint of chemical and physical analysis. To see in all this—as we are—only hydro-carbons, oxygen, silex and aluminium, atoms, molecules, and “laws”—that is to say, always the parts and combinations and no sense as regards man that he is, with his emotional sense of beauty, anywhere in the game or of any account—is going far too far. Setting teleology and theology entirely aside, Man, as the highest organism, has a right to claim that, as the highest faculties which have been as yet developed in him were caused by natural phenomena, therefore there is in the phenomena a certain beauty which is far more likely to lead to more advanced enjoyment of form, colour, or what we call the æsthetic sense, than to shrink away and disappear. And it seems to me that the most extended consideration of science leads to the result or conclusion that under its influence we shall find that the chemical and physical analyses of which I have spoken are only the dry A B C of a marvellously grand literature, or of a Romance and Poetry and Beauty—perhaps even of a wondrous “occult” philosophy, of whose beginning even we have, as yet, no idea.
But, great as it may be, those who will make it must derive their summary of facts or bases of observation from the past, and therefore I urge the importance of every man who can write doing what he can to collect all that illustrates Humanity as it is and as it was in by-gone ages. It hath not entered into the heart of man to conceive what a Folk-lore or ethnological society in ancient Greece, Rome, or Egypt might not have collected and preserved for the delight of every civilized human being of the present day. It is very true that the number of persons, as yet, who understand this—still less of those who take a real interest in it—is extremely limited, and they do not extend in England, America, or any other country, to more than a few hundreds. To the vast multitude, even of learned men, Folk-lore is only a “craze” for small literary bric-à-brac, a “fancy” which will have its run, and nothing more. To its earnest devotees it is the last great development of the art of learning and writing history, and a timely provision for future social science. It sets forth the most intimate inner life of people as they were, and the origins of our life as it is. In Folk-lore, Philology, Ethnology, and the study of Mythology or Religion find their greatest aid.
The amount of Red Indian Folk-lore which has been suffered to perish in the United States without exciting the least interest is beyond all belief. Thoreau could find in the Algonkin legends of New England nothing but matter for feeble-minded ridicule. But there are men coming, or a generation rising, to whom every record of the past will be of value, for they are beginning to perceive that while the collector is doing work of value the mere theorist, who generally undervalues if he does not actually oppose the collector, will with his rubbish be swept away “down the back-entry of time,” to be utterly forgotten.
Gypsy sorcery-lore is of great value because all over the Aryan world gypsies have in ancient or modern times been, so to speak, the wandering priests of that form of popular religion which consists of a faith in fortune-telling. This is really a very important part in every cult; the most remarkable thing connected with it; as with charms, fetishes, incantations and protective spells, being the extraordinary success with which the more respectable magi have succeeded in convincing their followers that their own sorcery was not “magic” at all, and that the world-old heathen rites, which are substantially the same, are mere modern thieveries from the “established religion.” Prediction and prophecy were the cornerstones of the classic mythology and of the Jewish law; they were equally dear to the Celtic races, and all men seem from the earliest times to have believed that coming events cast their shadows before. How this began and grew requires no deep study. Many disorders are prefaced by uneasy dreams or unaccountable melancholy, even as the greatest disaster which befel the gods of Valhalla was preceded by the troubled dreams of Balder. Sometimes the first symptom of gout is a previous irritability. But if diseases are believed to be caused by the literal occupation of the body by evil spirits these presages will be ascribed to occult spiritual influences. A man in excellent health feels gay—he goes hunting and has luck—of course his guardian spirit is believed to have inspired him to go. Then comes the priest or the gypsy to predict, and the hits are recorded and the misses are promptly forgotten.
The following instance has been related to me in good faith by a learned friend, whose books are well known to all Folk-lorists:—
“I can quote from my own experience a strange event founded on a prediction made to me by a gypsy in 1863. This was before I had learned the language of the Romany or had begun to take any interest in them. At the time of which I speak, I met one day here, in T——, one or two gypsy women bearing as usual babies on their shoulders, when the oldest as I was passing by pointed me out to the bystanders, saying in German, ‘Der Herr hat viel Kummer gehabt’ (‘That gentleman has had much trouble’—or sorrow).
“This was true enough, as I was suffering greatly at the time from a previous bereavement, though I was no longer in mourning, nor was there at the instant any indication of gloom in my looks, for I was in a cheerful humour. So I stopped to ask her why she had made her remark. She replied, ‘Ja, geben Sie mir die linke Hand und legen Sie drei Silbermünze darauf, wenn Sie weiteres hören wollen’ (‘Yes, give me your hand, and put three silver coins on it, if you would hear more’). I did so, when she repeated her assertion as to my sorrow, and added, ‘Aber eine Gräfinn steht für Ihnen’ (‘But there is a countess awaiting you’).
“I laughed at myself for listening to this, and for the strange feeling of interest or faith which I felt in it, and which my common sense told me was ridiculous. And yet the prediction, strangely enough, was fulfilled, though not in the sense in which I suppose most people would have taken it. Soon after I lost another relative, and was overwhelmed with that and other troubles when Providence sent me a friend in that most amiable and remarkable woman the Countess B——, who, with that noble and gracious affability which distinguishes her, as well as her husband, Sir ——, relieved my mind and cheered my depressed spirits.
“I add to this a marvellous story of a gypsy prediction which was uttered here in T—— and published last year in a small biography, but which is worth consideration because I have heard it apparently well authenticated by trustworthy people. A very great disgrace to our town—I am happy to say he was the only one—was a Mr. M——, of very good family. This man kept a mistress named R. M——, who became acquainted with a young man who was employed as a clerk at the Credit Anstalt, and who always at night carried on his person its keys. This M—— learned, and formed the following plot: The victim was to be enticed by the woman to her room, where she proposed to cut his throat, take the keys, and with the aid of M—— to rob the bank and escape. It succeeded so far as that the young man was brought to her room, but when she began to attempt to kill him he struggled, and was overpowering her when M—— entered the room and shot him dead.
“The precious pair were subsequently arrested and tried, and in the report of the proceedings there appears the following curious statement:—
“ ‘It is a singular thing (cosa piu singolare) that to this woman (M——’s mistress, Miss R——), a gypsy woman who pretended to palmistry predicted that she would come to a bad end (ch’essa finirebbe assai male).’ Which she effectually did, being condemned to fourteen years’ hard labour, and would have been hung had not her “interesting state” inclined the judge to mercy.
“There is the following addition in the pamphlet to what has been quoted: ‘Being begged by the said Maria R—— to look more closely into the hand, the Zingara refused to do so, and went away muttering strange or foreign words.’ (Borbottanda strane parole).”
To this my informant adds:—
“I know of a more cheerful case of gypsy prediction, and of quite another kind, and which happened to a friend’s friend of mine, also here in T——. The ‘subject’ was a young lady, who was ‘intended’ or betrothed, to an Italian actor, who had gone to play at Madrid; but for two months she heard nothing from him, and, believing that he had neglected her, was in despair.
“One morning she was passing through one of the main streets, and was talking with my friend, when a dark gypsy girl going by, whispered to her in a hurried manner: ‘Domani avrai una lettera e sarai felice’ (‘To-morrow you will receive a letter and be happy’). Having said this and nothing more, without asking for money, she went away. The promised letter was in fact received, all went well, and the lady is now married to the gentleman. This is all simply true. I leave the comments on the case to investigators. Can it be that gypsies are sometimes clairvoyant?”
My own comment on the case is that, admitting that the gypsy knew beforehand all the circumstances or even the “parties” in the affair, she had divined or “intuited” a result, and risked, as some might call it, or else uttered from a real conviction, her prophecy. How the mind, without any miracle—as miracles are commonly regarded—often arrives quite unconsciously to such conclusions, I have already considered in another chapter. Making every allowance for unconscious exaggeration and the accretive power of transmission, I am willing to believe that the story is actually true.
The following is also perfectly authentic: An English lady of excellent family, meeting a gypsy, was told by the latter that in six months the most important event of her life would come to pass. At the end of the time she died. On her death-bed she said, “I thought the gypsy meant a marriage, but I feel that something far more important is coming, for death is the great end of life.”
The following was told me by a Hungarian gentleman of Szegedin:—
“There was in Arad a lady who went to a ball. She had a necklace to which were attached four rings. During the evening she took this from her neck, and doubling it, wore it on her arm as a bracelet. In the house where she lived was a young gentleman who came to accompany her home from the ball. All at once, late at night, she missed her necklace and the rings, which were of great value.
“The next day she sent for a gypsy woman, who, being consulted, declared that the collar had been stolen by some one who was very intimate in her house. Her suspicions rested on the young man who had accompanied her home. He was arrested, but discharged for want of evidence.
“Three months after there came a kellner, a waiter, from some other city, to Arad. The lady, being in a café or some such place of resort, was waited on by this man, and saw one of her rings on his hand. He was arrested, and before the police declared that he held the ring in pledge, having advanced money upon it to a certain gentleman. This gentleman was the lady’s betrothed, and he had stolen her necklace and rings. The gypsy had truly enough said that the articles had been taken by some one who was intimate in her house.”
The gentleman who told me this story also said that the death of his father had been foretold by a gypsy—that is, by a lady who was of half-gypsy blood.
It should be borne in mind, though few realize its truth, that in stages of society where people believe earnestly in anything—for example, in witchcraft or the evil eye—there results in time a state of mind or body in which they are actually capable of being killed with a curse, or a fear of seeing what is not before them in the body, and of many nervous conditions which are absolutely impossible and incomprehensible to the world of culture at the present day. But there are still places where witchcraft may be said to exist literally, for there the professors of the art to all intents work miracles, because they are believed in. There is abundance of such faith extant, even in England. I have heard the names of three “white” witch doctors in as many towns in the West of England, who are paid a guinea a visit, their specialty being to “unlock,” or neutralize, or defeat the evil efforts of black witches. This, as is indeed true, indicates that a rather high class of patients put faith in them. In Hungary, in the country, the majority, even of the better class, are very much influenced by gypsy-witches. Witness the following, which is interesting simply because, while there is very little indeed in it, it was related to me as a most conclusive proof of magic power:—
“In a suburb of Szegedin, inhabited only by peasants, there is a school with a farm attached to it. The pay of the teacher is trifling, but he can make a comfortable living from the land. This was held by an old man, who had a young assistant. The old man died; the youth succeeded him, and as he found himself doing well, in due time he took a wife. They lived happily together for a year and had a daughter. In the spring the teacher had to work very hard, not only in school but on his farm, and so for the first time contracted the habit of going to the tavern to refresh himself, and what was worst, of concealing it from his wife under plausible tales, to which she gave no trust. She began to be very unhappy, and, naturally enough, suspected a rival.
“Of course she took advice from a gypsy woman, who heard all the story and consulted her cards. ‘There is,’ she said, ‘no woman whatever in the way. There is no sign of one for good or evil, na latchi na misec, in the cards. But beware! for there is a great and unexpected misfortune coming, and more than this I cannot see.’ So she took her pay and departed. Suddenly her child fell ill and died after eight days. Then the husband reformed his ways, and all went well with them. So, you see, the gypsy foretold it all, wonderfully and accurately.”
It requires no sorcery to conjecture that the gypsy already knew the habits of the schoolmaster, as the Romany is generally familiar with the tavern of every town. To predict a misfortune at large is a sure card for every prophetess. What is remarkable is that a man of the world and one widely travelled, as was my informant, attached great importance to the story. It is evident that where so much of the sherris sack of faith accompanies such a small crust of miracle there must be a state of society in which miracles in their real sense are perfectly capable of being worked.
CHAPTER XIII.
PROVERBS REFERRING TO WITCHES, GYPSIES, AND FAIRIES.
“Of Fairies, Witches, Gypsies,
My nourrice sang to me,
Sua Gypsies, Fairies, Witches,
I alsua synge to thee.”
(“Denham Tract.”)
Dr. Krauss has in his work, “Sreca, Gluck und Schicksal im Volksglauben der Südslaven,” collected a number of sayings in reference to his subject, from which I have taken some, and added more from other sources.
Of an evil woman one says, as in all languages, “To je vila”—that is, “a witch”; or it is uttered or muttered as, “To je vila ljutica”—that is, “a biting (or bitter) witch”; or to a woman whom one dislikes, “Idi vilo!”—“Begone, witch!” as in gypsy, “Jasa tu chovihani!”
Also, as in German, “Ako i je baba, nije vjestica”—“Though she is an old woman she is no witch”; while, on the other hand, we have, “Svake baba viestica, a djed vjestac”—“Every old woman is a witch, and every old man a wizard.”
The proverb, “Bizi ko vistica od biloga luka”—“she runs from it like a witch from white garlic”—will be found fully explained in the chapter on “The Cure of Children,” in which it is shown that from early times garlic has been a well-known witch-antidote.
Another saying is, “Uzkostrsila se ko vistica”—“Her hair is as tangled, or twisted, as that of a witch”; English gypsy, “Lākis balia shan risserdi sār i chovihanis.” But this has a slightly different meaning, since in the Slavonian it refers to matted, wild-looking locks, while the Romany is according to a belief that the hair of a witch is curled at the ends only.
Allied to this is the proverb, “Izgleda kao aa su ga coprnice doniele sa Ivanjscica”—“He looks as if the witches had done for him (or brought him away, ‘fetched’ him) on Saint John’s Eve”; English Romany, “Yuv dikela sá soved a lay sār a chovihani”—“He looks as if he had lain with a witch.”
“Svaka vracara s vrazje strane”—“Every witch belongs to the devil’s gang”—that is, she has, sold her soul to him and is in his interests. This is allied to the saying, “Kud ce vjestica do u svoj rod?”—“Where should a witch go if not to her kin?” or, “Birds of a feather flock together.”
“Jasa ga vjestice”—“The witches ride him”—refers to the ancient and world-wide belief that witches turn men into animals and ride them in sleep.
The hazel tree and nut are allied to the supernatural or witchly in many lands. For the divining rod, which is, according to “La Grande Bacchetta Divinatoria O Verga rivelatrice” of the Abbate Valmont, the great instrument for all magic and marvels, must be made of “un ramo forcuto di nocciuòlo”—“a forked branch of hazel-nut”—whence a proverb, “Vracarice, coprnjice, kuko ljeskova!”—“Sorceress, witch, hazel-stick.” This is a reproach or taunt to a woman who pays great attention to magic and witchcraft. “This reveals a very ancient belief of the witch as a wood-spirit or fairy who dwells in the nut itself.” More generally it is the bush which, in old German ballads, is often addressed as Lady Hazel. In this, as in Lady Nightingale, we have a relic of addressing certain animals or plants as if they were intelligences or spirits. In one very old song in “Des Knaben Wunderhorn,” a girl, angry at the hazel, who has reproached her for having loved too lightly or been too frail, says that her brother will come and cut the bush down. To which Lady Hazel replies:—
“Although he comes and cuts me down,
I’ll grow next spring, ‘tis plain,
But if a virgin wreath should fade,
’Twill never bloom again.”
To keep children from picking unripe hazel-nuts in the Canton of Saint Gall they cry to them, “S’ Haselnussfràuli chumt”—“The hazel-nut lady is coming!” Hence a rosary of hazel-nuts or a hazel rod brings luck, and they may be safely hung up in a house. The hazel-nut necklaces found in prehistoric tombs were probably amulets as well as ornaments.
Among popular sayings we may include the following from the Gorski Vijenac:—
“A eto si udrijo vladiko,
U nekakve smućene vjetrove,
Ko u marču što udre vještice.”
“But behold, O Vladika,
Thou hast thrown thyself into every storm,
As witches throw or change themselves to cattle.”
And with these we may include the curse, “Izjele te viestice”—“May the witches eat you!” which has its exact parallel in Romany. Also the Scottish saying, “Witches, warlocks, and gypsies soon ken ae the ither”:—
“Witches and warlocks without any bother,
Like gypsies on meeting well know one another.”
I may appropriately add to these certain proverbs which are given in an extremely rare “Denham Tract,” of which only fifty copies were printed by John Bell Richmond, “in. Com. Ebor.” This quaint little work of only six pages is entitled, “A Few Popular Rhymes, Proverbs, and Sayings relating to Fairies, Witches, and Gypsies,” and bears the dedication, “To every individual Fairy, Witch, and Gypsy from the day of the Witch of Endor down to that of Billy Dawson, the Wise Man of Stokesley, lately defunct, this tract is inscribed.”