“There is a blast of a trumpet, and the voice of a man proclaims behind the scenes that the play is to begin. The curtain is drawn, and Faust leaning against the background—which represents a city—soliloquizes:
“ ‘I am the cleverest doctor in the world, but all my cleverness does not help me to make the beautiful princess love me. I will call up Satan from the under-world to aid me in my plans to win her. Devil—I call thee!’
“Meanwhile Faust’s servant—the funny man—has entered and amused the public with comical gestures. The appearance of the devil is announced by a firework (Sprühteufel) fizzing and cracking. He descends from the air, there being no arrangements for his coming up. The servant bursts into a peal of laughter, and the devil asks:
“ ‘Faust thou hast called me; now, what is thy wish?’
“ ‘I love the lovely princess—canst thou make her love me?’
“ ‘Nothing is easier. Cut thy finger and sign to me thy life; then all my devilish art will be at thy service till thou hast committed four murders.’
“Faust and the devil fly forth, the servant making sarcastic remarks as to the folly of his master, and the curtain falls.
“In the second act the fair princess enters—she is three times as large as Faust, but bewails his absence in a plaintive voice and departs. Faust enters and calls for a Furio who shall carry him to Mantua. Enter three Furios (witches) who boast their power. ‘I can carry you as swiftly as a moor-cock flies,’ says one. This is not swift enough for Faust. ‘I fly as fast as bullet from a gun,’ says the second. The master answers:
“ ‘A right good pace, but not enough for Faust.’ To the third: ‘How fast art thou?’
“ ‘As quick as Thought.’
“ ‘That will suffice—there’s naught so swift as Thought. Bear me to Mantua, to her I love, the princess of my heart!’
“The Furio takes Faust on her back, and they fly through the air. The servant makes, as before, critical and sarcastic remarks on what has passed, and the curtain falls.
“In the third act the devil persuades Faust to murder his father, so as to inherit his treasures, ‘for the old man has a tough life.’ In the fourth, maddened by jealousy, he stabs the princess and her supposed lover. The small sarcastic servant takes the murdered pair by the legs, and drags them about, cracking jokes, and giving the corpses cuffs on their ears to bring them again to life.
“In the fifth act, the clock strikes eleven. Faust has now filled to the brim the measure of his iniquity. The devil appears, proves to him that it is time to depart; it strikes twelve; the smoke of a fizzling squib and several diabolical fire-crackers fills the air, and Faust is carried away, while the small servant, as satanical and self-possessed as ever, makes his jokes on the folly of Faust—and the curtain falls.”
This is the true Faust drama of the Middle Ages, with the ante-Shakespearian blending of tragedy and ribald fun. But this same mixture is found to perfection in the early Indian drama—for instance, in “Sakuntala”—and it would be indeed a very curious thing should it be discovered that the gypsies, who were in all ages small actors and showmen of small plays, had brought from the East some rude drama of a sorcerer, who is in the end cheated by his fiend. Such is, in a measure, the plot of the Baital Pachisi or Vikram and the Vampire, which is borrowed from or founded on old traditions, and the gypsies, from their familiarity with magic, and as practical actors, would, in all probability, have a Faust play of some kind, according to the laws of cause and effect. In any case the suggestion may be of value to some investigator.
Gypsies in England—that is those “of the old sort”—regard a shoe-string as a kind of amulet or protection. Many think it is unlucky to have one’s photograph taken, but no harm can come of it if the one who receives the picture gives the subject a shoe-string or a pair of laces.
Dr. F. S. Krauss in his curious work, “Sreća, or Fortune and Fate in the popular belief of the South Slavonians” (Vienna, 1886), draws a line of distinction between the fetish and amulet. “The fetish,” he declares, “has virtue from being the dwelling of a protecting spirit. The amulet, however, is only a symbol of a higher power,” that is of a power whose attention is drawn by or through it to the believer or wearer. This, however, like the distinction between idolatry and worshipping images as symbols of higher beings, becomes in the minds of the multitude (and for that matter, in all minds), a distinction without a dot of difference. The amulet may “rest upon a higher range of ideas, while the fetish stands on its own feet,” but if both are regarded as bringing luck and if, for instance, one rosary or image of the same person is believed to bring more luck than another, it is a fetish and nothing else. An amulet may pretend to be a genteeler kind of fetish, but they are all of the same family.
The gypsies prepare among the Bosniacs, “on the high plains of Malwan,” a fetish in the form of a cradle made of nine kinds of wood, to bring luck to the child who sleeps in it. But Dr. Krauss falls, I presume, into a very great error, when he attributes to her Majesty the Queen of England a belief in fetish, on the strength of the following remarkable passage from the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung:—
“By command of Queen Victoria, Mr. Martin, Director of the Institute for the Blind, has attended to the making a cradle for the newly-born child of the Princess of Battenberg. The cradle is to be made entirely by blind men and women. The Queen firmly believes that objects made by blind people bring luck.”
Truly, if anything could bring luck it ought to be something ordered with a kind and charitable view from poor and suffering people, but it is rather hard to promptly conclude that her Majesty believes in fetish because she benevolently ordered a cradle from the blind, and that she had no higher motive than to get something which would bring luck to her grandchild.
It may be observed in connection with this superstition that among the Hungarian gypsies several spells depend on using different kinds of wood, and that four are said to have been taken for the true cross.
Gypsies, in common with the rest of the “fetishioners” of all the world, believe in the virtue of a child’s caul. Dr. Krauss found in Kobaš on the Save an amulet which contained such a caul with garlic and four-leaved clover. This must have been a very strong charm indeed, particularly if the garlic was fresh.
Another very great magic protector in every country among gypsies as well as Gentiles, is the thunderbolt, known in Germany as the Donneraxt, Donnerstein, Donnerkeil, Albschoss, Strahlstein, and Teufelsfinger. It was called by the Greeks Astropelákia, by the Latins Gemma cerauniæ, by the Spaniards Piedras de rayo, by the dwellers in the French High Alps Peyras del tron (pierres de tonerre), by the Birmans Mogio (the child of lightning), by the Chinese Rai-fu-seki (the battle-axe of Tengu, the guardian of Heaven), by the Hindoos Swayamphu, or “the self-originated.” Dr. Krauss, from whom I have taken these remarks, adds that in America and Australia it is also regarded as a charm protective and luck-bringing. But here there is a confusion of objects. The thunderbolt described by Dr. Krauss is, I believe, a petrified shell, a kind of mucro or belemnite. The thunderbolt of the Red Indians really resembles it, but is entirely different in its nature. The latter results from lightning entering the sand fusing it. It sometimes makes in this way a very long tube or rod, with a point. People, finding these, naturally believed that they were thunderbolts. I knew an old Penobscot Indian who, seeing the lightning strike the earth, searched and found such a thunderbolt, which he greatly prized. In process of time people who found mucrones in rocks believed them to be the same as the glass-like points of fused sand which they so much resembled.