“There,” I said, “is the oldest patteran—first of all—which the Gipsies use to-day in foreign lands. In Germany, when one band of Gipsies goes by a cross road, they draw that deep in the dust, with the end of the longest line pointing in the direction in which they have gone. Then, the next who come by see the mark, and, if they choose, follow it.”
“We make it differently,” said the Gipsy. “This is our sign—the trin bongo drums, or cross.” And he drew his patteran thus—
“The long end points the way,” he added; “just as in your sign.”
“You call a cross,” I remarked, “trin bongo drums, or the three crooked roads. Do you know any such word as trúshul for it?”
“No; trushilo is thirsty, and trushni means a faggot, and also a basket.”
“I shouldn’t wonder if a faggot once got the old Rommany word for cross,” I said, “because in it every stick is crossed by the wooden withy which binds it; and in a basket, every wooden strip crosses the other.”
I did not, however, think it worth while to explain to the Gipsies that when their ancestors, centuries ago, left India, it was with the memory that Shiva, the Destroyer, bore a trident, the tri-çûla in Sanscrit, the trisūl of Mahadeva in Hindustani, and that in coming to Europe the resemblance of its shape to that of the Cross impressed them, so that they gave to the Christian symbol the name of the sacred triple spear. [{26}] For if you turn up a little the two arms of a cross, you change the emblem of suffering and innocence at once into one of murder—just as ever so little a deviation from goodness will lead you, my dear boy, into any amount of devilry.
And that the unfailing lucid flash of humour may not be wanting, there lightens on my mind the memory of The Mysterious Pitchfork—a German satirical play which made a sensation in its time—and Herlossohn in his romance of Der Letzte Taborit (which helped George Sand amazingly in Consuelo), makes a Gipsy chieftain appear in a wonderfully puzzling light by brandishing, in fierce midnight dignity, this agricultural parody on Neptune’s weapon, which brings me nicely around to my Gipsies again.
If I said nothing to the inmates of the cottage of all that the trushul or cross trident suggested, still less did I vex their souls with the mystic possible meaning of the antique patteran or sign which I had drawn. For it has, I opine, a deep meaning, which as one who knew Creuzer of old, I have a right to set forth. Briefly, then, and without encumbering my book with masses of authority, let me state that in all early lore, the road is a symbol of life; Christ himself having used it in this sense. Cross roads were peculiarly meaning-full as indicating the meet-of life with life, of good with evil, a faith of which abundant traces are preserved in the fact that until the present generation suicides were buried at them, and magical rites and diabolic incantations are supposed to be most successful when practised in such places. The English path, the Gipsy patteran, the Rommany-Hindu pat, a foot, and the Hindu panth, a road, all meet in the Sanscrit path, which was the original parting of the ways. Now the patteran which I have drawn, like the Koua of the Chinese or the mystical Swastika of the Buddhists, embraces the long line of life, or of the infinite and the short, or broken lines of the finite, and, therefore, as an ancient magical Eastern sign, would be most appropriately inscribed as a sikker-paskero dromescro—or hand post—to show the wandering Rommany how to proceed on their way of life.