On May 3, 1866, when riding from Rio Claro to Piracicava Saõ Paulo, I visited a gang of these “verminous ones”; and attended by my armed servants, I spent a night in their tents. The scene was familiar: the tilt-tent swarmed with dark children, the pot hung from the triangle, and horses and ponies for carriage, and perhaps for sale, were picketed about. The features and complexion were those of the foreign tinkler; the women, besides trumpery ornaments of brass, coral, and beads, wore scarlet leg-wraps; and some of the girls were pretty and well dressed as the memorable Selina, of Bagley Wood, Oxford. Apparently they were owners of negro slaves, possibly runaways. According to the Brazilians, they are fond of nomes esquisitos (fancy names); Esmeralda and Sapphira are common, and they borrow from trees, plants, and animals.
Their chief occupations are petty trade and fortune-telling, when they reveal for a consideration all the mysteries of “love and law, health and wealth, losses and crosses.” They also “keen” at funerals during the livelong day, and drink, sing, and dance through the night—a regular wake. I could not induce them to use their own tongue, yet they evidently understood me. This desire to conceal their Gypsy origin I have frequently noticed elsewhere. It is probably a relic of the days of their persecution. Fortunately in most civilized countries to-day the Gypsy can count equal rights with other men.
III. EL ISLAM
EL ISLAM
OR
THE RANK OF MUHAMMADANISM AMONG
THE RELIGIONS OF THE WORLD
A great philosopher in days of yore informs us that we may search the world throughout, and that in no region where man has lived can we find a city without the knowledge of a god or the practice of a religion (Plutarch).
This apophthegm embodies a dogma somewhat too rash and sweeping. The necessity of a Demiurgos—a Creator—so familiar to our minds is generally strange to savages. The wilder tribes of Singhalese Veddahs, for instance, have no superstition; these savages have not even attained the fear of demons. It has but scant hold upon the imagination of barbarous men. The Buddhists and Jains ascribed after Sakya-Muni the phenomena of the universe to Swabháva, or force inherent in matter, Matra, and independent of an Ishwara-Karta, or Manufacturing God. Aristotle and Spinoza believed with Pythagoras the world to be eternal, and that a God cannot exist without the world, as height without breadth. Hence Hegel’s “eternal nihilum”—creation being everything for created beings—in direct opposition to Calvin, who opined that creation is not a transfusion of essence, but a commencement of it out of nothing. In the present day, the Kafirs of the Cape, the ancient Egyptians, and African races generally, barbarians and semi-barbarians, by no means deficient in intellect and acuteness, have never been able to comprehend the existence or the necessity of a One God. With them, as with a multitude of civilized philosophers—the Indian Charvakas, for instance—Nature is self-existent, Matter is beginningless and endless; in fact, the world is their God. Ex nihilo nihil fit is the first article of their creed. Absolute ignorance of any God, then, was the earliest spiritual condition of the human family.