Charles Godfrey Leland

“ Doubtless there was an awful romance of darkness about the old witchcraft which caused its worshippers to declare that the new lights of Shamanism could never dissipate it. just so many millions of educated people at present cannot be brought to understand that all things to which they are used are not based on immutable laws of nature, and must needs be eternal. They will find it hard to comprehend that there can ever be any kind of poetry, art, or sentiment, utterly different from that to which they and their ancestors have been accustomed. ”

“ However, the fact being that babes can form for themselves supernatural conceptions and embryo mythologies, and as they always do attribute to strange or terrible-looking persons power which the latter do not possess, it is easy, without going further, to understand why a wild Indian gypsy, with eyes like a demon when excited, and unearthly-looking at his calmest, should have been supposed to be a sorcerer by credulous child-like villagers. ”

“ It is probable or certain that Shamanism (or that into which it has very naturally developed) will influence all mankind, until science, by absorbing man's love of the marvellous in stupendous discoveries shall so put to shame the old thaumaturgy, or wonder-working, that the latter will seem poor and childish. ”

“ There are, in fact, even among us now, minds to whom Shamanism or even witchcraft is deeply or innately adapted by nature, and there are hundred of millions who, while professing a higher and purer doctrine, cling to its forms or essentials, believing that because the apparatus is called by a different name it is in no respect whatever the same thing. ”

“ So out of the earliest time, in the very two o'clock of a misty morning in history, man came forth believing in non-existent terrors and evils as soon as he could talk, and talking about them as fast as he formed them. ”

“ There is great confusion and little knowledge as yet as regards primitive man, but till we know better we may roughly assume that witch-voodooism was the religion of the people of the paleolithic period, if they could talk at all, since language is denied to the men of the Neanderthal, Canstadt, Egnisheim, and Podhava type. All that we can declare with some certainty is that we find the advanced Shamanism the religion of the early Turanian races, among whose descendants, and other people allied to them, it exists to this day. ”

“ We all know how difficult it is for many people when some one dies out of a household to get over the involuntary feeling that we shall unexpectedly meet the departed in the usual haunts. In almost every family there is a record how some one has "heard a voice they cannot hear," or the dead speaking in the familiar tones. Hence the belief in ghosts, as soon as men began to care for death at all, or to miss those who had gone. ”

“ Yet it is clear and plain before them, this New Era, looking them directly in the face, about to usher in a reformation compared to which all the reformations and revolutions and new religions which the world has ever seen were as nothing; and the children are born who will see more than the beginning of it. ”

“ The exorcist is usually the spiritual adviser to the population of a low-caste village, and is known as a gooroo, or priest: that is to say, he professes to hold commune with the spirits of defunct Hindoos which have qualified for their unique position in the other world--by their iniquity in this one, perhaps. Every Hindoo has a guardian bhut that requires propitiating, and the gooroo is the medium.
Amongst the Jaiswars and other low-caste Hindoos, caste is regulated by carnal pice, and a man is distinguished amongst them by a regulated monetary scale. ”

“ The gypsies came, historically speaking, very recently from India. It has not been so carefully observed as it might that all Indians are not of the religion of Brahma, much less of Buddha or of Mahommed, and that among the lower castes, the primæval Altaic Shamanism, with even earlier witchcraft, still holds its own. Witchcraft, or Voodoo, or Obi, relies greatly on poisoning for its magic, and the first gypsies were said to poison unscrupulously. ”

“ Finally there are men who, with no logical belief whatever in any kind of supernaturalism, study it, and love it, and are moved by it, owing to its endless associations, with poetry, art, and all the legends of infancy or youth. ”

“ One person may be a 14-anna caste man while another may only be a 12-anna caste man. Does the 12-anna caste man wish to supersede the 14-anna caste man, then he consults the gooroo, who will, in consideration of a certain contribution, promote him to a higher-caste grade. A moneyed man having qualms about his future state should join the Jaiswars, where at least he would have an opportunity of utilizing his spare cash for the good of his soul. The average gooroo will be only too glad to procure him everlasting glory for a matter of a few rupees. ”

“ It may therefore be concluded that as soon as man began to think and speak and fear the mysterious, he also began to appease ghosts and bugbears by sacrifices. Then there sprung up at once--quite as early--the magus, or the cleverer man, who had the wit to do the sacrificing and eat the meats sacrificed, and explain that he had arranged it all privately with the dead and the devils. ”

“ These, with the vast fields of adjusting improved social relations and reforms--all of which in a certain way opens dazzling vistas of a certain kind of enchantment or brilliant hope--will go fast and far to change the old romance to a radically different state of feeling and association. ”

“ And as I believe that a company of children left entirely to themselves would form and grow up with a language which in a very few years would be spoken fluently, 1 so I am certain that the shades of night, and fear, pain, and lightning and mystery would produce in the same time conceptions of dreaded beings, resulting first in demonology and then in the fancied art of driving devils away. ”

“ Once when I was a child powerful doses of quinine caused a peculiar throb in my ear which I for some time believed was the sound of somebody continually walking upstairs. Very young children sometimes imagine invisible playmates or companions talk with them, and actually believe that the unseen talk to them in return. ”

“ There are children who, by the voluntary or involuntary exercise of visual perception or volitional eye-memory, 2 reproduce or create images which they imagine to be real, and this faculty is much commoner than is supposed. ”

“ Kaloo, or bahin (sister, English gypsy pen) Muti, the quondam grass-cutter and courtesan of Ramghur village, who in this life liked nothing better than a piece of bacon and a dram of spirits, will, in their state of bhuthood hanker after those things still. Acting on these notions of the people, the gooroo lives and thrives exceedingly. ”

“ But it certainly cannot be denied that Folk-lore of this kind casts a great deal of light on the early history of mankind, and the gradual unfolding or evolution of religion and of mind, and that, if intelligently studied, this of the gypsies is as important as any chapter in the grand work. ”