Charles Godfrey Leland

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Or yet, again, the gypsy having obtained the plunder and substituted the dummy packet, persuades the true believer to bury it in the barn, garden, field, or a forest, performs magic ceremonies and repeats incantations over it, and cautions him to dig it up again, perhaps six months later on a certain day, it may be his saint’s or birth day, and to keep silence till then. The gypsy makes it an absolute condition—nay, he insists very earnestly on it—that the treasure shall not be dug up unless he himself is on the spot to share the spoil. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Now it is no slander to say that the rural folk of Tennessee resemble Indians in several respects, and when I saw thousands of them during the Civil War, mustered out in Nashville, I often thought, as I studied these dark brown faces, high cheek-bones, and long, straight, wiry hair, that the American is indeed reverting to the aboriginal type. The Tennessee farmer and his friends reverted to it at any rate with a vengeance, for they turned out altogether, hunted the gypsies down, and having secured the sorceress, burned her alive at the stake. ”

“ As a bridge must cross a stream, or a torrent which is generally beautiful by itself, and as the cross or span has the effect of defining and framing the picture, as a circlet or tiara sets off a beautiful head, it is not remarkable that in all ages men have made such objects subjects of legend and song. Hence the oft-repeated Devil’s Bridge, so-called because it seemed to simple peasants impossible for mere mortals to build, although bridges are habitually and more naturally connected with salvation and saints. ”

“ They too had heard their elders repeat it as a charm against the jaw-ache—and can any man in his senses doubt that they applied it in turn to the divine witchcraft of fun and the sublime sorcery of sport, which are just as magical and wonderful in their way as anything in all theurgia or occultism, especially when the latter is used only to excite marvels and the amazement which is only a synonym for amusement. ”

“ Heine was not in his reasoning moments anything more or less than a strict Deist or Monotheist, but all the dreams and spectres, fairies and goblins, whether of the Middle Ages or the Talmud, were inexpressibly dear to him, and they move like myriad motes through the sunshine of his poetry and prose, often causing long rays when there were bars at the window—like that on which the saint hung his cloak. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But such touches of common humanity are rare indeed in it. I do not exaggerate in the least when I say that the whole spirit of this work—which faithfully reflects the whole spirit of the “justice” of the Middle Ages—inclines in a ferocious, wolfish manner to extend and multiply punishment of the most horrible kinds to every small offence against the Church—to manufacture and increase crime as if it were capital for business, and enlarge the sphere of torture so as to create power and awe. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For out of my own childish experiences and memories I retain with absolute accuracy material enough to declare that without any aid from other people the youthful mind forms for itself strange and seemingly supernatural phenomena. A tree or bush waving in the night breeze by moonlight is perhaps mistaken for a great man, the mere repetition of the sight or of its memory make it a personal reality. ”

“ According to the old Shamanic belief, which was the primæval religion of all mankind, every disease is caused by an evil spirit which enters the body and can only be driven out by magic. We have abundant traces of this left in our highest civilization and religion among people who gravely attribute every evil to the devil instead of the unavoidable antagonisms of nature. Nothing is more apparent in the New Testament than that all diseases were anciently regarded as coming from devils, or evil occult, spiritual influences, their negative or cure being holiness in some form. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Absolutely no one who lives in “the movement” can understand this sweet old sorcery. But nature is eternal, and while grass grows and rivers run man is ever likely to fall again into the eternal enchantments. And truly until he does he will have no new poetry, no fresh [56] art, and must go on copying old ideas and having wretchedly worn-out exhibitions in which there is not one original idea.
If it appears that the child is overlooked, or “berufen,” many means are resorted to, “one good if another fails,” but we have here to do only with those which are connected with incantations. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Gypsies, as I have said, have done more than any race or class on the face of the earth to disseminate among the multitude a belief in fortune-telling, magical or sympathetic cures, amulets and such small sorceries as now find a place in Folk-lore. Their women have all pretended to possess occult power since prehistoric times. By the exercise of their wits they have actually acquired a certain art of reading character or even thought, which, however it be allied to deceit, is in a way true in itself, and well worth careful examination. ”

“ If a pen drops from our fingers, or a penny rolls from our grasp, the former of course falls on our new white dress, while the latter nine times out of ten goes directly to the nearest grating, or crack or rat-hole. I aver that it is literally true, if I ever search for a letter or paper it is almost always at the bottom of the rest, while ink-wipers and pens seem to be endowed with more than mere instinct or reason—they manifest genius in concealing themselves. ”