Gypsies

The name Gypsy, an abbreviation of "Egyptian," has been used for centuries by English-speaking people to denote a member of a group of wanderers who traveled Europe during the Middle Ages, and whose descendants are still found in most European countries.

Many other names, such as "Saracen" and "Zigeuner," or "Cigan," have been applied to these people, but "Egyptian" is the most widespread. It does not, however, relate to Egypt, but to the country of "Little Egypt" or "Lesser Egypt," whose identity has never been clearly established. Two Transylvanian references from the years 1417 and 1418 suggested that Palestine is the country in question, but there is some reason to believe that "Little Egypt" included other regions in the East. It is now almost unanimously agreed that the Gypsies came into Europe from India.

There are strong resemblances between Indian and gypsy language. Gypsies speak of themselves as "Romany" and of their language as Romani-tchib (tchib= tongue). Physically they are black-haired and brown-skinned, their appearance, like their language, suggesting affinities with Hindustan.

In recent centuries, if not in earlier times, many of their overlords were not of Gypsy blood, but belonged to the nobility and petite noblesse of Europe, and were formally appointed by the kings and governments of their respective countries to rule over all the Gypsies resident within those countries. The title of baron, count, or regent of the Gypsies was no proof that the official so designated was of Gypsy race.

The appointed rulers, were empowered by Christian princes, and under Papal approval, were necessarily Christian. Moreover, their vassals were at least Christian by profession. Although their behavior was often inconsistent with such a profession, it was in the character of Christian pilgrims that they asked and obtained hospitality from the cities and towns of Medieval Europe.

This twofold character is illustrated in connection with the services held in the crypt of the church of Les Saintes Maries de la Mer, in the Ile de la Camargue, Bouches-du-Rhône. In this church many Gypsies annually celebrate the Festival of the Holy Marys on May 25. The crypt is specially reserved for them, because it contains the shrine of Saint Sara of Egypt, whom they regard as their patron saint. Throughout the night of the 24th-25th May they keep watch over her shrine, and on the 25th they leave. Among the Gypsy votive offerings presented in the crypt, some are believed to date back to about the year 1450.

All this would appear to indicate that the Gypsies were Christians. Another statement, however, tends to qualify such a conclusion. The assertion that the shrine of Saint Sara rests upon an ancient altar dedicated to Mithra, that the Gypsies of that neighborhood who are known as "Calagues," are descended from the Iberians formerly inhabiting the Camargue, and that their cult is really the Mithraic worship of fire and water, upon which the veneration of Saint Sara is superimposed.

Many believe that confirmation of this view is the worship of fire still existing among the Gypsies of Southern Hungary although this is also characteristic of India. There are special ceremonies observed at childbirth, in order to avert evil during the period between birth and baptism. Prior to the birth of the child, the Gypsies light a fire before the mother's tent, and this fire remains until the rite of baptism has been performed. The women who light and feed the fire recite the following chant:

"Burn ye, burn ye fast, O Fire!
And guard the babe from wrathful ire
Of earthy Gnome and Water-Sprite,
Whom with thy dark smoke banish quite!
Kindly Fairies, hither fare,
And let the babe good fortune share,
Let luck attend him ever here,
Throughout his life be luck aye near!
Twigs and branches now in store,
And still of branches many more,
Give we to thy flame, O Fire!
Burn ye, burn ye, fast and high,
Hear the little baby cry!"

It is noted that the spirits of the Earth and Water here are regarded as malevolent, and only to be overcome by the superior aid of fire. These women who are believed to have learned their occult lore from the unseen powers of Earth and Water are held to be the greatest magicians of the tribe.

Moreover, the water-being is not invariably regarded as inimical, but is sometimes directly propitiated. As when a mother, to charm away convulsive crying in her child, goes through the prescribed ceremonial details, including casting a red thread into the stream and repeating the following: "Take this thread, O Water-Spirit, and take with it the crying of my child! If it gets well, I will bring thee apples and eggs!"

The water-spirit appears again in a friendly character when a man, in order to recover a stolen horse, takes his infant to a stream, and, bending over the water, asks the invisible genius to indicate, by means of the baby's hand, the direction in which the horse has been taken. These two instances demonstrate the worship of water and the watery powers. Although these rites may be ascribed to Mithraism in its later stages, they may have an earlier origin.

Joseph Glanville 's observation of a young Gypsy inspired Matthew Arnold's poem, "The Scholar-Gypsy." In his Vanity of Dogmatising (1661), Glanville states, "There was lately a lad in the University of Oxford who was, by his poverty, forced to leave his studies there, and at last to join himself to a company of vagabond Gypsies…. After he had been a pretty while exercised in the trade," this scholar-gypsy chanced to meet two of his former fellow-students, to whom he stated, "that the people he went with were not such imposters as they were taken for, but that they had a traditional kind of learning among them, and could do wonders by the powers of imagination, their fancy binding that of others; that himself had learned much of their art, and when he had compassed the whole secret, he intended," he said, "to leave their company, and give the world an account of what he had learned."

It is believed that ancient Gypsies had knowledge and exercised hypnotism. Even among modern Gypsies this power is said to be exercised. Col. Eugene De Rochas stated that the Catalan Gypsies were mesmerists and clairvoyants, and the writer Lewis Spence supposedly experienced an attempt on the part of a South Hungarian Gypsy to exert this influence.

The same power, under the name of "glamour," was formerly an attribute of the Scottish Gypsies. Glamour was defined by Sir Walter Scott as "the power of imposing on the eyesight of the spectators, so that the appearance of an object shall be totally different from the reality."

Scott in explanation of a reference to "the Gypsies' glamour'd gang," in one of his ballads, he remarks: "Besides the prophetic powers ascribed to the Gypsies in most European countries, the Scottish peasants believe them possessed of the power of throwing upon bystanders a spell to fascinate their eyes and cause them to see the thing that is not. Thus in the old ballad of 'Johnnie Faa,' the elopement of the Countess of Cassillis with a Gypsy leader is imputed to fascination—

"Sae soon as they saw her weel-faur'd face,
They cast the glamour o'er her."

Scott also relates an incident of a Gypsy who "exercised his glamour over a number of people at Haddington, to whom he exhibited a common dunghill cock, trailing, what appeared to the spectators, a massy oaken trunk. An old man passed with a cart of clover, he stopped and picked out a four-leaved blade; the eyes of the spectators were opened, and the oaken trunk appeared to be a bulrush." Supposedly the quatrefoil, owing to its cruciform shape, acted as an antidote to witchcraft. Moreover, in the face of this sign of the cross, the Gypsy had to stop exercising the unlawful art. As to the possibility of hypnotizing a crowd, or making them "to see the thing that is not," that feat has often been ascribed to African witch doctors. What is required is a dominant will on the one hand and a sufficiently plastic imagination on the other.

Scott introduces these statements among his notes on the ballad of "Christie's Will," in relation to the verse:

"He thought the warlocks o' the rosy cross,
—Had fang'd him in their nets sae fast;
Or that the Gypsies' glamour'd gang
—Had lair'd his learning at the last."

This association of the Rosicrucians with Gypsies is not inapt, for hypnotism appears to have been considered a Rosicrucian art. Scott has other suggestive references including:

"Saxo Grammaticus mentions a particular sect of Mathematicians, as he is pleased to call them, who, 'per summam ludificandorum oculorum peritiam, proprios alienosque vultus, varus rerum imaginibus, adumbraie callebant; illicibusque formis veros obscurare conspectus.' Merlin, the son of Ambrose, was particularly skilled in this art, and displays it often in the old metrical romance of Arthour and Merlin. The jongleurs were also great professors of this mystery, which has in some degree descended, with their name, on the modern jugglers."

Various societies are credited with possession, of the art of hypnotism, during the Middle Ages. Presumably, it was inherited from one common source. How much the Gypsies were associated with this power may be inferred from a Scottish Act of Parliament of the year 1579, which was directed against "the idle people calling themselves Egyptians, or any other that fancy themselves to have knowledge of prophecy, charming, or other abused sciences." For the term "charming," like "glamour" and other kindred words (e.g., "enchantment," "bewitched," "spellbound") bore reference to the mesomeric influence.

The statement made by Glanvill's scholar-gypsy would lead one to believe that the Gypsies inhabiting England in the seventeenth century possessed other branches of learning. They have always been famed for their alleged prophetic power, exercised through the medium of astrology and chiromancy or palmistry, and also by the interpretation of dreams, this last named phase being distinctly specified in Scotland in 1611. It does not appear that any modern Gypsies profess a traditional knowledge of astrology. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that the scholar Francis H. Groome was shown by a Welsh Gypsyman the form of the written charm employed by his mother in her fortune-telling, and that form was unquestionably a survival of the horoscope. Both mother and son were obviously unaware of that fact, and made no profession of astrology, but they had inherited the scheme of the horoscope from ancestors who were astrologers.

The practice of palmistry is still identified with the Gypsies, as it has been for ages. A curious belief was current in medieval times to the effect that the Three Kings or Magi who came to Bethlehem were Gypsies, and in more than one religious play they were represented as telling the fortunes of the Holy Family by means of palmistry. This circumstance evoked the following suggestive remarks from Charles Godfrey Leland.

"As for the connection of the Three Kings with Gypsies, it is plain enough. Gypsies were from the East; Rome and the world abounded in wandering Chaldean magi-priests, and the researches which I am making have led me to a firm conclusion that the Gypsy lore of Hungary and South Slavonia has a very original character as being, firstly, though derived from India, not Aryan, but Shamanic, that is, of an Altaic, or Tartar, or 'Turanian' stock…. Secondly, this was the old Chaldean-Accadian 'wisdom' or sorcery. Thirdly—and this deserves serious examination—it was also the old Etruscan religion whose magic formulas were transmitted to the Romans….

"The Venetian witchcraft, as set forth by Bernoni, is evidently of Slavic-Greek origin. That of the Romagna is Etruscan, agreeing very strangely and closely with the Chaldean magic of Lenormant, and marvelously like the Gypsies'. It does not, when carefully sifted, seem to be like that of the Aryans…. nor is it Semitic. To what degree some idea of all this, and of Gypsy connection with it, penetrated among the people and filtered down, even into the Middle Ages, no one can say. But it is very probable that through the centuries there came together some report of the common origin of Gypsy and 'Eastern' or Chaldean lore, for since it was the same, there is no reason why a knowledge of the truth should not have been disseminated in a time of a traditions and earnest study in occultism."

These surmises on the part of a keen and accomplished student of every phase of magic, written and unwritten, are deserving of the fullest consideration. By following the line indicated by Leland it may be possible to reach an identification of the "traditional kind of learning" possessed by the Gypsies in the seventeenth century.

Leland also identified the gypsy language Shelta (as distinct from Romany) surviving in Ireland.

Gypsies have also been noted for their folk music, especially for the Flamenco style surviving in Andalucia (Spain).