Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune Telling: Illustrated by numerous incantations, specimens of medical magic, anecdotes and talesLeland, Charles Godfrey
History
Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune Telling: Illustrated by numerous incantations, specimens of medical magic, anecdotes and tales
Leland, Charles Godfrey
Fortune-telling; Magic, Romani; Romanies
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. I myself knew a small boy who had, as he sincerely
believed, such a companion, whom he called Bill, and when he could
not understand his lessons he consulted the mysterious William, who
explained them to him. There are children who, by the voluntary or
involuntary exercise of visual perception or volitional eye-memory,
[3] reproduce or create images which they imagine to be real, and this
faculty is much commoner than is supposed. In fact I believe that where
it exists in most remarkable degrees the adults to whom the children
describe their visions dismiss them as "fancies" or falsehoods. Even
in the very extraordinary cases recorded by Professor Hale, in which
little children formed for themselves spontaneously a language in
which they conversed fluently, neither their parents nor anybody else
appears to have taken the least interest in the matter. 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. All of this I believe might have taken place,
or really did take place, in the very dawn of man's existence as
a rational creature--that as soon as "the frontal convolution of
the brain which monkeys do not possess," had begun with the "genial
tubercule," essential to language, to develop itself, then also certain
other convolutions and tubercules, not as yet discovered, but which
ad interim I will call "the ghost-making," began to act. "Genial,"
they certainly were not--little joy and much sorrow has man got out of
his spectro-facient apparatus--perhaps if it and talk are correlative
he might as well, many a time, have been better off if he were dumb.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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