Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune Telling: Illustrated by numerous incantations, specimens of medical magic, anecdotes and talesLeland, Charles Godfrey
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Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune Telling: Illustrated by numerous incantations, specimens of medical magic, anecdotes and tales
Leland, Charles Godfrey
Fortune-telling; Magic, Romani; Romanies
Now this Dream Artist is, to judge by his works, a very different
kind of a person from Me. We are not sympathetic, and herein lies a
great and serious subject of study. "Dreams," says a writer, "are the
novels which we read when we are fast asleep," and, at the risk of
receiving punishment, I declare that my writer belongs to a school of
novelists with which I have no feelings in common. If, as everybody
assumes, it is always I who dream--only using other material--how
is it that I always invariably disagree with, thwart, contradict,
vex, and mock myself? I had rather be hanged and be done with it,
before I would wrong my worst enemy with such pitiful, silly, degrading
dreams and long-forgotten follies, as I am called on to endure. If this
alter-ego were a lunatic, he could not be a more thoroughly uncongenial
inmate of my brain than he often is. Our characters are radically
different. Why has he a mind so utterly unlike mine? His tastes,
his thoughts, dispositions, and petty peculiarities are all unlike
mine. If we belonged to the same club, I should never talk with him.
Now we are coming to our Witchcraft. This alter-ego does not confine
himself to dreams. A lunatic is a man who dreams wide-awake. He
has lost his will or the controlling power resulting from the just
co-relation of brain forces. Then the stored-up images stray out
and blend. I have dreamed of telling or seeing things and of acting
them at the same time. A fish and a watch and a man may seem to be
the same thing at once in a dream, as they often are to a waking
lunatic. A poet is a man who dreams wide-awake; but he can guide
his dreams or imaginings to symmetrical form, and to a logical
conclusion or coherence. With the painter and sculptor it is the
same. When the alter-ego works harmoniously with the waking will,
we call it Imagination.
But when the alter-ego draws decidedly on latent forces, or powers
unknown to the waking Me, I am amazed. He does it often enough,
that is certain. Then we have Mystery. And it is out of this that
men have drawn the conclusion that they have two or three souls--an
astral spirit, a power of prophecy, the art of leaving the body,
and the entire machinery of occultism. Physiology is probably on the
high road to explain it all, but as yet it is not explained.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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