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
V. Magic is the production of that which is not measured by the
capacity of the conscious working will. The dream spirit, or that
which knows all our memories, and which combines, blends, separates,
scatters, unites, confuses, intensifies, beautifies, or makes terrible
all the persons, scenes, acts, events, tragedies, or comedies known
to us, can, if it pleases, by instantaneous reasoning or intuition,
perceive what waking common sense does not. We visit a sick man, and
the dream spirit, out of the inexhaustible hoards of memory aided by
association, which results in subtle, occult reasoning, perceives that
the patient will die in a certain time, and this result is served up
in a dramatic dream. The amount of miracles, mysteries, apparitions,
omens, and theurgia which the action of these latent faculties cause,
or seem to cause, is simply illimitable, for no man knows how much he
knows. Few, indeed, are the ordinary well-educated Europeans of average
experience of life, whose memories are not inexhaustible encyclopædias,
and whose intellects are not infinite; if all that is really in them
could be wakened from slumber, "know thyself" would mean "know the
universe." Now, there are people who, without being able to say why,
are often inspired by this power which intuitively divines or guesses
without revealing the process to common sense. They look into the
eye of a person--something in glances and tones, gestures, mien, and
address, suggests at once an assertion or a prediction which proves to
be true. 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. When we think of what we
might be if we could master ourselves, and call on the vast sea of
knowledge which is in the brain of every one who reads these lines,
to give strict reckoning of its every wave and every drop of water,
and every shell, pebble, wreck, weed, or grain of sand over which it
rolls, and withal master the forces which make its tides and storms,
then we may comprehend that all the wonder-working power attributed
to all the sorcerers of olden time was nothing compared to what we
really have within us.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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