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
The magic of the gypsies is not all deceit, though they deceive with
it. They put faith themselves in their incantations, and practise
them on their own account. "And they believe that there are women,
and sometimes men, who possess supernatural power, partly inherited
and partly acquired." The last of seven daughters born in succession,
without a boy's coming into the series, is wonderfully gifted, for
she can see hidden treasure or spirits, or enjoy second sight of many
things invisible to men. And the same holds good for the ninth in a
series of boys, who may become a seer of the same sort. Such a girl,
i.e., a seventh daughter, being a fortune in herself, never lacks
lovers. In 1883 the young Vojvode, or leader, of the Kukaya gypsy
tribe, named Danku Niculai, offered the old gypsy woman, Pale Boshe,
one hundred ducats if she would persuade her seventh daughter to
marry him. In the United States of America there are many women who
advertise in the newspapers that they also are seventh daughters
of seventh daughters at that, and who make a good thing of it as
fortune-tellers; but they have a far more speedy, economical, and
effective way of becoming the last note in an octave, than by awaiting
the slow processes of being begotten or born, inasmuch as they boldly
declare themselves to be sevenths, which I am assured answers every
purpose, as nobody ever asks to see their certificates of baptism
any more than of marriage. [7]
Most of these witch-wives--also known in Hungary as cohalyi, or "wise
women," or gule romni, "sweet" or "charming women"--are trained up
from infancy by their mothers in medicine and magic. A great part
of this education consists in getting by heart the incantations or
formulas of which specimens will be given anon, and which, in common
with their fairy tales, show intrinsic evidence of having been drawn
at no very distant period from India, and probably in common with
the lower or Shamanic religion of India from Turanian sources. But
there is among the Hungarian gypsies a class of female magicians who
stand far above their sisters of the hidden spell in power. These
are the lace romni, or "good women," who draw their power directly
from the Nivasi or Pchuvusi, the spirits of water and earth, or of
flood and fell. For the Hungarian gypsies have a beautiful mythology
of their own which at first sight would seem to be a composition of
the Rosicrucian as set forth by Paracelsus and the Comte de Gabalis,
with the exquisite Indo-Teutonic fairy tales of the Middle Ages. In
fact, in some of the incantations used we find the Urme, or fairies,
directly appealed to for help.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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