We Borrow the Earth: An Intimate Portrait of the Gypsy Folk Tradition and Culture

by Patrick Jasper Lee

Whilst I was a child, many gypsies around us were beginning to turn to the Christian religion to satisfy their spiritual needs as their old magic was beginning to fade, but fortunately for me this did not happen in my own community and we retained our unique Romani gypsy spirit throughout. If the ancient flavour of that spirit hadn’t been preserved, I know I would never have developed my Chovihano skills in the way that I have. Thus cocooned from the rest of society as a child, this ancient spirit was able to flourish within me, untarnished and unimpaired.

  Under the influence of my elders, then, I learned to hear the robin sing and the raindrops patting the leaves outside the window, or the dog barking somewhere, no matter how distant it happened to be. I learned to look beyond rainbows, to believe in fairy-tale castles, and to understand the language of bees and trees and buttercups and all manner of natural living things. As poetic as all this sounds, it is a gypsy truth. Looking beyond the obvious is something gaujos do not teach their children. Watching people in cafés or in the street without even turning round, that is the kind of observation that all ancient people would have practised - to see without looking, to hear without listening. It is an art that might be dismissed as sheer nosiness today.

  I learned all these things, and more, from my family. I remember my childhood as on occasion being like a magical adventure. There was always music and laughter in the house, and we had many musical instruments scattered around, which my father boasted he could play, though of course he couldn’t play all of them! That did not mean that he or anyone else played badly. Some people are under the misapprehension that Romani gypsies sit around their campfires playing any old how, but the truth is very different. Both my brother and I were trained to be good musicians simply by being teased and told the truth if we weren’t playing well. It was good to be a child during these musical evenings, because every adult was a child as well, and I know of no other people who entertain themselves so openly and so humorously as the Romanies, because self-consciousness is rarely an issue for them. Yet their musical world is invariably also an artistically precise world, a world in which if you are doing anything you might as well do it well.

  Because of the ancient skills I was developing, Jack and Gladdy Lee kept a close eye on me and soon observed that at times my behaviour was erratic, with strong mood swings. I was also highly creative, especially with music, and was also developing the desire to draw, paint and write. I was suffering from what was later to be described as a hormone imbalance. To the gypsy mind this meant that I probably had access to a deeper understanding; to the gaujo mind it meant that I was simply odd! These ‘problems’, to my elders, were omens, signs that I was treading a distinctive path and was destined to do something unusual.

  I eventually emerged from my school years without a single certificate and was told by my teachers that I was a no-hoper. Clearly, though, I was destined for a different kind of path and I knew without doubt that that was more important. I was encouraged from the beginning to see Earth as the best teacher and in addition was taught the old gypsy arts of surviving the gaujo world, much of which involved surviving the world outside your door emotionally. The first rule for any developing youngster in our modern society is to remember that the world outside is probably going to take you for a ride!

  To become a man or a woman in gypsy society you will be asked to face the horrors of the civilized world outside. This is equivalent to entering a large pool filled with hungry crocodiles. Are you courageous or are you afraid? You can avoid being the victim if you hold on to your true inner heritage, so you are encouraged to live in the modern world whilst at the same time not allowing yourself to be sucked into it, so that the Romani values are not forgotten. To become a Chovihano, you will be expected to take on the workings of the Otherworld as well, and to understand the transition in life from birth to death and all the complex lessons held therein.

  This ‘initiation’ has its roots in a much earlier period when the modern Western world was in its infancy and when humans began modifying Earth-based traditions in order to suit civilized needs. The test of endurance may or may not be an ancient one, but it has certainly developed as modern civilization has developed: it is the traditional Romani way of constructively fighting what is considered to be an unlucky darker force which is opposing the natural order of things, so that it becomes possible to understand it and live with it more easily.

  In this way, for many centuries, it was as if the Romanies were behaving as if the Western world was only just being created. They were constantly reminding themselves that the civilized way was not the natural ancient nomadic way, and so they encouraged their youngsters to walk out and face the civilized way, preparing them for its obvious perils.

  Today, the perils of civilized living may be a test for all of us, even though we don’t know it, but perhaps the Romani gypsy is able to see those more clearly than most because of having lived, deliberately, on the fringes of society for so long.

  I had one of my greatest lessons around this theme when I once watched my father in a courtroom, cleverly twisting a whole case around so that he was finally cleared, even though he was partially to blame within the eyes of the law for what had happened - a problem over some land - and the plaintiff was not a lover of Gypsies. I will never forget my father’s courage, his wit and the sparkle in his eye when he came out of that courtroom. A gypsy still carries the fear that if a gypsy and a gaujo are in a court of law together, the gypsy will come off worse. But what I retained from that experience was not civilized law’s attempts to demonstrate a human being’s rights to land ownership, but my father’s guts and honesty; in so many words he was trying to tell everyone that we might do better to borrow rather than own the Earth. He happened to be very clever with words, and amusingly expressive, so the court could only warm to him.

  Sadly, as time passed, I saw my father slowly lose this spark, and echoing down the years I could hear my boro dad, my great-grandfather, speaking of the curse, how civilization would claim the soul of every nomadic gypsy - and indeed every single tribesperson - in the end. It had been a very real fear for him and I know it was something my grandmother also feared. Today, when every bit of land is accounted for, and quickly gobbled up, communities like those who were at Dale Farm in Essex - which gained international publicity when its residents were evicted in October 2011 - are bound to bear the brunt of this and they suffer greatly. It has always been beyond the power of the natural gypsy to control. The Children of the Wind and the Earth have fast become the Children of Civilization, like other tribal people everywhere who have also, by degrees, not only lost their lands but who have become extinct.

  At the beginning my father had had that strong Romani gypsy fire burning within him. He had nearly been named ‘Gus’, after the artist and friend of the gypsies, Augustus John, or ‘Sir Gus’, as they had called him. This had been Jack Lee’s idea, as he often spoke highly of the man, known personally to a few of my relations in Wales, but my father somehow ended up as Walter and slowly, as he grew older, his fire burned down. He contracted throat cancer at around the age of 55 and although he was cured, afterwards he was never the same. At this time, other members of the family were still clinging on to the old ways, the old ideas, but I could see, perhaps more than they, that only the ashes remained of our once colourful and quite powerful culture.

  It is a fact that indigenous peoples, or those who have lived within an ancient tribal-based community, will suffer more from being pushed too quickly into the modern world than perhaps those who have become acclimatized to such a world over a longer period of time. Suicides, mental problems, alcohol and drug abuse and depression can result as people are forced into sacrificing their ancient and dependable way of life.

  Romani gypsies may have suffered a little less where this is concerned because of being clever at keeping themselves to themselves. They are in fact sometimes condemned for wishing to separate themselves from the rest of the world, but this happens because they think di
fferently. It can, however, inevitably bring a great sense of isolation, particularly when families break down, and individuals suddenly find themselves alone.

  There was certainly an undeniable feeling of ‘us and them’ when I was a child and I was often encouraged by my elders not to get too close to outsiders. It was true that if other children knew too much about your roots they were quick to condemn you and more than once I was savagely attacked by another boy who bullied me. I would also find myself standing in front of a whole room full of children at school, being made to use counters by an unsympathetic mathematics teacher, an experience designed to be humiliating - for I was 14 years old at the time and my teacher should have known better. Perhaps this man was repaying me for making fun of his lesson. ‘How many pips are there in an orange?’ I once boldly asked him. He would grab me by the collar at times like these and shake me, and as he stared at me with frustration I could see in his eyes that he was thinking me simply not worth the time. On other occasions I would be happily playing with a group of gaujo children when suddenly a strange feeling would overwhelm me, a feeling of being somehow out of my depth, and I would become paralysed and stand very still with my eyes wide, staring hard at those about me, until I would suddenly bolt off at high speed, away from them. I naturally gained a reputation for being strange. These kinds of experience perhaps constituted the downside of a gypsy childhood.

  At the end of the day it was often the case that I had more confidence than other children, if only because I was convinced that this was not the real world, or the real life. I had always been taught that the material gaujo world was the ‘shadow’ world and that the world of the unseen, the world of the imagination and of fairy-tale castles, was the more real. In fact, the older I grew, the more I believed this.

  The greatest highlight of my early childhood, however, was the time I spent with my grandmother and great-grandfather and the occasions when I was honoured to witness them practising the old ways. Jack Lee was clever, observant, funny and patient with children, and he was intuitive to a high degree. One had the feeling that he constantly kept some kind of antenna waving around on the top of his head, given the way he could perceive what was going on within the minds and hearts, and usually the very souls, of most individuals. He looked into you with his dark eyes, rather than at you.

  My most vivid memory of him will always be watching him at a traditional ritual, which I was encouraged to observe due to the fact that I might be practising the same thing one day. I remember the darkened room, the atmosphere created by the warm candlelight and the ecstatic feeling. I remember my great-grandfather burning things in the flame of the candle: paper, and sometimes pieces of material, which formed the workings of a spell, while he muttered to himself in the Romani language. These were activities I did not always understand when I was young, but I remember giggling, which was allowed, not purely because I was a child, but because most adults giggled too. Nothing was ever that serious; even Jack Lee referred to himself as the ‘old Chovihano’ in a light-hearted way, although everyone around him treated him and his work with the greatest respect.

  He obviously carried a much heavier weight inside himself, which I was not to fully appreciate or understand until a much later date.

  During these sessions as a child I felt myself to be half in and half out of these strange but comforting scenes. We were cocooned in timelessness, difficult to understand unless you have experienced the closeness of a community that practises ancient traditions. The feeling of being woven into a reliable and harmonious tapestry that has existed for thousands of years, and being empowered by this, is hard for many to comprehend, but the best analogy I can give is that of a continuously flowing river, for none of the parts of a river can be separated; those parts that are ahead of you and those parts that are far behind you are inseparable, and all are very much a part of what you are yourself at this moment in time. It is the essence of the river that you are experiencing, like the spirit of water itself. It can run through and within and around, and there is nowhere it cannot be. This is exactly what we were as a clan, or tribe. The clan’s essence seeped into all of us and bound us all together.

  Part of this great essence was the Otherworld itself, a place where you could live, and where you found dragons and giants and fairy people and castles and great vast landscapes of extraordinary dimensions: things you could never find in the so-called ‘real’ world. The Otherworld was a place where absolutely everything started and finished, whose essence was indeed creation and life-force at its most profound level.

  All this strengthened me as a child. It might be said that if you subject a growing child to too much fantasy, that child may not be able to survive in the real world when it comes to living in it as an adult. I do not believe that this is so. The world of the imagination is a world yet to be understood, for it has yet to be rescued from the slumbering depths of the harsh worlds we have created around material themes. The Romani gypsies always worked very differently where the imagination was concerned, schooling their children in how to use it, so that by the time you were fully grown you were able to use it constructively, rather than ignoring and fearing it, and indeed growing out of it.

  Perhaps my greatest challenge in childhood was in facing the changes, which came upon my family as its bonds weakened with the passing of Jack and Gladdy Lee, who undoubtedly held the family together. The memories always remained strong, however, and there was much for me to do in the future since I had stepped on to that very special path which many before me had walked for thousands of years. It was quite a responsibility and had to be respected and protected if I was to preserve its power.

  I never wanted to let Jack Lee down, so armed and ready, I took what I had learned in my Romani gypsy childhood and walked out into the adult world.

  Chapter Two

  THE DARK PAST

  Where Did the Gypsies Come From?

  Many gypsies, even in more recent times, have not been able to say where they originally came from. In the past they have been inclined to reel off the kind of story they think a listener wishes to hear, however fantastic. Inevitably, this has frustrated those who have not taken the time to understand the workings of the Romani gypsy mind, which may appear to be complex but is in fact imaginative and childlike in its psychological make-up.

  This simplicity proved to be an asset in the past for a people who have so often needed to shrug off the negative labels, which have been unfairly attached to them. There is a reason for the gypsies’ ‘obsession’ with stories and fantasy, though, and reasons why they have been shrouded in the mists of a particularly mysterious and dark past.

  Gypsies earned many titles on their travels through different lands, including the Children of Ancient Egypt, Children of the Wind, or of the Earth, and were variously described as the survivors of Atlantis, or the descendants of a royal house in Asia Minor. It was in fact common for many of the old Lees to boast that they had royal blood. They often claimed to be the aristocrats of the gypsy race, for they had ‘breeding’, and more class, or so they said. Jack and Gladdy Lee always echoed this, instilling in me a pride about myself and a quality about everything I do. Yet no documented history was ever written by the Romani gypsies themselves, as everything was always passed down from generation to generation; indeed, the Romanies have no written language, which has of course only served to deepen their mystery.

  This also has a negative side, and many have jumped on the bandwagon where the Romani past is concerned, leading to all kinds of fantastic stories, at least more fantastic than any of the Romanies themselves could create. Many pagans attach a neo-pagan past to Romani gypsies, which is unfounded and simply not true. In fact, Romanies never called themselves ‘pagans’, or even ‘shamans’. Our culture does not include any of the Celtic gods or rituals which neo-pagans are so familiar with; it identifies far more with Hinduism.

  The study of Romanes, the gypsy tongue, has so far provided the most reliable clue to the gypsies
’ origins, placing their homeland in north-west India. It has also been possible to trace the route they were purported to travel through Asia to Europe through the many ‘borrowed’ words which have entered their language. In addition to this, the gypsies’ characteristics, style of dress and their affinity with aspects of the Hindu religion have brought gypsiologists and researchers to the same conclusion: Romanies are in essence Indian, or even ancient Persian, as some Iranian words are also used within the language.

  Opinions vary, however, as to why the gypsies might have left their homeland. Some authorities claim they left during the ninth or tenth centuries AD during various periods of unrest; others claim they left later than this, or even earlier. What most tend to agree upon is that the gypsies left India voluntarily, even though there is no evidence to support this. Personally, I have never believed that they came out of India of their own free will. Nomads, be they of human or animal origin, live by following, year in, year out, a seasonal circuit, which takes them to places where food and water will be readily available. They do not deviate from this structured path, as life can hang in the balance if you do not have food or water. Only if these essentials are not available will nomadic wanderers veer off their familiar routes. Therefore, there seems to me no sound reason why a race as simple as the Romani people, people who are neither adventurous nor conquering, should suddenly want to embark upon one of the longest migrations ever undertaken by human beings, risking life and limb crossing vast deserts and unchartered terrain where food and water would be scarce. All this for a whim, and where exactly were they going anyway?

  We may travel fairly easily today, with backpacks, by train, car, bus and plane, purely to see the sights, with modern amenities peppering our route. But these people were covering thousands of miles, mostly on foot, with the horse, mule or donkey as their most efficient, and fastest, means of transport - and an animal also had to be fed and watered whilst travelling such vast distances.