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

by Patrick Jasper Lee

  In attempting to understand the Bari Hukni, it is necessary to understand some of its magical implications for the gypsies, which are given in the number seven. Many researchers have been baffled by the very precise length of time the gypsies chose to remain wandering in Europe and it is often assumed that they simply chose the number seven at random, as part of their own trickery and deceit. But why seven years? Why not four years, or 16 years? It is obvious that they could not retreat back whence they came, so were bound to spend longer than seven years wandering the new continent; moreover, by announcing this number publicly, were they not doing themselves a disservice by giving themselves limitations? What would happen when the seven years had expired?

  For the gypsies who were working with the Bari Hukni, the number seven would have been far more important than the content of the exercise! Seven is a powerfully magical number, and extremely lucky, if used in the right way, and the Bari Hukni was therefore also a spell, probably cast by some of the cleverer Chovihanos within the tribes. Those seven years were certainly lucky, for during that time the gypsies received a warm welcome and plenty of alms.

  But dark clouds were spreading across Europe, blackening and taming the once colourful, once wild and once free nature of this beautiful continent, and their magic was strong. According to the old gypsies, Europe became enchanted by bad gaujo sorcerers. She had fallen under a spell - which has in fact lasted for hundreds of years. Chovihanos, female Chovihanis and elders would have frequently worked their own spells as antidotes and would have ensured that correct information about the gaujos and this great enchantment were passed down to successive generations of children as the tribes travelled on across the land. But the seven years turned into 70 years, and then into 270 years, until today we can see that Europe is still enchanted, still waiting to be set free.

  Where the gypsies’ wandering is concerned, an interesting point arises concerning the word ‘travel’, as it dates approximately from the fourteenth century and was always associated with hard work, or a painful effort, being originally related to the Old French travailler, which in turn was related to an earlier word implying an instrument of torture! Travelling large distances in those days when roads were almost non-existent might well be something you would describe as ‘torture’. From the formation of this word, we may also see that the gypsies would not have been known simply as ‘travellers’ in those days, for in fourteenth-century Europe - providing you wanted to remain respectable, rather than being known as a mere itinerant - you could only be a ‘pilgrim’. This was the age of the Crusades, the age when you walked hundreds of miles, dutifully, just to visit a holy shrine, and were tolerated, admired and given alms for doing so, whoever you might be. In his Dictionary of Word Origins John Ayto gives ‘pilgrim’ as a word being used back in the thirteenth century for traveller: ‘one who journeys for specific purposes’. People continued to journey for specific and very religious purposes for a further 200 years - all, perhaps, except the gypsies, whose idea of journeying was still attached to the old nomadic cycles structured by the Earth’s seasons, a structure already largely extinct in Europe.

  So when in the early fifteenth century a European official looked at the strange dark-skinned sherrengro, or Romani chief, with the battered hat and the even stranger colourful cloaks and robes, and asked him where he and his savage-looking people had come from, the chief was expected to say that they were all pilgrims - which he did - and that they were all Christians - which he did - and that they had all changed their primitive and heathen ways in favour of following the true religion. Then he received a reassuring slap on the back and was given alms together with a pass giving him and his people permission to remain and wander in the respective country.

  The passes the gypsies were given were presumed to be legal documents from people in high authority, including Pope Martin V. It is possible that they could have been forged. But historical evidence shows that the gypsies were welcomed in Europe and given alms, so whether these passes were authentic or forged, we can be assured that the gypsies were more welcome in Europe at this time than at any future date in their wanderings there.

  The chiefs were able to settle their people in the many sprawling forests of this new continent by now, allowing them to roam freely in great bands across the new uninhabited wildernesses where they could practise their ancient customs in peace, as they had always done. On the face of it the Romanies appeared to have mended their heathen ways - but they had no intention of changing anything.

  The realization soon came that they only wanted to live their own lives and mind their own business - which in these times would have been considered to be outside the law - and so tolerance wore thin. All this was so different from the laws of the caste system back home in India where tribes were expected to keep themselves to themselves. Now, when a Romani gypsy was found by the common people in the forests whenever healing, magical guidance or a herbal potion was needed, this infuriated the authorities. The dark clouds quickly began to gather around the gypsies as chroniclers, the press of the day, began their savage attack, labelling the gypsies as outcasts, thieves, beggars, charlatans and confidence tricksters. These labels, which were designed to turn the common people against the gypsies, echoed all across Europe and have stuck to the present day, constituting an unfair burden, which the gypsies have long had to carry.

  Tragically, this ignorant attitude eventually led to further persecution and slavery throughout the whole of Europe, particularly eastern Europe, where Romani men, women and children were auctioned and kept in chains even up to the middle of the nineteenth century, and where in the German Reich in World War II between a quarter and a half a million Romani gypsies were put to death in concentration camps. Sadly, persecution of the Romani race still goes on in many parts of Europe today.

  Having landed in Britain at the very end of the fifteenth century, by the sixteenth century Romani gypsies had arrived in vast numbers, which was when persecution of them in Britain reached its height, particularly under Henry VIII, under whose rule it became unlawful even to be a gypsy! But the gypsies were to remain in the woodlands of Britain for the next 500 years, practising their magic, a deep mystery to the rest of the population. In fact, for approximately 400 of those 500 years the ordinary person in the streets of Britain thought of gypsies as being powerful supernatural beings.

  My grandmother had told me that Jack Lee said it used to be auspicious for the common person to make contact with a true Romani gypsy, for this native had powers which could link the common person to the Great Beyond. This is a somewhat different picture from that given by many history books, which have usually drawn information from the scaremongering Christian chroniclers who always made a feast out of attacking anything, which appeared not to conform.

  I believe Romani gypsies enjoyed a better reputation than we might suppose in many areas of Britain, particularly among the ordinary people, but that the ‘bad’ picture gradually filtered through to our present age because of a social offloading which needed to be done by society, unfortunately an offloading which only took place because the gypsies happened to be in that place at that time. Thus, the once helpful, once useful and once likeable wild people of our British woodlands, who cherished and guarded the trees, became the social outcasts we still know as ‘gypsies’ today.

  By the sixteenth century the Romanies were well and truly ‘gypsy’. They had been ‘Egyptian’ (up until the early twentieth century), ‘Gipcyan’, ‘Gipsen’ and in more recent times ‘Gippo’! In other countries they were to become ‘Gitan’, ‘Tsigan’, ‘Bohemian’ and a host of other names. India was now well and truly history; India had been forgotten, as had the miserable trek across Asia in those turbulent years. Now, instead, gypsies told fantastic tales of Egypt and pilgrims, embellishing the story with scenes of fairy-tale castles in the sky, and witches and fairies under the ground, which the common person would listen to with great wonder, for stories like this were not told any more. />
  Were the gypsies again telling lies? It is quite natural for us to assume so, but their truth has always been something which the modern mind finds hard to comprehend, and certainly difficult to tolerate. The gypsies’ definition of truth and lies springs fundamentally from another place in another era when humans lived by different values and walked the Earth in a very different way. And whether in the fifteenth century or indeed the twentieth century, we often find the Romani gypsy using the same kind of language, embroidering a tale with so-called ‘fantasy’, when they are more often than not simply drawing from their own ancient legends and folk tales, simply telling the truthful story of their culture’s past as seen through their eyes.

  It seems that much of an ancient culture can be preserved when a people separate themselves from mainstream society whilst maintaining and practising their ancient traditions at the same time. It is, however, important when speaking of people who separate themselves from society to make clear the distinction between Romani gypsies and a variety of other so-called social outcasts, for there are many people in our own society who are often confused with true Romani gypsies, particularly those we may term ‘drop-out’, ‘hippy’, ‘rebel’, ‘tramp’, ‘New Age traveller’, and even the homeless. All these may be as much gaujo to the true Romani as those other gaujos who constitute the bulk of civilized society. The Romani race needs always to be seen as an ancient race in its own right.

  Unfortunately, in more modern times, the old magical ways kept alive by the social interaction within gypsy tribes and between gypsies and gaujos seem to have died completely, as has happened in many tribal cultures all over the world. Many gypsies no longer value what went on in their past; in fact, they are hard pushed even to remember what went on in their own grandparents’ time, for their grandparents and great-grandparents have usually preferred to take their ancient knowledge to the grave than hand age-old knowledge over to those who may well abuse it. This is quite understandable in many respects, for many modern Romanies would indeed not respect their culture’s knowledge, and so true Romanies who still carry the old magical ways are increasingly difficult to find.

  I believe that back in those earlier centuries in Europe people still had an instinctive memory of their own primitive tribal past. Colonization of the West would, after all, only truly begin in the sixteenth century, so between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries people were not so disconnected from their ancient past as they are today. Even so, to the British and Europeans of the Middle Ages this distant past was beginning to seem more and more like a half-remembered dream. Folk tales and tradition still provided the connection to it, although it was becoming increasingly difficult to find anything from the ancient world, which had not been relabelled or disfigured by Christian symbolism. Thus today we believe that many customs and traditions are in essence Christian when the vast majority of these had their beginnings in an earlier age. The Romani gypsies, with their stubborn tendency to cling to ancient traditions, provided a vital link with the primitive past and refreshing glimpses into the old Otherworld.

  And a gypsy might have said, in an English market-place, in the eighteenth century: ‘In the beginning there was Kam, the sun, a great gypsy king who madly pursued Shon, the moon, his beautiful sister in the sky. She had to keep evading him because if he caught her they would have an incestuous relationship, so she slipped silently over the horizon out of sight by the time he rose each morning. But one day he did catch her and they fought for a while but then made love, which caused a darkness to spread over the Earth. And this union results in the birth of the gypsy race.’ And he may have nodded, adding, ‘Yes, that is where we gypsies come from.’

  Perhaps his listener’s eyes were wide. She wanted to believe him because he told this tale with such conviction. It brought comfort to her, for she knew this was the kind of tale that would have nourished all her ancestors in the past and she so longed to believe the way he believed. But officialdom had long put it about that these tales could not be found in the Bible and could therefore only be related by those who were ‘wicked’, those who were sorcerers and wizards and ‘ventriloquists’, people who conversed with spirits, those who were in fact practising the work of the Devil.

  All this greatly confused the gypsy, for he knew that his tale was anything but an untruth, anything but wicked; it was something his ancestors had been handing down for many centuries and was simply the story of all his people.

  From where we are all standing in the modern world today it may be difficult for many to perceive the Romani gypsy mind as it has been over the last few hundred years. The fact that more people are attracted to studying tribal ways of life these days certainly helps us step closer to this ancient nomad, though, and slowly the Romani gypsy can at last begin to emerge from a particularly dark past, as a member of a tribal people worthy of recognition.

  Today, people have a need to believe in the old myths and this came home to me in a big way when the 1999 solar eclipse took place, which I called ‘the sacred marriage of Kam and Shon’. So many people who were aware of this beautiful old Romani story of our spiritual mother and father mating in the sky experienced distinct changes in their lives at that time and this itself helps to link them to a primitive past, for they are thinking in the very same way that their ancestors would have thought. Those who looked at the eclipse taking place were in danger of subjecting themselves to bad luck, whilst those who respected what was going on up in the heavens and who didn’t watch were soon enjoying good luck. Reports reached me of various ‘good luck’ and ‘bad luck’ stories, which I saw as a positive sign, for people were beginning, once again, to harness the essence of an old myth to everyday life and to see it as a powerful source of magic.

  It is this simple act of belief, which ultimately connects us to a more natural and what we might call a more primitive way of relating to each other and the Earth. There is magic happening all around us in the signs and symbols, which regularly cut across our paths every day, if only we care to look and see what is there. And if we practise looking for signs or omens about our future, every day, we will soon make a habit of it, which is exactly what the old gypsies would have done.

  Finding a small acorn, for instance, is a powerful symbol, if it is on your path. Your foot might kick it, but pick that acorn up, put in into your pocket and carry it with you. Then ask yourself what you were thinking when your foot touched that acorn. Were you thinking about a dream you have? The acorn symbolizes the oak, and greater things, so by picking the acorn up you are giving yourself its potential, the potential for ‘it’ to become something greater than it is, be it good or bad.

  There are far too many examples of what it means to find symbols and omens to go into here - this must be reserved for another book - but by training yourself to work in this way, you are doing what the old gypsies did, and you are reaching the core of that primitive psychology which all old gypsies retained over the centuries and which ultimately helped them retain their traditions to this day.

  The Kam and Shon myth is a particularly powerful omen, as the sun and moon are powerful spiritual beings to the gypsies and they are with us all the time. We all know that a red sky at night can mean ‘a shepherd’s delight’ - fine weather the next day - meaning that we can get out and do things, and we have remembered that, but equally we need to remember how a new moon can give us a boost of energy for the dreams we wish to fulfil and can therefore mean that we can work well at what we are trying to achieve if only we try.

  The solar eclipse of 1999, I knew, was a powerful omen for marking the rebirth of the gypsy culture and this rebirth is happening, as more and more people over the last few years have started to take my culture far more seriously, although because by its very nature the ancient Romani culture is mysterious and secretive, there have been those who have ‘cashed in’, calling the gypsy culture their own, due to a need to belong. My hope is that more people will respect and honour it now and will not feel the need to preten
d that they are gypsies - or even Chovihanos - when they are not. Practising any culture with respect and certainly without greed and ownership is something all of us have to learn when studying any primitive culture anywhere in the world.

  So if there is any one thing which helped to preserve the gypsies as a race, it is their ability to understand and practise constructive magic, and to keep practising it behind closed doors, throughout their many centuries of wandering. Many will say that they acquired their magic and healing ability from other cultures, but I believe this is often the other way about, for I have sometimes had little or no experience of other cultures, only to learn that traditions being practised by some of the more modern religions are very Romani in essence. There are many similarities in pagan traditions and in spiritualist traditions, and I feel that the Romani gypsies, having carried their own traditions across Asia and into Europe, may well have contributed much of their own culture to others on their travels over the centuries, particularly as they have always practised traditions in their pure form.

  Certainly, the gypsies’ ability to absorb other languages and encounter other traditions of the countries they passed through without losing their own, over an extraordinary length of time, is a quite remarkable exercise in itself. In Britain, the rest of Europe, and indeed the rest of the world, many Romani gypsies now profess to be Christians, but they are also just as likely to practise Hindu-flavoured traditions as well, traditions which they undoubtedly carried with them from India. But if we dig deeper into their psyche we discover underneath the foundations of what they have been in their tribal/animist past. It is like stripping away layers, only to find that the bottom layer is as primitive as it has always been. It is somehow as if the gypsies made a pact with their tribal identity never to forget who they truly were. For so long they were considered to have no religion and no real spiritual identity. They have said themselves that when prophets of old were writing down the laws of their religions on stone, wood and paper, the Romanies wrote theirs on cabbage leaves, which were promptly eaten by a passing donkey, so they could therefore no longer remember what their own religion was supposed to be!