To the Chovihano, every small pocket of the universe is alive and personalized, a global network of powerful signals being broadcast around us every single minute of every single day. Of course we have telephones, televisions, computers and other sophisticated forms of communicative equipment, but even if these were taken away there would still be a great hubbub going on around us day and night, not only from organic beings, but also from so-called ‘inanimate’ objects. A cloud in the sky might speak to us as he passes us by; a bend in the road might have something direct to say to us as she takes us on to something new; a pebble on the path might speak to us as he is accidentally kicked by our shoe. Indoors, the bed might say, ‘Ouch!’ when we accidentally stub a toe on her in the darkness! Quite literally, these inanimate things feel much the same as we do, because we have given life to them. Together, we all occupy a living, breathing universe, and it is only because we have created so many ‘things’ that we believe that nothing feels anything any more, and sometimes this even includes ourselves!
There are also undoubtedly times when the Chovihano will see the purpose of a sickness, which must then run its course within the individual before being ‘exorcized’. These are the most difficult cases for the Chovihano to deal with as a healer, for he sees that there is an obvious need for the sickness to inhabit its host. Perhaps it has come along to teach a host something important about life. Of course, we all learn something from sickness. None of us are excluded, but the spirits of sickness can sometimes be employed by our guardians - those knowledgeable ancestral spirits who guide us from the Otherworld - to teach us something we might otherwise not have a chance to learn.
During my training as a Chovihano, I was taken on a long journey by my ancestor down into the Lowerworld where the spirits of sickness ordinarily dwell, so that I could understand the hows and whys of sickness and disease, which had always baffled me. I was told to find a cave, which I did, and as I stood at its entrance I saw how dark and sinister it seemed to be inside, and I knew I would be in for a bit of a rough ride.
I was introduced then to three people: a man who was the spirit of heart disease and heart-related problems, a woman who was the spirit of emotional and mental problems, and a child, a little girl, who was the spirit of cancerous growths. There was also a fourth spirit, the Spirit of Change, and this spirit was neither man nor woman but somehow both.
First, the little girl, who appeared to be about five years old, came up to me and held my hand, looking up at me with big bright eyes, calling me boro prala, ‘big brother’. There seemed to me to be nothing the matter with her while I was standing with her; in fact she was laughing and seemed bubbly and strong. But then as she pulled me further into the cave, where it became unbearably narrow, she suddenly changed into a large ugly black shadow, which ran the length of the floor, wall and ceiling: a rather chilling experience at the time.
The same thing happened with both the man who represented heart problems and the woman who represented mental and emotional problems. In and out of the cave we went, all of them taking turns to pull me further inside, where all of them shapeshifted into large ugly black shadows in the most compressed part of the cave.
After a time, however, I observed that the fourth spirit there, the Spirit of Change, didn’t move. This spirit, who seemed to be sometimes young and sometimes old, stood there just watching us while we were all busy going in and out. Concentration on this spirit soon helped me to see that change was what we really needed to be focusing upon whenever we were beginning to develop signs of sickness, otherwise we could not grow, and if we could not grow, our spirits would weaken, because we were not doing what we naturally should be doing - like fulfilling specific goals in our lives, or even taking well-earned rests when we needed to. If we did not entertain these necessary changes, which means letting things go, we became vulnerable to magic attack by any number of black shadows who dwelt in the dark pockets of the Lowerworld.
I saw many people - men, women, children and even animals - going in and out of those caves during my time there. The dark shadows of bad spirits took them there seemingly against their will, but mostly because they refused to change things within themselves and let things go, and very few noticed the lively spirit standing alone at the door, the Spirit of Change. Those who did notice this good spirit, however, naturally began to change themselves and let things go, and the shadows thereafter left them alone, because black shadows could not live with the Spirit of Change.
In all my healing work I now attempt to help people understand and cope with the changes their souls are asking them to make in order to get well. These can often be a big wrench, but change, and letting go, is often the turning-point, the start of a happier, healthier life.
But what exactly do we let go of, and change into? How do we undergo such a challenging metamorphosis? This is something we can only discover for ourselves, but usually it involves making plans to do the things you really want to be doing with your life. Much of the time we say, ‘I can’t, I shouldn’t, I mustn’t, I daren’t.’ Much of this has to do with having had our souls hammered into shape by people who have had theirs hammered in exactly the same way.
Because of this kind of conditioning, with the passing of time we can end up fearing our very own souls and instead of detaching ourselves from the troublesome entities, we instead detach ourselves from our bodies, which tends to make us sicker than we would perhaps ordinarily be, and soul-loss becomes the inevitable result. In my view, soul-loss has risen to epidemic proportions in our modern times. I will go more deeply into this a little later.
In these earlier days of learning about the healing craft: that it is really the art of helping people to transform themselves, I was getting very little support from my parents, which was saddening. Jack Lee was dead, my Puri Dai, although still very much alert, was growing older, and the realization was slowly dawning on me that I would soon be totally alone.
My parents felt more and more threatened whenever I attempted to mix with gaujos, especially if I happened to talk to them about our guarded healing practices. Not only would bad luck catch up with me, my mother warned, but probably the police as well! They were always knocking on the doors of gypsies, she claimed. She filled me up with plenty of scary stories, but finally, when an opportunity arose to work abroad as a musician, I seized the chance to leave.
This didn’t mean that I was deserting my family, although they inevitably interpreted it that way. Their anxieties ran high at this time, as they knew that I would continue practising my magical skills wherever my travels took me and also that I was not exactly travelling with my own kind.
By the time of my departure my mother had taken to her bed, dying with a kidney infection - or so she said. She seemed to have become something of a hypochondriac and a recluse at this time in her life.
I remember standing in the hall preparing to leave, with my father standing behind me, telling me how bad I was for going whilst my mother was so ill. Because she was dying I had to stay. As a Chovihano it was my duty to help with her passing. She had already said that the mulesko doods, the ‘death lights’, were around the bed, and if I left now, at such a critical time, she would remain in this world and would become the Mulo, and it would all be my fault.
I knew, as they all knew, that she was not dying at all, that she was unlikely to become the Mulo and that this was just her way of saying she didn’t want me to go. Although it was unspoken, we also knew that nearly everything in our past was simply crumbling away because we could not stop the modern world - and its curse - seeping into every nook and cranny of our lives.
I kissed my mother and father goodbye, closed the front door and walked slowly away, feeling as if I had betrayed my clan, which of course I hadn’t. There had already been fierce quarrels between us all, my mother was often heard shouting at people who came to the house, if not someone on the end of the telephone, and my father eventually numbed himself to the whole situation by beginning to live more
and more in his own world, while my brother simply spent more time in the pub drinking. So in my view, the spirit of the clan had already been betrayed.
I believe this deterioration to be due to the splitting of the larger family, but I also believe that what was left of the smaller family worsened because my grandmother was no longer able to hold us all together. It is true that it is part of the Chovihano’s job to keep everyone connected, to weave the spiritual or Otherworld lives of the tribe into a colourful meaningful tapestry, but ours had already broken down and what remained of the family deteriorated further after I left. At this time, the curse was exerting an especially strong influence, and my great-grandfather’s warnings about it were often echoing loudly in my head. My ancient skills had helped to heal many, but now I knew I had to use them to heal myself, and ultimately the ancient elements of the spirit of the Romani gypsy race. Perhaps this was the next step along my lonely path. It was really all that was left.
Soon, my mother was stubbornly refusing to forgive me for leaving her while she was dying - even though she lived on and is indeed still living to this day! There is a big part of her that has always been intensely passionate and dramatic, as many gypsy women can be; her influence on the rest of the family was strong. So, following her lead, the others behaved as if it had been necessary to turn me out of the clan - as used to happen to gypsies in earlier times, particularly if one of their number had become embroiled in gaujo activities. Some members of the family questioned my actions but then gave me their support as time went by, and eventually the situation healed.
My grandmother never blamed me for leaving home. In fact she understood my actions very well, as did my cousin Chilly and his family, eventually. All these encouraged me to talk openly about our culture, mostly so that we could get the truth across about the way we were. So much new-age philosophy and neo-shamanic thinking was rife by this time that we all considered it important to let others know that most of this had been fabricated and that real ancient traditional tribal crafts were often being misrepresented.
Thus the prophecy Marie had made all those years before when she told my mother that I would be working at something unusual with the gaujos finally came true and is still coming true today. This has always been a comfort to me, confirming that I am on the right path and am not violating any of our ancient laws but am in fact helping the Romani gypsy spirit to survive in an authentic way. It is a mission I am still on today, educating people to understand that tribal values are mostly a thing of the past, but if we work together to seek the truth about the way tribal people used to be, we will not risk losing that near-extinct ancient spirit.
Perhaps my only real grievance in those earlier days was that my own immediate family refused to let me know that my grandmother had died. This indeed brought me a good deal of pain. Gladdy Lee died and was buried before I was told that she had gone, and I was left alone to mourn her in my own way as best I could. This was not an appropriate way for my parents to behave and was in fact their way of punishing me and shutting me out. Romanies can be brutal in their convictions and fiercely stubborn if they want to be.
I, however, do not believe that my family would have committed a crime so great as this - least of all against a Chovihano - had we all still been living with our old natural ways. I do believe that the full force of the old curse was upon them when they made this terrible decision to exclude me, and they would therefore have been influenced by its dark and ugly spell. I have heard many similar stories of Romani gypsy families acting out dramas in this way, stories of those who are normally so loyal to their blood suddenly turning against their own. Such is the curse upon indigenous peoples everywhere. We are left asking the question: Is the need to ‘develop’ away from tribal identity really worth such suffering?
I also believe that my family was experiencing what many others have experienced in our difficult modern times: the problem of soul-loss.
Perhaps soul-loss can best be defined by likening it to a television whose channels are not fully in tune, even though appropriate measures have been taken to ensure the normal functioning of both picture and sound. The pictures are foggy and perhaps flicker or blur, and the sound comes and goes and may be extremely distorted. Basically, the outer casing for the television is there, and it is plugged in and in receipt of sufficient power, but even when all the right buttons are pressed, it does not function as it normally should.
The biggest symptom of soul-loss is when a person both looks and sounds normal but feels as if something vital is missing (though in many cases the person may not even know that something vital is missing). You may feel as if everything around you is foggy and flickering, and indeed distorted, especially if in the past you have known what it is to be alive and kicking, in full command of your own spirit, wits and senses. You may also feel extremely frustrated and that nothing goes right for you.
Most see soul-loss as ‘losing’ the soul and I believe it was once like that, but because of the way we live today I believe that we do not so much lose our souls as withhold them. We are familiar with holding on to, or owning, our emotions and so many other things in our lives. We all too easily tuck our souls away in a corner somewhere, where we think no one will be able to find them, but we are not able to say exactly where that place is. This is because that place is quite timeless and faceless, with no true personal identity. There our souls will slumber, as if entombed, sometimes for a whole lifetime.
One lady I worked with once described this timeless place as being something like a washing machine, in which all her muddled thoughts and feelings were constantly swirling around, a wash programme permanently operating its own cycle. She was powerless to stop it because she felt so disconnected from it.
In Romani lore, such circumstances may well contribute to the soul becoming lost to darker Otherworld forces, and sickness, or a mania of some kind, may be the end result.
Traditionally, the Chovihano searches obscure Otherworld realms looking for people’s souls, held prisoner there by unsavoury entities, but today it is far more common for the Chovihano to find most souls locked in the past. In fact I discovered during the many healing retreats I conducted over a period of seven years that associations with the past seem to be the greatest obstacle to living in the present. This, very clearly, brought me up against another important area of healing within Romani lore, something that is sadly given no place in our society today: the world of ancestors.
For Romanies and a great many other indigenous cultures, it is unthinkable to live without an awareness of the dead. The ancestors guide, guard and heal. They are the vital links in the chains bonding a people’s spirit and they certainly act as guardians during Romani magical rituals. Remembering and honouring the ancestors is as important as remembering and honouring the natural world, as they are part of the natural world.
In these modern times I see so many reasons why we should restore this old form of worship, especially when many people feel so isolated and cut off from their roots. I believe many of us would feel far more connected and grounded were we walking with those ancient relations at our sides. Then we would never become trapped in the past, for we would associate the past with wisdom, honour and devotion.
In my experience, many factors add up to making a healing ritual successful: protecting oneself with lucky charms and also plenty of salt, personalizing a sickness, restoring the wild self, surrendering to the Spirit of Change, honouring ancestors and being especially aware of the reality of soul-loss. There is also the art of bringing oneself to the edge of the dream world, where our imagination is restored and we are no longer afraid of what is considered to be the ‘unreal’ within ourselves. I introduced all these things on my Devlesko Dikkiben programmes.
Devlesko Dikkiben means ‘sacred vision’ or ‘sacred sight’. In earlier days I referred to the process in English as ‘Deep Visioning’, which is similar in essence to the vision quest, where journeying and a short spell of fasting is used, together w
ith special plants, for encouraging clarity of vision and sense of direction. I conducted these Dikkiben programmes with people from all over the world and was able to carry out much exploration with this Romani way of understanding things in order to promote healing.
In our modern times there has been much use of fasting in connection with visions. It has long been thought by many tribal communities that deprivation, particularly when it applies to food, water and the comforts one loves, promotes a stronger awareness of the self.
In earlier days, people would draw up a treaty with the Chovihano, so that whilst fasting he could serve as a guide on their travels through Otherworld landscapes, where visions would leap into the spirits of those who were ready to receive them. I discovered, however, over the first seven years that I was fasting people, that there are many factors we have to consider today if we wish to help and not harm ourselves during the fasting process, for this is a very powerful healing art with its own unique and indomitable spirit.
I soon discovered that most people could not work through ‘visioning’ programmes in the way I, and my elders, had done. Modern social disciplines seemed to be the strongest deterrent in preventing people from acclimatizing to this process in the natural way. I met many health conditions in the people who came to me, but in these earlier days there were a great many who did not consider that psychological and physiological changes brought about by our modern times might just make a difference to results. I therefore soon found that it was necessary to re-educate people before they began a programme, and certainly before they began a fast. They were otherwise in danger of trying to run before they had learned to walk and the consequences could be detrimental to health and well-being.
My methods did not involve a complete water fast. I discovered that a water fast could only be successfully employed - or perhaps endured - by those who were already accustomed to going without food for long periods of time, such as people who were already suffering to some degree with eating distress. Home-prepared fruit and vegetable juices were given, which affectionately became known as ‘brews’. These contained healing herbs and spices, and made extremely pleasant-tasting drinks. Sometimes even light broths were given, depending upon the condition of the person, for the aim was less about depriving than stimulating the senses. The spirit of the modern ‘tamed’ individual itself needed to be healed before we could go any further with healing as the ancient ones would have done it. I had to find ways of inspiring and motivating people, so that they would make contact with the Otherworld, where healing was more likely to occur.
We Borrow the Earth: An Intimate Portrait of the Gypsy Folk Tradition and Culture Page 15