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

by Patrick Jasper Lee

  First, it is advantageous to remember that the gypsies made facts out of their legends, while today we prefer to make legends out of facts! If we can begin to look at this objectively, with a view to understanding how fact versus fantasy are constantly splitting us down the middle, we might then be able to see what we have all been composed of for an extraordinarily long time: the factual and the imaginative.

  We are all affected by the creative imagination, no matter how logical we might consider ourselves to be, no matter how imaginative we might consider ourselves to be. The imagination exists, just as a fact exists. We use it unconsciously throughout much of the day. The only difference between fact and fiction is that we do not have to prove that fiction exists, or that the imagination exists! It is actually something we can’t prove, and so we consider it to be inconsequential, a worthless contribution if we are talking about that all-important word ‘evidence’. We can surely all agree that we can all choose to use the imagination, for good or ill.

  So we start with that one ‘fact’: the imagination exists, and it gives us a foundation upon which to work, even if it seems at the moment to be a rather precarious one. We are looking for our ancestors. Where are they? We might well close our eyes and start to imagine a picture of a man or a woman, attired in clothes of a previous era, someone who answers the description of an ancestor. Then we might immediately think that we created that picture, that isn’t really real and, feeling we are getting carried away somewhat, we instantly erase or dismiss it from our minds. At this point we are likely to blame our own imagination for creating someone whom we think is in all probability fictitious. But at the same time have we ever stopped to think that we use the same imaginative technique for erasing or dismissing a picture in our minds? Never do we say that the erasing or dismissing process is unreal! This proves that in our times we will often only use that part of our imagination, which we feel it is legitimate to use: the mental erasure!

  We need now to be thinking of the health of our imagination. It is such a strong part of us that where it lies dormant we are in danger of losing much of our self-confidence and our self-belief if it remains in an unhealthy state, which is most uncomfortable to live with.

  Experimentation is the key, something else the Romani gypsies were good at doing on an imaginative level. It is best to set aside some time during the day when we can allow our imaginations to flow free, perhaps just five or ten minutes at first. If we can create someone befitting an ancestor, we might like to try giving that ‘figure’ permission to exist in our minds on and off just for those few minutes during that special time of the day. Create the figure and just set him or her aside for a while, without making a judgement as to whether he or she may be legitimate or not. By doing this you will allow the figure time to mature and grow and develop of its own accord, without your control, and just watch and see what happens.

  This is the first stage of the Otherworldly process of finding an ancestor and it is all about transferring your energy over to your imagination for a while. Your inner senses will assist you: asking yourself questions, being objective about yourself, opening yourself up to new challenges regarding your own opinions and beliefs - without necessarily chastising yourself - and experimenting with all those things which make up the fabric of your personal inner world with a view to making necessary changes if you need to make them.

  If you can manage to start doing this, then the next stage of the process will begin and an Otherworldly figure will soon be stepping into the shoes of the one you have imagined, with his or her own unique individuality. Then will you see an ancestor with his or her own character beginning to live and you will have gained some kind of access to the ancestral realms.

  All of this will take time and perseverance. It is not an easy process and no one should start looking for one’s ancestors with a complacent attitude, as it takes a lot of continuous hard work and only works if the inner senses - which I sometimes refer to as an ‘inner tool’ - are used properly and with the greatest respect. But yet another of the golden rules is to remember to keep a sense of adventure and even a sense of humour about it all - give yourself permission to play and to recognize what is being communicated to you. Then, over a period of time, you will be using the right kind of equipment or management skills for perfecting this ancient craft.

  Generally, we need to begin questioning ourselves rather more frankly where the imagination is concerned and we certainly need to start opening our minds to the possibility of seeing the imagination as a field in its own right, worthy of considerable exploration. The imagination must no longer be thought of as ineffectual, artificial or unreal. All of the greatest scientific inventions we have in our world today began with the imagination, as did all the greatest works of art and everything we use. Even the bed you sleep in every night began in someone’s mind before it was brought to the drawing-board!

  We need radical changes for any revolution to take place and for some there is no doubt that the imagination will prove to be a very scary, unpredictable world at first. But we must always remember that it hasn’t been used properly for such an extraordinarily long time that it will have to be oiled again, its creative processes trusted and its existence seen as something sacred, rather than something that is just a nuisance. Without doubt, consideration of the imagination as a healing tool must feature somehow on the next rung of the ladder of human development.

  For me, without question, Puro, my ancestor, is always my guardian, my mentor, my brother, my father and my friend, and he is real. He is a normal healthy human spirit, with his own thoughts, feelings, insight and his own personal ways. As I grew, he became a member of the family in more ways than one. I was given various warnings that learning from him would be tough sometimes, because he was such a thorough teacher.

  I have learned that if you hear what you don’t expect from an ancestor, that is, if he or she tells you something that helps you see what you can do to be honest with yourself and make your life more balanced, then that ancestor is worth knowing. ‘Puro will trick you as soon as shake your hand,’ Jack Lee was known to say. That, to him, was how a respectful, helpful ancestor needed to be! Puro himself has said to me: ‘Please don’t look at who I am to decide whether you think I’m worthy. Listen to what I say, and if it makes sense, then I’m worth knowing.’ This is a very valuable thing to remember because too many people will get caught up in the glamour of an ancestor rather than desiring to know a sensible, disciplined, truthful and firm influence.

  Ancestors are always revered, but even so, their ways are not always tolerated, liked, or even understood! I have known many people to either overlook or turn away from Puro’s advice when he has hit the nail right on the head in a difficult personal situation a person may be going through, which means he or she will end up digging themselves ever deeper into their difficult personal situation, and may risk never finding a solution. People can cultivate a heavy resistance to change, which means they forsake the opportunity to understand their psychological situation and therefore miss learning what they might be able to do about it.

  The absence of a natural primitive mind, these days, is certainly part of the problem.

  I have sometimes thought that we would understand our ancestors, and indeed the workings of the Otherworld a good deal more if we all still had something of the wild left in us. Once there was a time when we copied animals, learning what their body language meant for hunting and ritual purposes; we knew what a toss of the head meant, a licking of the lips, a stamp of the foot, the wink of an eye. All this was very simple to us and carried a powerful meaning. Now it is the reverse. I stood in a shopping precinct not so long ago and saw a mural there, intended for children, depicting various wild animals: rabbits, badgers, squirrels and hedgehogs, all having a picnic on a beach. The cloth was laid before them and food was spewing forth from a hamper, and they were all dressed in human clothes, some up on their hind legs, walking as humans walk, and others using their front
legs as arms, as humans do.

  Understanding and communicating with our ancestors is very similar to approaching wild animals, but we need to see them and understand them as they are. They will come so far to meet us, but we are obliged to learn how to meet them half-way, on their terms, not on ours, because we are, after all, also animals, which we tend to forget. There was a time when we took ourselves to an animal’s spirit, rather than bringing the animal’s spirit to us. Giving animals a human persona and having them react exactly as we would react, as in the mural, isn’t going to do us any favours. Communicating with them as human beings used to do being long gone, it would take a lot of time for us all to relearn animal language and return to the ‘animal’ within us once again. But if we work at it steadfastly, with a view to seeing the process as a constructive exercise, we might just be able to move towards knowing what true communication, from an ancestor’s point of view, is really all about, because there is no escaping the fact that it involves animal qualities in a big way.

  Personally, I conduct much of my work regarding ancestors in a place I call my ‘Otherworldly wood’, which is actually in the Otherworld. I usually travel there via a wood near my home. This is part of a most beautiful ancient forest, extremely magical, teeming with spirits, quite perfect for ancestral exploration. Here I will walk or sit while I talk to the spirits of the trees and the Bitee Fokee and I will spend some time thinking of all those who lived on Earth in an earlier time long before me.

  I find Puro very easily in this place and if I ever take offerings to him I always place them here, as the connection with the Otherworld is strong. I sit somewhere comfortable, where there is not too much activity from other human beings, picture the woodland around me in my mind and take it into my soul. There, the seed of the picture will germinate and a picture of the woodland in the Otherworld will soon start to form. Then I can work more purposefully on transporting myself there, perhaps journeying along my river so that I feel I am travelling there, perhaps riding a white horse, or running to the edge of the Earth and jumping into the picture, or sometimes even simply walking into the Otherworld wood. Then I simply sit and watch the activity that takes place, until it is time to return, usually by the same process.

  I see the spirits of ancestors in various ways, doing various things in the woodland of the Otherworld, perhaps standing or sitting or laughing or crying, dancing or even restlessly pacing about. At times I am able to talk to their spirits far more easily than I can talk to people in the everyday world, for ancestor spirits are honest, rather like animals; it all goes to prove that the instincts are still strong between ourselves and the natural world when we are properly linking with the Otherworld. Perhaps this means that our problem isn’t that we are unable to find the Otherworld so much as simply always feeling we are so separated from it!

  I would describe Puro as being around the age of 40 when he comes to see me. Age is really irrelevant; it is more apt to say he has reached a natural maturity in his attitude and outlook. He dresses himself very finely, sometimes in ancient furs, which date back thousands of years, other times in clothing from the seventeenth century. He has sometimes worn a strange battered hat decorated with ribbons, streamers, feathers and gold and silver coins, all of which bear significance, and his dark hair curls down from beneath his hat to his collar. All his clothes sit casually on his slender body, and he gives off a refinement, even something royal. If I ever had to sum up his appearance, I would probably say that in his seventeenth-century guise he looks something like an old-fashioned over-dressed somewhat elegant Morris dancer! I have also seen him wrapped in a coloured blanket, which was how many of the old gypsies used to dress. He is bearded and often goes barefoot, and he has the darkest eyes that can look right through you.

  Why do I see him in these particular guises? This has to do with what I am learning about at the time, whether I would benefit from a more ancient or more updated teacher, and the fact that by using these guises this ancestor is able to express himself more effectively.

  ‘Sarshin,’ I will usually say to Puro, in the traditional Romani gypsy manner, whenever I greet him, and he will usually wish me kushto bok in return.

  I have not always met the ancestor in the Otherworld. Quite a lot of the time he comes to visit me in my own physical world and will often speak through me in a more telepathic way. True to his character, these times are not solemn, but always enlightening and full of fun. In the past, when the ancestor came to Jack Lee, he did so with Jack Lee sitting cross-legged on the floor in the way gypsy males do when gathered together socially around the campfire, and my grandmother sitting on the floor also, hardly looking up from her crochet work. Often, singing or tambourining, or some other rhythmical activity, which serves to lighten the atmosphere and make everyone happy, would take place prior to a communication session. Then the ancestor and everyone present would often engage in ‘Otherworld gossip’, talking of spirits and shadows quite as one might speak of annoying neighbours!

  There is never any strain or formality between those who are talking together in any of these telepathic sessions - in either world - and because of this, stimulating discussions can often develop, enabling members of the group to learn in a very simple way.

  Many spirits can communicate through the Chovihano during telepathic sessions, in my own case as many as 19 in one evening, but the Chovihano who is skilled at his craft always maintains control. These spirits will be a selection of nature spirits, Bitee Fokee, shadows, human spirits, animal spirits, ancestors and all manner of life around us. A skilled Chovihano is invariably revitalized at the end of such a telepathic session - even though some may think he may need to lie down!

  There have been times when the ancestor has been with me in this world for hours at a time in the telepathic state and there have also been times when I have been with him in his world for hours at a time in my journeys.

  When I was first thinking about writing this book and becoming more open about my culture, I visited the Otherworldly wood, largely to think about it all and to decide whether it was the right thing to do, and the ancestor was there, sitting in the middle of the wood. He had made a fire and was poking it with a stick. It was as if he knew what I had come for and was waiting for me.

  ‘Puro,’ I said, walking up to him. He beckoned me to sit beside him, which I did.

  ‘So many questions,’ he said, obviously reading my mind and sighing with exasperation on my behalf.

  ‘What should I do?’ I asked. ‘You, more than anyone, knows what is best. Will talking about the Romani culture and the Chovihano help or hinder the ancient gypsy spirit? And will it help or hinder my world?’

  He looked into the fire for a moment, in that wise and reflective way that he has. Some ancestors take a long time to answer questions. Jack Lee had been known to say that you could go fishing between the time you asked an ancestor a question and got your answer! Now I watched Puro. It was dusk and flashes of pale firelight were licking his kind face. ‘Which world?’ he asked, tossing a small piece of wood on to the fire. I frowned. ‘You asked me if it would help or hinder your world,’ he added, ‘and I am asking you which world you are talking about.’

  Of course, as a Chovihano, I lived in a multitude of worlds and Puro had to remind me often about the many realms within all the worlds, and real worlds and their shadow worlds all overlapping one another, but here there was also the world of the past and the world of the future. I was asking a question about a future, and the future would contain yet another world.

  ‘Let us see what is in the flames,’ he said, tossing onto the fire a handful of herbs, which made the flames crackle as they gave off the most wonderful aroma. The old gypsies would throw sacred herbs such as mugwort and rosemary onto their fires and then stare into the flames until the flames had turned themselves into shapes and people, which would provide the answers to questions.

  On this occasion I concentrated and looked deep into Yag’s spirit as he drew me i
nto his flames; I then danced with him for a while, going up into the smoke which came from the fire where I was able to look all around and far into the future. I saw many fires and many people dancing around their fires laughing, enjoying themselves in their dance with the Romani gypsy spirit. Should I? Shouldn’t I? Should I? Shouldn’t I?

  In answer to this I saw, distantly, something sticking up out of the soil. I stretched out a hand so that I could brush the soil away from whatever it was. As I did this, the ground began rumbling and moving beneath me, as if some kind of earth tremor were taking place. Listening to this rumbling was like listening to the grumblings of distant thunder when a storm is in the air. It was both exhilarating and disturbing. Then I became aware of a great vortex of energy, which was attempting to spiral its way up to the surface.

  I soon realized, to my astonishment, that this was a giant lady’s face emerging from the Earth. I brushed this great face gently and made her clean, and she rose and sat up, large against me, for I was still contained in the smoke of the fire and wasn’t human at all. I curled around her and she coughed whenever I attempted to brush her cheek, for my smoke blew over her face. She was very big, bigger than any giant I had ever seen. The trees and hills near her were so minute that she might have been a normal-sized woman sitting in a bonsai garden!

  ‘Bari Weshen Dai!’ I muttered, and I was suddenly sitting beside the fire, back in my human form again, and the great lady was gone. I knew I would see her again; I had to see her again, for she was our hope for the future and for the future of our Otherworld.

  ‘I believe that is my answer, Puro. I only need to think of the Bari Weshen Dai, the old forest mother, our important woodland ancestor. She is the Sleeping Beauty who now needs to wake and the Romani gypsy spirit will help us to bring her back to life again.’

  I turned with excitement to look at the ancestor, but he had gone. Perhaps he was still contained in the flames or perhaps he was somewhere else. I sat beside his fire for a long time, until it became dark, then I returned to my own world - or perhaps I should say ‘the middle realm of the Middleworld’, and that particular ancestral journey goes on, for its theme continues in every ancient woodland I ever visit.