By the time we reach the Bronze Age, when the forging of metals is commonplace across much of Britain and Europe, the modern age in Europe is well under way, destined to become what it is today. Such changes undoubtedly caused the biggest social shift in our past. Contrary to what some believe, I feel that this social shift was the last thing that anyone needed. As a Chovihano, I see it more as a shadow passing over the land, a bad spell, the beginnings of the curse we gypsies talk about, the ‘dark clouds gathering on the horizon’, as one far-seeing Neolithic ghost was to put it to me at a later date.
General thinking tells us that the changes the human race underwent to get where they are today have been positive and advantageous. Belief in Darwin’s evolutionary theory is often referred to, educating us with the fact that we have little or no say in the process of our development, but in my view Charles Darwin is the evolutionary theory! One civilized Victorian answering on behalf of nature doesn’t give satisfactory answers as to our mysterious past. It is ludicrous to suggest that something, i.e. nature, being billions of years older than any human, knows less than we do. ‘But we cannot converse with nature,’ some might argue, ‘so she can’t tell us of our beginnings and our deeper past.’ How is it we forgot how to converse with nature? I would argue, in return. Rather would I listen to a native’s myths if I wished to know how humans developed themselves; rather would I ask for omens to provide me with answers to such questions. I believe that we have been misled and misguided by those who believe that the deeper tribal past was inevitably bad while the modern way of living must essentially be good - simply because we are here living within it. The image of the unintelligent cave man was never such a good idea, especially as experts are now slowly admitting that early man has been far more intelligent than otherwise believed.
It is an interesting fact that ghosts do not occur prior to the Neolithic Age. This means that there was a time - probably a very long period of time - when social structure catered for people’s problems, and when individuals were literally unable to sustain the muddled and complex psychology that is our general tendency, and burden, today. This, for me, says everything about the development of the human being’s strange psychology. To have been present on the Earth in the Neolithic Age in Europe, when the first moves away from tribal life were beginning, must have been a horrendously traumatic experience.
It is therefore necessary to understand, within the conversation that took place between ourselves and Teeth and Bones, that during this time (the Bronze Age: in Britain approximately 3,300 to 1,200 BC), we are seeing a fundamental change in the way people think, feel and communicate. By this time in prehistory we are no longer able to rely upon a tribal structure founded entirely upon natural law, previously guaranteed to be consistent, enduring, in fact, entirely unalterable - which raises many questions as to how all these early changes actually happened - but that is unquestionably another story for another book. Common modern characteristics like ambition, competition, greed and resentment, unfamiliar to primitive tribal people before this time - being tantamount to a foreign language because communities would have dealt with and eliminated such characteristics during their nature-based rituals - will suddenly have entered the picture, creeping in as humans unexpectedly find themselves vying for land and possessions which will enable growth of crops and grazing to take place. This means that ambition, competition and greed become essential ingredients for this kind of survival, which is very different from how it would have been for the great-grandparents of these Bronze Age tribal people, who would have been occupying a completely different world.
These changes also usher in a more liberal view of ancestors, for ancestors are now unable to inspire and guide us in the way they have been doing - for how many thousands of years? We lose count; there are so many. We have undergone such a change in our psychological make-up, ancestors now seem somehow superfluous and we begin to want to know exactly who they are as we have lost touch with their Otherworld status. Now they are able to become whatever we wish them to become; rather than those whose function is to pass on instructions on life according to the ancient law of nature, we are left with a blank canvas, an empty space which we can fill in at our leisure. Except it isn’t and can never be at our leisure, for the freedom we believe we have inherited is nothing but an illusion. It gives us great pain not to know who we are, and where we have come from and where we belong. We have crossed a bridge to another world, and with that crossing came the loss of memory, for we are now fated never to remember the old life as it once used to be.
These new insights came out of my conversations with Teeth and Bones. Through no fault of her own, this lady ghost had been caught up in historical changes which would have no means of providing answers for what had happened to her, and this made it impossible for her to rectify the problems in her life with a view to moving on to the Otherworld where she could reside as an ancestor herself. Instead, she was fated to hang around the Devil’s Dyke wood, just one of those unfortunate individuals living out the trauma of simply being there when life changed so drastically all those thousands of years ago: an innocent child of the Neolithic Revolution.
After our second encounter with Teeth and Bones we came to know of the man who had been instrumental in making matters worse for her back in her time; indeed, he turned out to be someone who was heavily influenced by these Neolithic changes, and the person who was responsible for the dark feeling lingering within the trees.
During the Bronze Age a man who was known as Black Wind became an adviser to people in the Devil’s Dyke settlement and other settlements along the trade route. His job as a medicine man was to help people with their social and emotional problems, and to explain the effects of the Otherworld in people’s lives, along with the changes that were occurring socially. His role was in fact very similar to the one I had as Chovihano, but the sudden changes meant that he could no longer practise his craft as he might once have done. He had completely corrupted his role as he seized an opportunity to ‘cash in’ on the power that was slowly becoming available to everyone in the West at this time.
This fact led me to question the whole concept of shamanism and its role within primitive communities. Although I knew that the role of Chovihano was very old, it now occurred to me that if a community didn’t display social and emotional problems - perhaps because they didn’t have any, which might well have been the case pre-Neolithic Revolution - and if people weren’t prone to what I term ‘strange psychology’, then perhaps the need for a medicine man within a tribe was somehow surplus to requirement. And another important question arose: if people were not developing such muddled and complex psychologies, which themselves transpire from civilized thinking, might they be naturally closer to the Otherworld, rather than being removed from it, as we are today? This doesn’t necessarily imply that because everyone is closer to the Otherworld that everyone is a shaman; on the contrary, it can mean that people do not need a shaman, because they are actually integral in prehistory to what the natural Otherworld is.
Tribes still exist (just about) who do not have shamans. Neo-shamanic practitioners might well argue that shamanism is as old as man, and I would agree; shamanism is as old as man, but only as old as modern man, who dates from approximately the Neolithic Revolution when society underwent these irreversible changes. Prior to that time people were naturally and unavoidably integrated with a world destined to mercilessly break apart and become extinct, at least here in Britain and most of the nearby Western world.
In fact, man’s modernness was somehow complete by the time of the Iron Age (1,000 BC - 200 AD). And we forget that civil unrest - between the new hierarchical powers and local tribal people - would have been prevalent and widespread throughout this period as civilized and tribal laws battled for supremacy through the 5,000 years or so that covered this era of change.
So, Black Wind, in my view, wasn’t only a relatively new breed labelled ‘medicine man’, whose intentions were to keep vital
connections with the Otherworld - because they were in danger of being lost altogether. He was a step on from that as civilized thinking began sweeping across Europe from Asia and the Middle East. Power, however you could get it, was now on the menu.
General ideas on history and prehistory will not provide us with these facts. But the clues are there if we search for them, due to history’s habit of repeating itself, across aeons of time. If we begin with a simple tribal people around the Devil’s Dyke area in Sussex who are subjected to new civilized strongholds assuming power, we can fast forward to the Roman Empire a few hundred years later and see the same thing occurring, and then on to the conquistadors in South America who extinguished numerous primitive tribes for similar reasons, and then finally on to the tribal people at Wounded Knee in the nineteenth century, destined to suffer exactly the same fate, illustrated so well in the book, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown. Is there a difference between these four instances? We may be seeing religion as playing a part in the latter occurrences, but there is no denying that the thirst for power, ambition, greed and resentment are at the heart of the conflicts, in great abundance. We could reel off numerous incidents of this kind all across the globe, throughout the last 8,000 years, and all would bring the same story and the same power-hungry reasons for inciting change and eliminating indigenous peoples so it doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to see the kind of changes that civilized thinking bestowed on simple indigenous tribal people here in Britain.
Black Wind may have started out with good intentions; in fact, he probably did. He may have been instrumental in fighting off adversaries threatening to alter the whole tribal structure, but he abused his power by choosing to use man-made laws rather than nature-based laws which, after all, everyone else was doing! Teeth and Bones would have known nothing of religion, so religion - not yet invented and an offshoot of these changes - cannot be blamed in this instance. Her people were repressed and defence would therefore have been high on the agenda with menacing ‘dark clouds’ disrupting social life, all a build-up to the advent of religion.
Teeth and Bones eventually told us that she was never able to get over the fact that she died by falling down a steep incline, the Dyke itself: a V-shaped valley carved out by a river at the end of the Ice Age, and whatever the reasons for her fall, she resented her life being taken from her, particularly as she had been pregnant when it occurred. She maintained that Black Wind had been responsible for her death, and not knowing how to deal with it all, she hung around the trees, unwittingly assisting him with his continuous struggle for power, simply because she knew not what else to do. The afterlife would bring solace, she had been told, if she held on long enough. The Otherworld and the old life would come back. Life would return to the way it had once been if everyone held on and hoped for something to reverse it all.
I found this a common theme for many of the prehistoric ghosts I dealt with. It seemed that all of them had been promised some kind of magnificent afterlife, which they were obliged to look toward, even though it hadn’t seemed to exist before, in earlier times. Where Teeth and Bones was concerned, I never before felt so sad about someone I labelled a ‘ghost’. This lady, for me, epitomizes so simply the prehistoric tribal person who is subjected to changes they do not wish to entertain, chiefly because they don’t know what they are, which is disconcerting. If you don’t understand what changes you are supposed to embrace because they haven’t been part of your society before, how are you able to embrace them?
Anni and I were moved when, after talking to Teeth and Bones about how much time had passed between her life on Earth and ours, we gave her some shells as a token of our love and understanding regarding her plight. We knew what she had suffered at the hands of time. She cried huge tears on receiving these shells from Anni; she actually cried not unlike an animal, as she wailed and moaned, but she never looked back. She still visits us occasionally and is now dedicated to helping others who are stuck in early eras when civilization overpowered the simple native people of these lands. The trees changed once we had disrupted ghostly life there in the Devil’s Dyke wood. We walked there one day to see that many of the dark ugly trees had been cut down while new growth was taking place, bringing a completely new feel of lightness to the area.
As for Black Wind, he eventually did a most ancient and honourable thing. After holding out in protest that he was right to keep his people under control in his bid for power and in order to welcome a newly created afterlife that was never actually going to happen, he finally gave in and met his end. He did this by spreading out his arms and diving off the precipice of the Dyke, quite majestically, delivering himself to whatever fate held for him, a ghost no more. Perhaps he died a second death, putting right what had happened when Teeth and Bones died, or was this his first death, his real death, owing from much earlier times? Whatever the situation, a good death is and always has been necessary within the primitive world, so for Black Wind, dying, or finishing with his Bronze Age life would, in ancient terms, have been considered a principled thing to do. We are told by Puro that, unlike Teeth and Bones, who had earned the right to move on, Black Wind ‘extinguished’ himself, voluntarily, not unlike a flame going out and becoming non-existent. This is because he knew, as a medicine man, that he hadn’t earned the right to enter the Otherworld. If your ‘points’ do not add up to anything the ancient natural world can recognize upon your physical death, how are you able to enter it when you die? You may be forever wandering non-worlds, until you ever decide to compensate for what has gone wrong, and sometimes that adds up to a lot of hard work, if not extinguishing yourself. It seems harsh, but nature is harsh. She creates us in her likeness, and there is no one more caring, but when she is harsh, she keeps everything balanced, and that permits the Otherworld to be blessed with the most incredible ancestors who guide and advise us. Wonderfully, it also means that the Otherworld is protected; people who do not observe the natural laws as they need to be observed will never be able to access it.
I cannot, though, visualize anyone today dealing with himself in quite the principled and majestic way Black Wind did. For all his power-conscious habits, he finally resorted to humility with his honourable, pre-civilized and pre-Neolithic way of ending physical life. I have already mentioned in an earlier chapter that the subject of death is dealt with in something of a brutal fashion in Romani gypsy tradition. We take pains to ensure the soul of a person is sent packing to the Otherworld so that the Mulo doesn’t become an option. Is this brutal? We might want to see it this way today, but we need to do a lot of rethinking where our views of life and death are concerned. It is in fact my job to assist with this so-called ‘brutality’. Black Wind being no more, Teeth and Bones was able to move on to reunite with the natural Otherworld and whatever it required of her. Together, this pair had showed us how it used to be done, and how it can still be done today should we ever have the misfortune to fall prey to ghosthood!
Teeth and Bones’ story was repeated within other settlements we encountered along the South Downs, stories which were touching to say the least when we discovered that many who had been caught up in these prehistoric social changes were affected by the new breed of human being that was emerging: the kind that could become a ghost. Although there is no doubt that ghosts existed prior to this Bronze Age era, they perhaps hadn’t quite existed in the same way.
At the hill fort at Hollingbury on the outskirts of Brighton we were met with another strange atmosphere. A young man there, another ghost, challenged us with his spear and threatened us if we went anywhere near the burial mounds which skirted his camp. He was at pains to protect his king, he said. And again, inhabitants had been promised a reversal of fate by the new civilized powers: a place in the afterlife, providing they hung around long enough and waited for the dark clouds to disperse; just like Teeth and Bones, this man believed that life might return to the way it had been if he conformed to these requirements.
On closer investigat
ion, we discovered that there were no ancient burial mounds, except what turned out to be golfing bunkers! In our modern times the prehistoric site had become host to a golf course where golfers disregarded the ancient drama playing itself out around them and where the ghost we came to know as ‘Spear’ was patiently and quite tragically guarding the ‘sacred’ bunkers in a devoted and quite animal-like way.
By this time I realized that we were seeing a socially repressed prelude to the advent of religion in the way many of these ghosts were behaving. Promises of the afterlife, a return to the way life had been, providing one conformed to the new-found laws, all added up to a regime that was being used to keep tribal people under control in a way that had never happened before. Death was being used as a controlling force, which was possible to do in those earlier times. One wouldn’t be able to do this now, since the journey of death has become something less important to us, and something we tend to encounter unwillingly or as if haphazardly. I was getting a real glimpse of the pre-religious past now with Spear, along with the prehistoric changes that had been instrumental in ushering religious thinking into Britain. This was extremely enlightening, and gave me a lot to think about.
Like Teeth and Bones, Spear and many of his kinfolk entered into a period of transformation. They helped us as much as we helped them; in fact, I believe they helped us more. We were all receiving an education in the perils involved in swapping a primitive lifestyle for a modern one. Spear, after some meaningful discourse, made it through and, like Teeth and Bones, began to understand how much time had passed and what had actually been happening to him. He also devoted himself to helping other ghosts of the same era.
From Chanctonbury Ring, which was ruled by another sorcerer who called himself White Crow, to Cissbury Ring, which housed a huge settlement of smug prehistoric ghosts who were, despite everything, still trading with other ghosts, we continued our journey west, until we arrived at Danebury Hill, an Iron Age hill fort north-west of Stockbridge, Hampshire.
We Borrow the Earth: An Intimate Portrait of the Gypsy Folk Tradition and Culture Page 24