An ABC of Witchcraft Past and Present - Doreen Valiente 2018

Gypsies and Witchcraft

Ki shan i Romani,

Adoi san’ i chov’hani,

So runs the old gypsy proverb, meaning “Wherever the Romanies go, there witches may be found.” The first President of the Gypsy-Lore Society, Charles Godfrey Leland, regarded gypsies as the great carriers and disseminators of magic and witchcraft, wherever they travelled.

Certainly, one reason given for the persecution of gypsies in the past has been that they provided a rallying-point for disaffected and shiftless persons of all kinds, among whom witches were counted. There is a certain amount of truth in this, in that the gypsies attracted to their way of life a good many people who were at odds with society. In fact, they still do; and there are probably more travelling people in Britain today than there are real Romanies.

The Romanies came originally from the East, probably from India; but as they journeyed by way of Egypt, or claimed to have done so, they were called Egyptians, of which ’gypsy’ is a worn-down version, a name given to them by the gorgios, or non-gypsies. They, however, held themselves proudly in their rags, and called themselves ’Lords of Little Egypt’, their name for gypsydom in general.

Their great profession has always been fortune-telling, either by the lines of the hand, dukkerin’ drey the vast as they call it, or by means of the cards. On the Continent the Tarot cards have come to be so much associated with gypsy fortune tellers, that these cards are sometimes called ’the Tarot of the Bohemians’, meaning the gypsies. However, the real origin of these mysterious cards of fortune remains a mystery. (See TAROT CARDS.)

It is remarkable that the Romany word for God is Devel or Duvel, which derives from the Sanskrit Deva, meaning ’a shining one’. No wonder, then, if the gypsies felt some kinship with the European witches, who were like themselves hounded for being different, for not conforming, and for being alleged devil worshippers.

The Romanies, too, believe in the Great Mother, Amari De, or De Develeski, the personification of Nature; thinly disguised today as Sara-Kali, the Black Madonna, or alleged gypsy-saint Sara, whose little statue can still sometimes be found, dark-faced and bedizened, in the smart motor-drawn caravans of well-to-do modern gypsy families.

The real old-time gypsies of England would never willingly allow their dead to be buried in Christian consecrated ground, or have anything to do with the religion of the gorgios. Nor would the gypsies of the European continent; though they did have a reverence for the Virgin Mary, whom they prayed to as a goddess. The famous Spanish Madonna, La Macarena of Seville, in all her goddess-like beauty and magnificence, is regarded as the special Madonna of the gypsies.

People like this, pagans at heart with strong traits of goddess worship, and with an inborn aptitude for all things of magic, sorcery and the occult, were natural sympathisers with the pagan witches, their companions in misfortune and outlawry. They share, too, another characteristic with them, namely a belief in reincarnation, which Charles Godfrey Leland noted among the witches of Italy, and George Borrow has witnessed to among the gypsies he knew. (See REINCARNATION.)

In his introduction to The Zincali: an Account of the Gypsies of Spain (John Murray, London, 1841), Borrow tells us:

Throughout my life the gypsy race has always had a peculiar interest for me. Indeed I can remember no period when the mere mention of the name of Gypsy did not awaken within me feelings hard to be described. I cannot account for this—I merely state a fact.

Some of the Gypsies, to whom I have stated this circumstance, have accounted for it on the supposition that the soul which at present animates my body has at some former period tenanted that of one of their people; for many among them are believers in metempsychosis, and, like the followers of Bouddha, imagine that their souls, by passing through an infinite number of bodies, attain at length sufficient purity to be admitted to a state of perfect rest and quietude, which is the only idea of heaven they can form.

Among the gypsies themselves the chovihani and the drabarni, the witch and the herb woman, are held in honour. The profession of tribal chovihani is handed down from mother to daughter; even as among non-gypsy witches, with whom the respect for heredity is strong. The whole truth about gypsy religion and gypsy witchcraft has not yet been fully investigated; though some ceremonies and customs have been recorded, which illustrate their beliefs. Many of these are strikingly similar to those of the witch cult among non-gypsies.

For instance, there is the custom of praying to the new moon, which among some of the wildest and most primitive gypsy tribes is performed naked. On the night when the new moon first appears in the sky, they will take off their clothes to her, bow their heads, and pray that she will bring them good fortune, health and money during the coming month.

There is also a considerable resemblance between the outdoor Sabbats and Esbats of the witches, held at a crossroads or in a wood, and the nocturnal gatherings of gypsies, as Jean-Paul Clébert has noted in his book The Gypsies (Vista Books, London, 1963). The open fire with its bubbling cauldron, the music and dancing, must have looked very reminiscent of witches’ meetings to a suspicious passer-by. In fact, the small cauldrons called gypsy pots are much sought after today by witches, as being more convenient to use than the big cooking-pot variety; and both kinds, alas, are becoming collectors’ pieces, expensive and hard to find.

There is a definite belief among some present-day witches that when the persecution against witches grew fiercer in England, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many witches fled from their homes and took to the roads, becoming mumpers, or travelling folk who followed the gypsy way of life though they were not themselves of gypsy blood. Because of the beliefs they held in common a certain amount of interchange of ideas took place between witches and gypsies, and they tended to protect each other against the mutual enemy, that settled Christian society which tormented, dispossessed and hanged them both in the name of the God of Love.

Throughout history, witchcraft seems to have been the religion of the dispossessed and the outlawed: the down-trodden serfs of medieval Europe, whose misery and resentment are described in Aradia; the people who fled before the conquering sword of Islam; the gypsies who prayed to the moon, and to the spirits of stream and woodland, the Nivashi and the Puvushi; and earlier, the dark aboriginal people of these islands, who were here before the Celts, and the priests and priestesses of pagan mysteries, whose temples were closed and whose rites forbidden by the Early Christian Church.

Because witchcraft is old, its origins are complex; and yet its real essence is simple—devotion to Nature, the Great Mother, and to looking into Nature to find magic. The intellectuals and the sophisticated scoff at it, and yet fear while they scoff; because they recognise, consciously or otherwise, that witchcraft is linked to the primitive, to the depths within themselves that they do not wish to look into, or even acknowledge the existence of.