Therefore there is nothing whatever in the past relating to the influences which have swayed man, however strange, eccentric, superstitious, or even repulsive they may seem, which is not of great and constantly increasing value. And if we of the present time begin already to see this, how much more important will these facts be to the men of the future, who, by virtue of more widely extended knowledge and comparison, will be better able than we are to draw wise conclusions undreamed of now. But

It is no great problem in ethnology or anthropology as to how gypsies became fortune-tellers. We may find a very curious illustration of it in the wren. This is apparently as humble, modest, prosaic little fowl as exists, and as far from mystery and wickedness as an old hen. But the ornithologists of the olden time, and the myth-makers, and the gypsies who lurked and lived in the forest, knew better. They saw how this bright-eyed, strange little creature in her elvish way slipped in and out of h

By “the evil” is understood evil spirits. According to the old Shamanic belief, which was the primæval religion of all mankind, every disease is caused by an evil spirit which enters the body and can only be driven out by magic. We have abundant traces of this left in our highest civilization and religion among people who gravely attribute every evil to the devil instead of the unavoidable antagonisms of nature. Nothing is more apparent in the New Testament than that all diseases were anciently

It was in 1886 that I learned from a girl in Florence two exorcisms or invocations which she was accustomed to repeat before telling fortunes by cards. This girl, who was of the Tuscan Romagna and who looked Etruscan with a touch of gypsy blood, was a repertory of popular superstitions, especially witch-lore, and a maker and wearer of fetishes, always carrying a small bag full of them. Bon sang ne peut mentir. The two formulas were as follows. I omit a portion from each:— “Venti cinque carte sie

Witches and wizards were summoned to aid him, but to no avail; nay, it made matters worse, for the Vila now often beat him, and when people asked him why it was, he replied that the Vila did so because he refused to wander out into the world with her. And yet again he would be discovered in the top of a tree, bound with bast; and so it went on for years, till he was finally found one morning drowned in a ditch. So in the Wolf Dietrich legend the hero refuses the love of die rauhe Else , and is m

The Turks are a Tartar race, and the drum is used among them very generally for magical purposes. I have one of these tambouri which, I was assured when I bought it, was made for incantations. It is of a diamond shape, has parchment on both sides, and is inscribed with the name Allah, in Arabic, and the well-known double triangle of Solomon, with the moon and star. To keep domestic animals from straying or being stolen, or falling ill, they are, when a gypsy first becomes their owner, driven up

“Káy me yákh som Ac tu ángár, Káy me brishind som, Ǎc tu pāni!” “Where I am flame Be thou the coals! Where I am rain Be thou the water!” Or at times the husband takes an egg, makes a small hole at each end, and then blows the yolk and white into the mouth of his wife who swallows them. There are innumerable ways and means to ensure pregnancy, some of which are very dangerous. Faith in the so-called “artificial propagation” is extensively spread. “ Will der Zigeuner einen Sohn erzielen, so gürtet

But when a horse has been stolen, they take what is left of his harness, bury it in the earth and make a fire over it, saying:— “Kó tut cordyás Nasvales th’ ávlás Leske sor ná ávlás, Tu ná ač kiyá leske Avá sástes kiyá mánge! Leskro sor káthe pashlyol Sár e tçuv avriurál!” “Who stole thee Sick may he be May his strength depart! Do not thou remain by him, Come (back) sound to me, His strength lies here As the smoke goes away!” To know in which direction the stolen thing lies, they carry a sucking

On Wednesday and Friday no one should use needle or scissors, bake bread, or sow flax. No bargain should ever be concluded on a Friday, and Venus, here called Paraschiva, to whom this day is sacred, punishes all infractions of the law. There was among the Wends a flax-goddess, Pscipolnitza, and the shears as emblematic of death are naturally antipathetic to Venus, the source of life. Whether Mars has anything in common with Mors I know not, but in Roumania he is decidedly an evil spirit of death

“No one bakes such bread as my wife, such as she baked me on St. George’s Day. Many flowers and dew were kneaded into the cake with love. Whoever eats of it will be her slave.” In England I was told by an old gypsy woman named Lizzie Buckland , that in the old time gypsy girls made a peculiar kind of cake, a Romany morriclo , which they baked especially for their lovers, and used to throw to them over the hedge by night. To make it more acceptable, and probably to facilitate the action of the ch

“Ima trava u okolo Save, I korenja okolo jasenja,” “There are herbs by the Save, And roots around ash trees,” —meaning that she can prepare a love-potion from these. There is in the Edda a passage in which we are also told that there are magic powers in the roots of trees, the reference being probably to the ash, and possibly to the alraun , or images made of its roots, which are sometimes misnamed mandrakes. Other resorts of Slavonian gypsy witches are near or in deep woods and ravines, also on

I am coming to my witchcraft directly, but I pray you have patience with my proeme . I wish to narrate a dream which I had a few years ago (September 5, 1887), which had an intensity of reality. Dreams, you know, reader, vary from rainbow mist to London fog, and so on to clouds, or mud. This one was hard as marble in comparison to most. A few days previously I had written a letter to a friend, in which I had discussed this subject of the dual-Me, and it seemed as if the Dream were called forth b

The amount of Red Indian Folk-lore which has been suffered to perish in the United States without exciting the least interest is beyond all belief. Thoreau could find in the Algonkin legends of New England nothing but matter for feeble-minded ridicule. But there are men coming, or a generation rising, to whom every record of the past will be of value, for they are beginning to perceive that while the collector is doing work of value the mere theorist , who generally undervalues if he does not ac

A witch-wife and an evil Is three-halfpence worse than the devil. Hey-how for Hallow-e’en! When all the witches are to be seen, Some in black and some in green, Hey-how for Hallow-e’en! Thout! tout! a tout, tout! Throughout and about. Cummer goe ye before, cummer goe ye, Gif ye will not goe before, cummer let me! “These lines are said to have been sung by witches at North Berwick in Lothian, accompanied by the music of a Jew’s harp or trump, which was played by Geilles Duncan, a servant girl, be

The Faws or Faas are a gypsy family whose head-quarters are at Yetholme. I have been among them and knew the queen of the gypsies and her son Robert, who were of this clan or name. “It is supposed the Faws acquired this appellation from Johnnie Faw, lord and earl of Little Egypt; with whom James the Fourth and Queen Mary, sovereigns of Scotland, saw not only the propriety, but also the necessity of entering into special treaty” (“Denham Tract”). “Francis Heron, king of the Faws, bur. (Yarrow) xi

It’s going on, like Stokepitch’s can. A pixey or fairy saying, used in Devonshire. The family of Stokespitch or Sukespic resided near Topsham, and a barrel of ale in their cellars had for many years run freely without being exhausted. It was considered a valuable heirloom, and was esteemed accordingly, till an inquisitive maidservant took out the bung to ascertain the cause why it never run dry. On looking into the cask she found it full of cobwebs, but the fairies, it would seem, were offended,

This is, of course, nonsense, but it is Romany or gypsy nonsense, and it may be thus translated very accurately:— First—here—you begin! Castle, gloves. You don’t play! Go on! Kivi —a kettle. How are you? Stáni , buck. The common version of the rhyme begins with— “One—ery—two—ery, ickery an.” But one-ery is an exact translation of ek-keri ; ek , or yek , meaning one in gypsy. ( Ek-orus , or yek-korus , means once). And it is remarkable that in— “ Hickory dickory dock, The rat ran up the clock, Th

W ith pleasant plausibility Heine has traced the origin of one kind of fairy-lore to the associations and feelings which we form for familiar objects. A coin, a penknife, a pebble, which has long been carried in the pocket or worn by any one, seems to become imbued with his or her personality. If it could speak, we should expect to hear from it an echo of the familiar voice of the wearer; as happened, indeed, in Thuringia in the year 1562, when a fair maid, Adelhait von Helbach, was carried into

T he toad plays a prominent part in gypsy (as in other) witchcraft, which it may well do, since in most Romany dialects there is the same word for a toad or frog and the devil. Paspati declares that the toad suggested Satan, but I incline to think that there is some as yet undiscovered Aryan word, such as beng , for the devil, and that the German Bengel , a rascal, is a descendant from it. However, gypsies and toads are “near allied and that not wide” from one another, and sometimes their childr

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