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ABSTRACT
Magic and fortune-telling have been standard elements in stereotypes about Europe’s Romani minorities since the fifteenth century. These stereotypes produced two mutually contradictory images of the Roma: That they possess real occult powers, and that they are frauds. Both images were perpetuated by nineteenth-century ‘gypsylorist’ scholarship, which construed ‘the gypsies’ as Europe’s internal Orientals. This article demonstrates that the most influential gypsylorist author on magic, the folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland (1824–1903), sought to harmonize the two images through a new theory of magical efficacy – building on established work in folklore as well as his own life-long engagement with esotericism.
Leland’s alignment with occultism is a textbook example of the entanglements of esotericism and scholarship in the period. Seeing occultism as a constitutive context for gypsylorist speculation on ‘gypsy magic’ sheds new light on the history of Romani studies and helps explain the perpetuation of anti-gypsy stereotypes in alternative spirituality.
Acknowledgements
Research for this article was funded by the Swedish Research Council (project number 31002950). The final version benefitted from the feedback of colleagues in the Stockholm University higher seminar in the history of religions, especially Andrea Franchetto, Peter Jackson Rova, and Susanne Olsson. I also thank Michael Stausberg, Steven Engler, and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 See, however, Andersen’s (Citation1987) insightful but unpublished PhD dissertation on fortune-telling among Kalderasha and Machwaya Roma in 1980s America. Among published works, Trigg (Citation1973) is arguably an exception, claiming to offer an overview of the “magic and superstitious practices” of “gypsies”. A short foreword by E. E. Evans-Pritchard provides an academic stamp of approval; however, the work is largely derivative of Leland and other turn-of-the-century gypsylorist authors, with new information provided completely without reference to how and where it has been gathered. An abundance of errors, inaccuracies, and speculation presented as fact also place this book closer to the exoticizing occultist literature emerging after the republication of Leland’s book. See below.
2 The distinction between “esotericism” and “occultism” made in this article follows conventions in the study of esotericism that see the former as an umbrella term covering subject matter from late antiquity to the present day (e.g. Hanegraaff et al. eds. Citation2006), and the latter as a set of currents starting to emerge only in the mid nineteenth century, often by individuals self-identifying as “occultists” (see e.g. Pasi Citation2006; Strube Citation2017). The forms of esotericism that initially influenced Leland predated the emergence of occultism, whereas the currents he positioned himself towards at the end of the century were thoroughly part of it.
3 As is well known by specialists in Pagan studies, Leland’s book Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches (Citation1899a), purporting to document the survival of Etruscan religion in North-Italian folk-magic, has had a significant reception among twentieth-century Wiccans where it has even inspired a whole new tradition of Stregheria (see e.g. Mathiesen Citation1998; Citation2010; Magliocco Citation2002; Doyle White Citation2016, 50).
4 Sorciers, bateleurs ou filous, / Reste immonde / D’un ancient monde; / Sorciers, bateleurs ou filous, / Gais bohémiens, d’où venez-vous?
5 This statement concerns the west-European diaspora, as described below. The Roma do however appear associated with magic in a major way already in the Byzantine material, including in the earliest eleventh-century reference thought to be about the Roma. See Soulis Citation1961; Marsh Citation2008, 199–207.
6 Most likely, these first recorded Romani migrants to western Europe had been displaced from the border areas of Hungary and the Ottoman Empire as a result of war (see e.g. Fraser Citation1997, 301–302), with others coming from Venetian controlled territories in the Balkans and the Aegean (cf. Soulis Citation1961; Pym Citation2007, 9). In other words, the Roma had likely been rooted in Europe for several centuries prior to their appearance in the Holy Roman Empire and the rest of western and northern Europe, and it is possible, as Fraser has speculated, that the counts and dukes leading the groups that we meet in the west from 1417 were feudal lords set to rule and administer the Roma populations, as we know had been the custom since the 1300s in places like Corfu and later in Hungary and the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth (see Fraser Citation1997; cf. Soulis Citation1961; Mróz Citation2015, 193–230).
7 The full paragraph reads: Summatim ut dicamus, neqvitiæ a pueris assveti, nulla est impostura, in qva se artifices præstare non didicerint: nullu scelus, qvod non audeant perpetrare: subtiles eqvorum mangones; aleatores fraudulenti; stellionatus & libidinum convicti; contemptores religionis, ut qvi sæpius infantulorum baptisma qvæstus causa iterant; venefici; homicidæ; incantatores, præcipue in compescendis magica arte ignibus; proditores Christianorum; Turcarum emissarii & exploratores.
8 Leland’s memoirs suggest a much deeper involvement in the events of 1848 than can be corroborated by Pennell, and is a good example of why we must take the details of his stories with a grain of salt. According to himself, he had been part of a clandestine cell at the Hotel de Luxembourg, planning the revolution in great detail (though he cannot name his accomplices, who moreover seem to emerge from thin air), and he claims to have been among the first to storm the Throne Room, taking some credit for having kept the masses from excessive looting (Leland Citation1894, 172–179). The picture we get from his letters written at the time, quoted by Pennell, is the far more realistic one of a foreign student being dragged into the tumultuous events and then playing his part (see Pennell Citation1906, vol. 1, 185-195).
9 Besides his studies of “gypsies”, Leland maintained other research interests, as seen notably in his study of The Algonquin Legends of New England (1884), collected in Maine and New Brunswick, Canada, during three consecutive summers between 1882 and 1884.
10 On the Vienna congress, see Pennell Citation1906, vol. 2, 222-223. On the Paris and Stockholm/Uppsala/Christiania conventions, see Pennell Citation1906, vol. 2, 206-208.
11 The encounter at Kerner’s home, which Leland describes vividly in his Memoirs, can however not be directly corroborated by his published letters from that time. He does however refer to it again in later work (e.g. Leland Citation1904, 117), and Kerner is known to have generously received “literary tourists” in great numbers (see T. Kerner Citation1897).
12 Leland befriended Olcott long before the latter became a co-founder of the Theosophical Society; in his military capacity, Olcott helped Leland with introductions to officers allowing him to participate in the Civil War, and Leland claims that the two collaborated on a couple of counter-espionage missions against Confederate spies (Leland Citation1894, 274).
13 A Paracelsian neologism usually taken to signify the “invisible interior man”, responsible for prefiguring in the soul the forms which “exterior man” makes visible and concrete. Cf. the definitions of Paracelsians discussed in Willard Citation2016, 175–176.
14 He had first suggested this idea to the First International Folk-lore Convention in Paris in 1889.
15 The question of occultist representations of Gypsies will be dealt with on a separate occasion.
16 Connections with the Tarot have since become a persistent myth, issuing from occultism but given weight by a small number of gypsylorists in the early twentieth century (Ranking Citation1908). Despite being easily debunked on historical grounds (see Decker, Depaulis, and Dummett Citation1996) it is still occasionally perpetuated by scholars (see e.g. Richardson Citation2022, 159–161).
17 In The Algonquin Legends of New England Leland had suggested not only a very ancient diffusion of shamanism throughout the northern hemisphere, but also a more recent transmission of mythological material from the Eddas to Algonquin tribes via the “Eskimos” of Greenland (see Leland Citation1884a; Citation1884b).
18 Barnum had given some examples of how spiritualist mediums used similar statements to produce the illusion of genuine predictions: see e.g. Barnum Citation1866, 87.
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Egil Asprem
Egil Asprem is Professor of history of religions at Stockholm University. His research interests include esotericism and the sciences, the history of magic, and more recently Romani studies.