The gypsylorist as occultist: anti-gypsy stereotypes and the entanglement of esotericism and scholarship in Charles Godfrey Leland’s work on ‘gypsy magic’

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Charles Godfrey Leland
• Gypsylorism
• esotericism
• The Roma
• magic
• shamanism
• history of folklore
• Gypsy Lore Society

Introduction: magic and gypsylorism

In 1891, two books appeared on the subject of magic, fortune-telling, and religious customs among the ‘gypsies’: Charles Godfrey Leland’s Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune Telling, and Heinrich von Wlislocki’s Volksglaube und religiöser Brauch der Zigeuner. Wlislocki, a German-Hungarian ethnologist who married a Romani woman, claimed to have been granted unique access to the secretive religious practices of the only ‘pure’ Zigeuner left in Europe: Those of the eastern Danube lands (on Wlislocki 1891, xi; see also Patrut 2007; Davis 2017). Leland, an American author, editor, humourist and self-taught folklorist, provided a collection of materials found in other authors – especially in Wlislocki’s published papers – interspersed with his own comparisons, erratic theorizations, and anecdotes with mostly British ‘gypsies’. Quite contrary to Wlislocki’s search for authentic and unspoiled secrets, Leland’s main theses were that the magical practices of the ‘gypsies’ had primarily been developed for consumption by outsiders, and that gypsies had therefore functioned as ‘colporteurs of folklore’, picking up, sharing, and spreading diverse customs, occult services, and fairy-tales on their assumed long trek from India to Europe and beyond.

Remarkably, after 130 years these two books remain the only original monographic studies with academic pretentions to have been published on the subject of the Roma and magic.¹ Outside of academia the situation is different, in large part thanks to Leland’s book, which was republished in 1962. Explicitly targeted at ‘the student of spiritual exotica’ and the ‘connoisseur of the extraordinary’ (Leland 1962, dust-jacket text; Silver 1962, v), this second edition would inform works on ‘gypsy magic’ marketed to occultist, neopagan, and new age audiences, where the notion of the Roma as an enchanted people continue to thrive (for examples see e.g., Trigg 1973; Buckland 2010; Alvarado 2013; Lecouteux 2018).

But occultism was not just a vehicle through which gypsylorist notions were disseminated to new generations; it was also an important, but little explored context for late nineteenth century scholarship on ‘gypsies’. Through a closer analysis of Charles Godfrey Leland (1824–1903), the first president of the Gypsy Lore Society (established 1888) and a foundational player in the field that would later become Romani studies, I argue that his influential construction of ‘gypsy magic’ was shaped in part by the gypsylorist’s own life-long engagement with occultism and pre-occultist forms of esotericism.² Moreover, Leland’s construction effectively repurposed and perpetuated two long-standing, but mutually contradictory aspects of anti-gypsy stereotype: that the Roma possess occult powers, and that their magic is fraudulent.

Stereotypes, as Walter Lippmann (1922, 79–94) originally theorized them, are central to how humans categorize and relate to their surroundings by ‘pick[ing] out that which our culture has already defined for us’ (ibid., 82). Building on Dyer (1999), stereotypes (1) create order by reducing complex phenomena (like groups of people) to a small set of specific characteristics, (2) provide shortcuts for passing judgments and making decisions, and (3) signal the values of the in-group. While all stereotypes about Roma reduce the group to essential characteristics, provide models for interaction, and express the values of the gadje or non-Roma, they are not all anti-gypsy stereotypes. The growing body of research on representations of Roma (see e.g., Saul and Tebbutt 2004; Gay y Blasco 2008) has shown that the image of ‘the gypsy’ has been an object both of ‘revulsion and fascination’ (Gay y Blasco 2008, 297); thus, the use of stereotypes reducing Roma to picturesque wanderers living on the margins of civilization has been used abundantly in Romantic representations holding up ‘the gypsy’ as an unattainable model reflecting values now presumed to be lost to moderns (cf. Epstein Nord 2008; Houghton-Walker 2014). I define anti-gypsy stereotypes as those stereotypes about Roma that express the values of the in-group in direct contradistinction to perceived negative and undesirable aspects of ‘gypsies’, making them a problem and justifying various forms of repressive measures. Historically, the stereotypes emphasizing magic that concern us here were explicitly anti-gypsy in this sense: they defined the other as connected with demonically inspired magic in contrast to religion, or with fraud and theft in contrast to honest work. However, conceptions of magic itself underwent radical changes in the nineteenth century, not least through the ascent of occultism as an alternative worldview among European and American populations (see. e.g., Owen 2004). Against this background, a central gypsy scholar like Leland was able to repurpose the old stereotypes as a way to argue the scientific and, indeed, broader societal value of ‘gypsy magic’.

The significance of my argument should be assessed both in view of the study of religion and the history of Romani studies as a field. First, historians of religion have recently started to pay attention to how currents like Mesmerism, spiritualism, and occultism influenced early scholarly debates on religion (e.g., Mühlematter and Zander 2021; cf. Josephson-Storm 2017; Pokorny and Winter 2021; Robertson 2021). An American autodidact who wriggled himself into the inner circles of British folklorists in the 1890s, Leland’s studies of ‘gypsy sorcery’, Native-American legends (Leland 1884a; 1884b), and Tuscan folklore and witchcraft (Leland 1892; Leland 1895; Leland 1899a)³ all sought to contribute to ongoing discussions about cultural diffusion, survivals, and the evolution and origins of religion. In Gypsy Sorcery he brought these interests into a critical dialogue with occultists in order to shed light on the emergence and efficacy of magical practice. In fact, Leland’s later work, of which Gypsy Sorcery is part, are textbook examples of the late-nineteenth-century entanglement of esotericism and scholarship.

Second, through his role as co-founder of the Gypsy Lore Society, Leland was at the heart of the discourse now often referred to as ‘gypsylorism’ (e.g., Lee 2000; Mayall 2004; Acton 2016; Selling 2018; Brooks, Clark, and Rostas 2022; see also Okely 1983; Willems 1997), a variant of Orientalism that constructed the Romani peoples as ‘gypsies’, and cast them as Europe’s internal Oriental Other (Lee 2000, 132). I agree with previous authors that gypsylorism must be seen in connection with other forms of colonial and imperial knowledge production, making the Roma ‘legible subjects of empire’ and instrumentalizing this knowledge in ‘practices of governance, extraction and dominance’ (Brooks, Clark, and Rostas 2022, 69). Critical scholarship on gypsylorism has received pushback from some scholars associated with the Gypsy Lore Society (e.g., Matras 2005; 2017; Marushiakova and Popov 2017). Against what they see as an unfair portrayal of the early GLS as motivated solely by Orientalist and racist notions, scholars like Yaron Matras (2017, 114) instead see the GLS as a coterie of people who, for all their limitations, were objective researchers on ‘a quest for discovery’, and whose ‘commitment to documentation’ yielded rigorous and valid accounts that can still be assessed by contemporary scholars.

My argument has bearing on these debates by offering a grounded contextualization of a central player in the early GLS. On one hand, a closer examination of Leland’s work destabilizes the gypsylorist’s positionality as an agent of the colonial Establishment. On the other, it demonstrates that Leland’s motivations are not found in a simple, detached quest for scientific discovery, but rather are bound up in complex ways with the concerns of occultists and aspects of his personal life story. What Leland ultimately extracts from his ethnographic subjects are the building blocks of his own theory of magic, seen not as an idolatrous practice to be exterminated nor as an ignorant superstition to be remedied by education, but as a real power latent in human beings that ought to be taught to children in school for the betterment of humanity. Significantly, Leland developed this theory in critical conversation with contemporary occultist authors and esotericists of previous centuries, thus subordinating the practices of his ‘gypsy’ subjects to scientific discussions of the occult and the possible implementation of magic’s underlying techniques in the service of the state. What emerges is a view of the gypsylorist not only as producer of scientific knowledge of the Oriental Other, but as a critical occultist bent on harnessing the powers of the occult. Viewed in light of the long-standing stereotypes about ‘magical gypsies’ which Leland’s book both drew on and contributed to, the gypsylorists’ own enduring engagement with the occult invites questions about whose magic is really on display in this literature: that of the Roma subaltern or that of the gadje Establishment?

I will proceed in three parts. First, a preliminary discussion is necessary for clarifying historical and contemporary terminology relating to the Roma, introducing gypsylorism, and the historical entanglement of antigypsyism and discourses on magic that undergird late-nineteenth-century gypsylorist work. Second, I take a biographical approach in order to demonstrate how Leland’s lifelong interest in esotericism intersected with an emerging scholarly career late in life. Finally, I turn to a closer analysis of Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune-Telling, contextualizing it in view of contemporary folkloristic theory on the one hand and Leland’s occultist connections on the other.

Preliminaries: Roma, gypsylorism, and ‘Magic’ in anti-Gypsy stereotyping

Roma

Since the Gypsy Lore Society that Leland co-founded has given rise to the field of Romani Studies (its journal changed names from Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society to Romani Studies in 1999), one might think that ‘Roma’ is simply a less offensive term for what used to be called ‘gypsies’. This would be a mistake. The term Roma today has two primary functions: on the one hand, it is a legal umbrella category in the context of the minority policies of the European Union and some of its member states (Directorate-General for Justice and Consumers 2020, 1); on the other, it is an ethnic self-designation of some but far from all of the groups covered by those policies (cf. Law and Kovats 2018). To complicate matters further, since this unified ethnic self-designation has become central to struggles for Romani rights, reparations, and liberation across the world it has become strategically rational for some members of Romani groups who did not previously consider themselves Roma to adopt this identity and emphasize aspects of their culture that fit an exotified and racialized image (cf. James 2021).

In the first, umbrella category sense, the term refers to a heterogeneous cluster of ethnic minorities in various European countries that used to go under exonyms such as ‘Egyptians’, ‘gypsies’, ‘gitanos’, ‘Zigeuner’, ‘cigan’, ‘bohémiens’ and ‘tattare’. From a deep historical perspective these groups do have certain things in common, notably (1) that some of their distant ancestors were part of a poorly understood but probably drawn-out migration to Europe in the late Middle Ages, originating in India by way of the Persianate and Byzantine worlds, (2) that they preserve some knowledge of some dialect of the language Romani, and, importantly, (3) that they have been the targets of explicitly anti-gypsy legislation in various European countries from the late fifteenth-century onwards. Despite these historical ties, Romani groups differ widely between each other. Many have been separated for hundreds of years, been embedded in different majority societies, adopted different languages, religions, and denominations, lived under different state/church legal structures, and adapted to different economic conditions. Moreover, only some of the groups (primarily in the Balkans and Central and Eastern Europe) explicitly identify themselves as Roma, and some do not even consider each other part of the same ethnic group. Thus, the umbrella term ‘Roma’ covers self-identifiying Roma as well as those who primarily define otherwise, e.g., as Sinti (Germany), Manouches (France), Travellers/Romanichal (UK), Resande/Reisende/Romanisæl (Scandinavia), Calé (Iberia), Kaale (Finland), etc. Here I assume an understanding of ethnicity on broadly Barthian lines – that is to say, as a social organization of cultural difference predicated on ethnic self-ascription as well as the ascription of ethnic identity by outsiders (Barth 1969; cf. Hylland Eriksen and Jakoubek 2019) – which means that ethnic status cannot be conferred based on various objective criteria (language, ancestry, religion etc.), irrespective of whether the group in question recognizes them as distinctive. Thus, while we cannot use ‘Roma’ as an ethnonym for all Romani minorities, the category remains useful for talking about that which different Romani groups do share – including their common subjection to gypsylorist interest. I will therefore be using three levels of terminology: When discussing the thought world of the primary sources I refer directly to the emic terminology (e.g., ‘gypsy’, ‘Zigeuner’); when referring to all or any Romani group (including ancestor populations of such groups, irrespective of what they may have called themselves), I follow the European Commission’s pragmatic use of ‘Roma’; when referring to clearly localized groups, I use specific ethnonyms like the British Romanichals or Iberian Calé.

Gypsylorism

Following Ken Lee (2000, 132), the term gypsylorism refers to a variant of Orientalism that construes the various Romani minorities in essentialized terms as ‘gypsies’, and cast them as ‘the Orientals within’. The ‘gypsy’ of gypsylorism thus refers to an imagined transnational ethnic group, supposedly unified by a set of racial, linguistic, social, and psychological traits, applied to a diverse set of ethnic minorities that in some cases have nothing to do with one another. Gaining its impetus from late-eighteenth-century work by Rüdiger (1782), Grellmann (1783) and others that had demonstrated the Indian origins of the Romani language, gypsylorism developed against the backdrop of early-nineteenth-century Romanticism (see e.g., Epstein Nord 2008; Houghton-Walker 2014; Saul 2007). One highly influential author was George Borrow who, after attempting to distribute the Gospels among the Spanish Calé for the British and Foreign Bible Society, published a vastly influential pseudo-ethnographic (i.e., largely anecdotal and fictionalized) study entitled The Zincali: An Account of the Gypsies of Spain (1841) (see Willems 1997, 93-170). Borrow’s fictional renditions of ‘gypsies’ in the novels Lavengro (1851) and The Romany Rye (1857) were equally influential. The latter also presented a model for the scholar of gypsies that would be emulated by later gypsylorists: the phrase ‘Romany Rai’, literally a Romani ‘gentleman’ or ‘lord’ (from Sanskrit rājan, ‘king’), referred to a learned non-Roma gentleman who claimed to have gained the trust and friendship of the Roma, mastered their language, been granted access to their traditions and secrets and earned the right to speak with authority about – and for – their community. The reality behind this sort of romance has been called into question (e.g., Mayall 2004, 38–40). The Romani Rai was prone to the same problems as other early participant observers; the trust and friendship was generally transactional in nature, and many Rais appear to have been conscious that their Roma informants could mislead them or simply feed them what they wanted to hear.

Gypsylorist scholarship reached its zenith with the foundation of the Gypsy Lore Society (GLS) by a coterie of Romany Rais in 1888 (Fraser 1990; cf. Mayall 2004, 162–166). The initial aim of the society was to systematize what was already known of ‘gypsies’ and to collect new evidence, working towards what, in the first issue of the GLS’ journal, was called ‘the final solution to the Gypsy problem’ (MacRitchie 1889, 1). While this sounds ominous in view of the genocide on Roma fifty years later (the Porajmos or Samudaripen; see About and Abakunova 2016), it referred to the questions of Romani origins, migration, traditions, and impact on European culture. Thus, the GLS gathered a group of folklorists, orientalists, philologists, and historians, guided by an interest in the origins and diffusion of the Roma, and especially their relations with European folklore.

Following the critical turn in Romani studies that began in the 1980s (see e.g., Selling 2022, 83–108), scholars have occasionally noted that associations with ‘magic’ were an integral part of gypsylorist constructions of ‘gypsies’ as the internal exotic Other (e.g., Lee 2000, 136; Hancock 2002, 102–104). They have also noted that these associations were built on much older and longstanding stereotypes, which, as magic-based stereotypes often do, joined fascination and exoticism with fear and distrust (Kenrick 2004). This was a central feature of Borrow’s work, particularly in his representation of Romani women: ‘if there be one single being in the world who, more than another, deserves the title of sorceress (and where do you find a word of greater romance and more thrilling interest?) it is the Gypsy female in the prime and vigour of her age’ (Borrow 1841, vol. 1, 129). Such casual connection to magic continued to be invoked by the Gypsy Lore Society. The frontispiece of the first issue of the Society’s journal set the stage by quoting the following lines from Pierre-Jean de Béranger’s (1780–1857) song, Le bohémiens:

Sorcerers, jugglers or tricksters,

Filthy remnants

Of an ancient world;

Sorcerers, jugglers or tricksters,

Gay gypsies, where do you come from?⁴

Associating Roma with magic connected them to an imagined deep past, in contrast with pious Christian religion on the one hand and Enlightened rationality on the other. It could insinuate the possession of genuinely sinister occult powers (‘sorcery’, ‘witchcraft’), or a dishonest use of trickery. But at the end of the nineteenth century, the association of Roma with magic also created a potential link to the growing interest in the occult among the literate public as well as certain scientists and scholars. This link, hitherto unexamined by critics of gypsylorism and ignored by those wishing to portray GLS scholars as driven solely by detached objectivity, was fully exploited by the Society’s foremost writer on ‘gypsy magic’. Before turning to this entanglement of gypsylorism with occultism, we should have a look at the origins of the two contradictory aspects of gypsy magic stereotype.

Anti-Gypsy stereotypes about ‘Magic’

The double image of ‘gypsy magic’ as demonically inspired and entirely fraudulent was not a nineteenth-century invention: it was based in long-standing stereotypes about the Roma with roots in the first records of the western European Romani diaspora in the early fifteenth century.⁵

A number of city chronicles note the arrival in the late autumn of 1417 of a foreign people, variously called ‘Tatere aus Egypten’ (in Hildesheim), ‘Secaner’ from ‘Tartarien’ (in Lübeck), or ‘Thateren, die Zegeuner genannt’ (Magdeburg) (see entries in Gilsenbach 1997, 47–52); in the following years we find them in Belgium, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Italy, and Spain, and from the early 1500s in Britain and Scandinavia (cf. Fraser 1992, 60–128; Cressy 2018, 1–34). Usually led by men styling themselves counts or dukes, and claiming to be from a place called Little Egypt (hence the exonyms Egyptians, gypsies, gitanos etc.) these travellers, which are now generally considered to be ancestors of the indigenous Romani populations of western and northern Europe, were initially well received as refugees and penitent pilgrims (Fraser 1992).⁶ But among the sixty or so contemporary records we have for the decades between 1417 and 1450 (cf. Kenrick 2004, 80), there were also a few references to magic. The earliest is from Colmar in France. On August 10, 1418, the city chronicle states that thirty ‘heathen’ men with silver earrings along with their shawl-clad wives and children, more than 100 people in total, had arrived and stayed in the town for three days (see Gilsenbach 1997, 54). The women said that they could tell the future by looking at the lines in the hands, but, the chronicle claimed, it was really just a trick for picking the customers’ purses. On August 24, 1419, in Mâcon, France, a certain Andrew, duke of Little Egypt, had arrived with an entourage of at least 120 people (Bataillard 1889, 325–326). Two entries exist for this event. According to the first entry, the visitors were met with the usual hospitality, receiving alms in the form of bread and wine. A second entry claims that the women as well as the men had then proceeded to practice ‘evil arts’, such as reading hands and summoning spirits. Some of them were brought to the castle of Mâcon and imprisoned ‘for certain deceits by evil art which they had practiced in the said town’ (Bataillard 1889, 326).

It should be noted that such negative references to the Roma as fraudulent fortune-tellers or practitioners of evil arts are on the whole few and far between in the early records. They would however be picked up by later authors from the sixteenth century onwards and form the basis of two specific and enduring stereotypes: on one hand that the Roma, especially their women, really do possess dangerous demonic powers and that consulting a fortune teller is therefore tantamount to idolatry (cf. Coy 2020, 57); and on the other that their claims to magic powers are fraudulent pretexts for tricking the superstitious. On the whole, it appears that the latter suspicion became the dominant one. Samuel Rid suggested that the juggling tricks and legerdemain found in his country originated with the ‘Egiptians’ that had ‘arrived heere in England’ and were ‘excellent in quaint trickes and devises, not known heere at that time’ (Rid 1612, B). By the eighteenth-century, Spanish inquisitors were instructed to treat the practices of ‘gypsy’ women as fraudulent rather than demonic (Pym 2007, 108), while Swedish court-cases where ‘gypsies’ (tattare or zigenare) were tried for sorcery typically ended with convictions of fraud, often with the peasants who had been tricked being punished for their superstitious gullibility (Asprem and Casinge 2022). Indeed, the evidence, such as it is, suggests that early-modern Roma knew how to make productive use of the ‘real powers’ stereotype by feigning such powers through illusions and sleight of hand.

Yet, influential and much-cited works of the sixteenth- and seventeenth centuries tended to retain the ambiguity. Notably, Jacob Thomasius’ Dissertatio philosophica de cingaris (1652), filled to the brim with contradictions (cf. Saul 2007, 3), sums up his account by stating that ‘there is no imposture they have not mastered, no crime which they dare not commit’ listing their roles as ‘subtle horse dealers, fraudulent gamblers, convicted of all kinds of fraud’, as ‘murderers’, ‘traitors of Christianity’, and ‘emissaries and explorers for the Turks’ (i.e., spies), but also stating that they really are ‘sorcerers [veneficii]’ and ‘enchanters [incantatores], especially in controlling fire by magical art’ (Thomasius 1652, §67).⁷ On these grounds Thomasius argued that the cingari should not be tolerated anywhere but be expelled, legitimating Draconian policies that were already in force across the continent (see Fraser 1992, 130–171).

Charles Godfrey Leland: ‘[A]n adept in occulta, and a scholar’

When Leland wrote his book on Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune-Telling in 1891 he did so in a tradition that was already long and well established. In fact, the two principal contradictory views on ‘gypsy magic’ – that they possess inherent occult powers and that they are all frauds – constitute a central problem that Leland sought to solve. In line with earlier authors, he wanted to have it both ways. Unlike them, he had a range of new ideas at his disposal for making the pieces fit. The problem of magic had become one of the central questions in the new disciplines of ethnology, folklore, and the history of religion; meanwhile, a range of alternative religious currents had emerged under headings such as spiritualism, Mesmerism, and occultism, claiming to offer a practical and often ‘scientific’ approach to phenomena like ‘magic’ (Pokorny and Winter 2021). Some of Leland’s colleagues among the folklorists, notably Andrew Lang, were moreover seeking to bridge these two developments, addressing the scholarly problem of magic by engaging the discipline of psychical research. Leland’s work on ‘gypsy magic’ was situated in the middle of these concerns. But it was also grounded in a long-standing, though often critical, engagement with esotericism.

The slow making of Leland the scholar

Charles Godfrey Leland’s life is not easily summarized. Margery Silver, writing the introduction to the second edition of Leland’s Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune Telling in 1962 described him as ‘a prolific poet, critic, editor, political commentator, folklorist, humourist, philologist and anthropologist who was also at various times revolutionist, soldier, prospector for oil, reformer, educator and artist’ (Silver 1962, xi). Leland’s Memoirs in two volumes covering his life until 1870 (Leland 1894; originally published 1893) and the two-volume biography written by his niece, Elizabeth Robins Pennell (1906), both portray an exceptional life filled with extensive travel, adventure, meetings with extraordinary people, and participation in historic events ranging from the French revolution of 1848 to the American Civil War. While the details of Leland’s many adventures, richly supported by anecdotes in his memoirs, can often be questioned, Pennell’s generous reprinting of letters, scrapbooks and other contemporary material make it possible to corroborate the broad lines and main events. Due to the focus of the present article, I will only present the broadest lines, ignoring most of Leland’s fiction, editorial and translation work, political activities, or involvement with the arts and crafts movement and educational reform. In this section I will emphasize aspects that are of immediate relevance to his scholarly path in later life; in the next one I present Leland’s connections with nineteenth-century esoteric currents.

Leland was born into a financially comfortable home in Philadelphia in 1824. He endured a somewhat difficult childhood, struggling both socially and academically at the private schools where he was educated, as well as at Princeton. In 1845, at the age of 21, Leland’s father supplied him with enough money to pursue postgraduate studies in Europe for three years. The years were spent first at Heidelberg, then Munich, and finally the Sorbonne in Paris, with many adventures in between, visiting Poland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Italy. In Paris he got caught up in the revolution of February 24, 1848, building barricades, fighting the king’s soldiers, and participating in the storming of the Tuileries Palace.⁸ Later that year he returned to America. In the period between 1848 and 1869 Leland established a literary, journalistic, and editorial career; besides writing for a number of magazines and newspapers in New York and Philadelphia, he served as editor for publications such as Vanity Fair and the showman P. T. Barnum’s Illustrated News in the 1850s and 1860s. Leland took a special liking to Barnum, and we shall have occasion to return to him later on. In 1855 Leland published a translation of two of Heinrich Heine’s prose works into English. Leland’s lasting engagement with Heine, another satirically minded author that Leland looked up to, resulted in a seven-volume collection published between 1891-1893 (cf. Sammons 1998). In 1857 Leland launched his most successful literary invention: the character Hans Breitmann, a tall, big-framed, beer-guzzling German, presented in obnoxious and witty rhymes in a mock-German broken English. Himself an imposing, broad-shouldered figure at 193 cm (6’4), Leland appears to have put more than a little of his own personality into the character; he would even sign his memoirs and other late works (including the Heine edition) Hans Breitmann. Hugely successful pamphlets of ‘Breitmann ballads’ were published on both sides of the Atlantic (cf. Leland 1889), providing Leland with fame as well as an independent stream of income.

In 1869, Leland and his wife Eliza Bella (Isabel) Leland née Fisher left America for Europe. Starting with travels through Turkey, Egypt, and Russia, they settled in England in 1870. It was at this mature stage in life that Leland commenced his scholarly career as an ethnographer, folklorist, and philologist. A crucial catalyst for this shift of emphasis was his encounter, apparently in 1871 at Devil’s Den outside Brighton, with a group of English Romanichals, led by Matthew ‘Matty’ Cooper (1812–1900). According to letters and scrapbooks quoted by Pennell, Leland took language lessons with Matty Cooper three to four times a week, visited the group frequently at their camps and seems to have been quite well received (Pennell 1906, 2:131-137). Two years later, Leland published a book on The English Gipsies and Their Language (Leland 1873). This was also his first work with a clear scholarly aspiration, initiating a series of publications on the subjects of gypsies, ethnography, and philology. In an appendix to his second book on The Gypsies (Leland 1882), Leland became the first to document the existence of the language Shelta, or ‘tinkers’ talk’, a mixed language with origins in Irish Gaelic spoken primarily by Irish Travellers. This discovery remains Leland’s most important contribution to Romani studies, paving the way for the differentiation of the category ‘gypsies’ on linguistic grounds.

From 1871 Leland befriended established Romani Rais, notably Francis Hinde Groome and E. H. Palmer; in the 1880s he became increasingly involved in the wider scholarly community of folklorists, ethnologists, and orientalists (see Dorson 1968).⁹ He helped establish the Gypsy Lore Society in 1888, became its first president, and contributed to its journal. He wrote articles for international journals like the Ethnologische Mitteilungen, participated in a number of international conferences, such as the Oriental Congresses in Vienna (1886) and in Stockholm/Uppsala and Christiania (1889), and was the only Britain-based folklorist represented at the First International Folk-Lore Convention in Paris (1889).¹⁰ In Paris, Leland was invited to organize the Second International Folk-Lore Congress in London in 1891, which he did in capacity as vice-chairman to Lawrence Gomme, with Andrew Lang acting as president of the congress (see Jacobs and Nutt 1892, vii, xii-xiii). Other members of the organizing committee included James George Frazer and Edward B. Tylor. By 1891, Leland had reached the inner circle of the British folklore community.

The connection with Andrew Lang, president of the Folk-Lore Society at the time that Leland headed the GLS, is of greater relevance to our story. Lang is among those scholars who connected an interest in the nineteenth-century occult with his work in folklore and anthropology (see Frenschkowski 2021; Luckhurst 2002, 160–167). His position that the new discipline of psychical research, and in particular its studies of spiritualism, telepathy, apparitions, and mesmeric phenomena, is of the greatest interest to folklorists who want not only to collect stories, but seek to explain their occurrence as pointing to an aspect of human experience, caused debate in the Folk-Lore Society in the 1890s (see especially Lang 1895; cf. Clodd 1895). The intellectual battle stood between diffusionism and psychic universalism. As we shall see, Leland would combine diffusionist arguments with Lang’s ‘psycho-folklore’ in his approach to magic and fortune telling among the gypsies. Before turning to that, we should have a closer look at Leland’s occult interests and connections.

‘[D]eep in darksome lore’: Leland and mid-nineteenth century esotericism

Reading Leland’s Memoirs and biography it becomes clear how much his early upbringing fostered an interest in what we would now call esotericism. Philadelphia in the 1820s and 1830s was a city still dominated by Quakers; founded on religious toleration, William Penn’s state had since the seventeenth century been a refuge for various denominations and sects, but also for Behmenists, Hermeticists, and Rosicrucians, cultivating a significant interest in occult practices (see e.g., Albanese 2007, 75–82). Nostalgic memories of the peoples of the old colony also lived on: Leland remembered the Philadelphia of his youth as ‘a city of great trees, which seemed to me to be ever repeating their old poetic legends to the wind of Swedes, witches, and Indians’ (Leland 1894, 46). Leland tells a story from his early childhood that fits in with this ambience and gives an insight into his own self-image in later years. A few days after Leland’s birth, the household’s old Dutch nurse had disappeared with the newborn and his cradle, taking him to the loft. There he was found, Leland writes, ‘sleeping, on my breast an open Bible, with, I believe, a key and knife, at my head lighted candles, money, and a plate of salt’. The nurse had explained that the ritual was done to secure the infant’s rising in life. Leland added that he had ‘since learned from a witch that the same is still done in exactly the same manner in Italy, and in Asia’ and that ‘the child thus initiated will become deep in darksome lore, an adept in occulta, and a scholar’ (Leland 1894, 4).

Leland’s account of his childhood is sprinkled with anecdotes of this kind; how he had seemed entirely strange to his parents as a child, communing with birds, telling the fortunes of the family’s guests, and taking uncannily to the fairy legends told by his Irish nurses (e.g., Leland 1894, 28–29). While we should file this under self-mythologization in later life, it remains clear that the young Leland was exposed not only to Pennsylvania folklore but also to post-revolutionary American esotericism. Leland describes a turning point in his life occurring at around the age of 13 or 14, which involved a deep dive into esotericism. Now an unusually tall, but weak and sickly boy, Leland was regularly bullied, beaten, and humiliated by his peers; as a response, he retreated into a world of obscure books. His father had bought him a share in the Philadelphia Library. He soon discovered that the library had a special section containing ‘several hundred volumes of occult philosophy;’ over the coming years, he read ‘nearly every one’ (Leland 1894, 74):

Cornelius Agrippa and Barret’s ‘Magus,’ Paracelsus, the black-letter edition of Reginald Scot, Glanville, and Gaffarel, Trithemius, Baptista Porta, and God knows how many Rosicrucian writers became familiar to me. Once when I had only twenty-five cents I gave it for a copy of “Waters of the East” by Eugenius Philalethes, or Thomas Vaughan. (Leland 1894, 74).

Following this crash-course in occult philosophy, magic, and alchemy, Leland discovered ‘the Mystics and Quietists’, finding that the Quakerism of his hometown had grown out of Jacob Boehme’s theosophy. By the age of 18, if not before, he had ended up with the Neoplatonists and the Hermetica. Pennell describes a manuscript in her possession entitled the ‘Pemander of Trismegistus: Transcribed by Charles Leland, 1842’ (Pennell 1906, 1:33). Leland’s Memoirs also mentions this transcription of the first tractate of the Corpus Hermeticum, though he misdates it to his sixteenth year. Leland’s mention of this document opens a fascinating three-page account of his encounter with, and eventual dismissal of, Transcendentalism, written from the perspective of someone claiming to have had a broad grounding in older esoteric ideas, despite his young years. He says that he had ‘become deeply interested in the new and bold development which was then manifesting itself in the Unitarian Church’:

There was something new in the air, and this Something I, in an antiquated form, had actually preceded. It was really only a rechauffé of the Neo-Platonism which lay at the bottom of Porphyry, Proclus, Psellus, Jamblichus, with all of whom I was fairly well acquainted. Should anyone doubt this, I can assure him that I still possess a full copy of the “Poemander” or “Pimander” of Hermes Trismegistus, made by me in my sixteenth year, which most assuredly no mortal could ever have understood or made, or cared to make, if he had not read the Neo-Platonists; for Marsilius Ficinus himself regarded this work as a pendant to them, and published it as such. (Leland 1894, 76).

Having transcribed a Hermetic text proved his attachment to the Neoplatonists, and his Neoplatonist leanings in turn predisposed him to immediately grasp the new spiritual ideas that were coming out of Unitarianism – that is to say Transcendentalism.

There came a rumour that there was something springing up in Boston called Transcendentalism. Nobody knew what it was, but it was dreamy, mystical, crazy, and infideleterious to religion. Firstly, it was connected with Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and finally with everything German. The new school of liberal Unitarians favoured it. I had a quick intuition that here was something for me to work at. (Leland 1894, 77)

He set out to read Carlyle and Emerson, along with Kant, Schelling, Fichte and many others (Leland 1894, 77–78). Although he was ‘utterly alone and without a living soul to whom [he] could exchange an idea’ Leland felt that he was ‘mastering rapidly and boldly that which was then in reality the tremendous problem of the age’ (Leland 1894, 78). But with mastery came disillusionment:

I can now see that, as regards its real antique bases, I was far more deeply read and better grounded than were even its most advanced leaders in Anglo-Saxony. For I soon detected in Carlyle, and much more in Emerson, a very slender knowledge of that stupendous and marvellous ancient Mysticism which sent its soul in burning faith and power to the depth of “the downward-borne elements of God,” as Hermes called them. … Vigorous and clever and bold writers they were – Carlyle was far beyond me in literary art – but true Pantheists they were not. And they were men of great genius, issuing essays to the age on popular, or political, or “literary” topics; but philosophers they most assuredly were not, nor men tremendous in spiritual truth. And yet it was precisely as philosophers and thaumaturgists and revealers of occulta that they posed – especially Emerson. And they dabbled or trifled with free thought and “immorality,” crying Goethe up as the Light of Lights, while all their inner souls were bound in the most Puritanical and petty goody-goodyism. Though there were traces of grim Scotch humour in Carlyle, my patron saint and master, Rabelais, or aught like him, had no credit with them. (Leland 1894, 78–79).

He had expected to find in this new movement ‘the sacred mysteries of some marvellous cabala’ (Leland 1894, 77). Finding nothing of the sort, Leland ‘returned to the good old ghost-haunted paths trodden by my ancestors, to dryads and elves and voices from the stars, and the archæus formed by the astral spirit (not the modern Blavatsky affair, by-the-bye), which entyped all things … ’ (Leland 1894, 77).

As with much else in Leland’s Memoirs, it is wise to read these passages as a late reflection on the paths taken, not free from backwards projection. As such it is nevertheless of great interest. The narrative describes how an erudite fondness of old esoteric wisdom led to a rejection of the modern, shallow fads of Transcendentalism and eventually Theosophy. A turn to folklore, grounded in blood and tradition, became his solution – combined with a passion for science in a Romantic mode.

In a sense, Leland is a link between older forms of esotericism, especially as manifested in German Naturphilosophie and related currents at the beginning of the century, and later ‘scientized’ forms focused on hidden psychic abilities emerging at the century’s close. During his postgraduate stay in Germany in 1846, Leland tellingly made a pilgrimage to Justinus Kerner (1786–1862), the physician famous chiefly for his experiments in animal magnetism and his book on the remarkable ‘Seeress of Prevorst’, Friederike Hauffe; Leland apparently dined with Kerner at his home in Weinsberg (Leland 1894, 204–207).¹¹ While he would befriend several other central personalities of nineteenth-century esotericism, including Emerson and Henry Steel Olcott,¹² the meeting with Kerner is particularly relevant because Leland would come to show an increased interest in hypnotism, dreams, psychic powers, and the unconscious. We see this already in his very first published booklet, The Poetry and Mystery of Dreams (1856). Written in the birth-year of Sigmund Freud, and 23 years before Eduard von Hartmann’s Philosophie des Unbewussten, it testifies to the widespread Romantic interest in dreams, memory, and unconscious mental action as the bridge between emerging science and the magic of the past. Organized as an ‘oneirological’ lexicon of dream symbolism, drawn from a range of ancient and medieval sources and illustrated with excerpts of poetry, the book’s introduction connected dreams with the power of ‘latent memory’ which ‘would serve of itself to explain many a mysterious revelation, which the Rosicrucian philosopher would have ascribed to his mystical Adech¹³ or invisible ‘inner sprite’’ (Leland 1856, x). Dreams displayed not only latent memory, but also ‘hidden powers’ which during waking hours were ‘so subtle in their operation as to defy detection’ (Leland 1856, x). This subtle dream power was, he held, responsible for ‘the apparent spontaneity of much reasoning’, specifically ‘in relation to memory’; he concluded that ‘when we recall the vast magazine of knowledge which memory presents to these powers, we can no longer wonder that they should occasionally form combinations and conclusions which appear to the unreflecting, perfectly miraculous’ (Leland 1856, xi).

Leland would return to these ideas and expand on them at the very end of his life, after modern occultism and psychical research had entered the stage. In the posthumously published book entitled The Alternate Sex; or, the Female Intellect in Man, and the Masculine in Woman (1904) Leland argued that the phenomena which ‘Theosophists and Occultists of all kinds’ called ‘the Subliminal Self, the Hidden or Inner Soul, the Unknown Me, or Unconscious Cerebration’ really pointed to the existence of aspects of the alternate sex within each man and woman. Besides the many misogynist and anti-suffrage attitudes sprinkled throughout the book (e.g., why women cannot produce good literature and art, have no sense of humour, or should not be given the vote), Leland spent a good deal of time offering explanations for Mesmerism, hypnotism, spiritualism, mysticism, clairvoyant dreams and similar phenomena by reference to the oppositely-gendered self (e.g., Leland 1904, 37–45).

Another, much more influential late work is Have You a Strong Will; or How to Develop Will-power, or any other Faculty or Attribute of the Mind, and render it habitual by the easy process of Self-Hypnotism (1899b). A kind of self-help book competing with similar titles popular in the New Thought movement, Have You a Strong Will would go through seven editions by 1929, published first by Wellby and then by Rider, in their catalogues of occult literature. Hypnotism is the key theme also here; Leland aims to show that he has developed a method of self-hypnotism which, by first training the power of attention, can increase the practitioner’s memory and imagination, and finally strengthen their will so that they can achieve things that ‘would have once been regarded as miraculous action’ (Leland 1899b, v). He has himself practiced this method since his seventieth birthday (which would have been 1894), and has as a result been able to work more tirelessly, focused, and efficient than ever before. In this book, too, Leland makes a direct but demystifying connection with the occult. One chapter, focusing on the ‘Marvellous faculties or powers latent in Man’ states that humanity has always seen itself ‘as possessed of latent faculties, or capacities of a mysterious or extraordinary nature’ and gestures to ‘the history of occultism, magic or sorcery from the earliest times to the present day’ to indicate what he has in mind (Leland 1889, 24–25). But this magic, Leland says, really worked through ‘fascination’, which was ‘closely allied to, or the parent of, what is now known as Suggestion in Hypnotism’, a technique which, in turn, is ‘an off-shoot of Animal Magnetism’ and Mesmerism. Indeed, James Braid’s hypnotic theory of animal magnetism becomes the master key also for Leland, who finds in it a way to keep what is good in magic while holding fast to a naturalistic or, as he says elsewhere, materialistic worldview (Leland 1904, 111, 130). We might note that from the third ‘memorial’ edition (1903) onwards, Have You a Strong Will included a final chapter on how this method had in fact been known already by Paracelsus, providing several direct quotations from Paracelsus’ works in Latin and German (Leland 1903, 276–291).

Leland’s later work was published by occultist presses and freely referenced occultism, psychical research, and hypnotism, always in an attempt to demystify and explain ‘magical’ phenomena while making them practically applicable in people’s lives. As we shall now see, this style is also reflected in Leland’s scholarly works on ‘gypsy magic’. In fact, Leland’s peculiar theory of magic appears to have been developed in the context of explaining gypsy fortune telling; more specifically, it allowed him to repackage and connect the two old opposing stereotypes of ‘gypsy magic’ as both a real power and entirely fraudulent.

Gypsy sorcery and fortune-telling

Folklore, occultism, and gypsies: seeking the ‘grand solution of the Unknown’

By its own account, Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune-Telling was primarily a ‘collection of the customs, usages, and ceremonies current among gypsies, as regards fortune-telling, witch-doctoring, love-philtering, and other sorcery, illustrated by many anecdotes and instances’ (Leland 1891, ix). Organized around themes such as charms to cure adults, children, and animals, conjurations and exorcism, the recovery of stolen property, and ‘gypsy witchcraft’, its style is loose, weaving together an abundance of examples from the literature, interspersed with Leland’s own experiences and anecdotes. Leland’s project emulated the grand comparative enterprises of the nineteenth century, albeit without any systematic comparative method; he would compare ‘gypsy’ practices to entirely unrelated traditions that, to his mind, filled in the blanks of an ancient tradition, indicated that diffusion had taken place, or provided useful parallels in other ways. He suggested the thesis that gypsies were the ‘colporteurs’ of folklore, meaning that they picked up bits of customs on their wanderings, introduced these to new populations who had in turn absorbed them and given the gypsies yet new ones to pass on elsewhere.¹⁴ ‘Gypsies’ were thus presented to folklorists and orientalists as a missing link in the big discussions on cultural diffusion (cf. Hindes Groome 1892, building on Leland; Hindes Groome 1899, lxiii-lxv). But diffusionism was tempered with arguments from the other side in the contemporary debate. The position that folklore reflected panhuman experiences that could independently generate strikingly similar beliefs in different cultures was weaved into Leland’s otherwise diffusionist narrative, in a form similar to Andrew Lang’s ideas of psycho-folklore. This perspective was key to how Leland ultimately explained the origins and development of ‘gypsy sorcery’, but also to how he related his topic to occultism and framed its broader relevance to the sciences.

Since our primary interest is how Leland related folklore and occultism in order to argue the scientific relevance of gypsylorism, we must pay particular attention to his book’s preface and introduction along with various explanatory passages scattered throughout the book. Together, these frame the study of ‘gypsy sorcery’ as a branch of psycho-folklore, and they do so with explicit and casual connections to occultism and earlier forms of esotericism.

Throughout the book, Leland frequently name-drops key figures and currents of esotericism, assuming knowledge on the part of the reader. We find references to Lévi, Blavatsky, Hermes Trismegistus, Cornelius Agrippa, Paraceslus, the Kabbalah, Rosicrucians, Mesmerism, Christian Science, and spiritualism, among others, usually invoked to clarify a point on which Leland is writing. For example, building on Wlislocki’s work, Leland writes that ‘the Hungarian gypsies have a beautiful mythology of their own’ involving spirits associated with the elements (e.g., Nivasi = water; Pchuvusi = earth), ‘which at first sight would seem to be a composition of the Rosicrucian as set forth by Paracelsus and the Comte de Gabalis, with the exquisite Indo-Teutonic fairy tales of the Middle Ages’ (Leland 1891, 46). Leland sees no need to explain the cosmology of the (originally likely satirical) Comte de Gabalis or Paracelsus’ taxonomy of elemental spirits; instead, these references serve as explananda. When commenting on a formula against colic that involves burning the hair of a black dog and mixing it with mother’s milk, Leland discusses the role of black dogs in other folklore traditions, noting that ‘[t]he black dogs of Faust and of Cornelius Agrippa will occur to most readers’ (Leland 1891, 62). When discussing the continued prevalence of folk magic in Great Britain in the nineteenth century – and making a point about class – he states that ‘the superstitions of the masses were always petty ones, like those of the fate-books; it was only the aristocracy who consulted Cornelius Agrippa, and could afford la haute magie’ (Leland 1891, xvi) – the latter being an implicit reference to Lévi.

In addition to cases like these, occultists are sometimes invited into the conversation as ambiguous, but mostly negative reference points. Eliphas Lévi is described as ‘a writer of no weight whatever as an authority, but not devoid of erudition, and with occasional shrewd insights’ (Leland 1891, 240), while ‘the whole range of occult literature from Hermes Trismegistus down to Madame Blavatsky’ is taken to task for never having understood the real truth behind magic power: namely, that it stems entirely from human mental capacities, and not from interaction with ‘spirits’ (Leland 1891, 171).

This latter point is, as it turns out, central to the book as a whole. As we have seen from other late works such as Have You a Strong Will and The Alternate Sex, Leland had in the early 1890s become preoccupied with how mental training techniques could tap an unlimited latent potential, producing effects that would seem miraculous or magical. In a rare example of an unambiguously positive reference to occultist literature, Isis Unveiled is commended for suggesting ‘the simple truth that every child may be educated to possess an infinitely developed memory of words, sights, sounds, and ideas, allied to incredible quickness of perception’ (Leland 1891, 7). In the opening passages of Gypsy Sorcery we find this interest in a rhetorical form that, despite Leland’s distancing from modern occultists, comes very close to how Theosophists expressed themselves: namely an insistence that magic and science are converging. In a passage that could have been lifted from Isis Unveiled we read that ‘magic’ is extending into ‘a country of reality in which men of science who would once have disdained the mere thought thereof are beginning to stray’:

Darwin, Huxley, Tyndale [sic], Galton, Joule, Lockyer, and Edison have been or are all working in common with the theosophists, spiritualists, Folk-lorists, and many more, not diversely but all towards a grand solution of the Unknown. (Leland 1891, ix-x).

The point where science and magic intersect is once again hypnotism, which provided the scientific framework for addressing the riddle of magic. But why would ‘gypsies’ be relevant?

It is worth noting that despite his many references to occultism, Leland never cites any of the occultist representations of the Roma that could by this time be found in authors such as Lévi (1860), Jean-Alexandre Vaillant (1857), Emma Hardinge Britten (1876a; 1876b), or Papus (1889).¹⁵ In the case of the first two authors this was not for lack of knowledge: Leland quoted Lévi, and owned and studied a copy of Vaillant’s Les Romes (1857), which in addition to being an early contribution to Romani studies and a defence of the abolition of Roma slavery in Moldavia and Wallachia, must also be credited with inventing the notion that the Roma had an intimate relationship with the Tarot. Papus’ Le Tarot des Bohémiens, which popularized that idea, had only been published in 1889, with the first English translation appearing in 1892.¹⁶

The relevance of gypsies to ‘the grand solution of the Unknown’ was, instead, found in the two intertwined folkloristic questions referred to earlier: the role of gypsies in the diffusion of folk-magical practices, and how the efficacy of at least some of these practices shed light on the mechanics of magic as a universal human phenomenon. To these two elements were added discussions of standard folkloristic themes like survivals, the evolutionary development of religion, racial, gendered, and class-based aspects of this development, and, which was more original, the relationship between genuine magic powers and fraud. We will look at each of these in turn.

The role of gypsies in the diffusion and survival of ‘Shamanism’ and ‘Witchcraft’

‘Gypsies’, Leland held, ‘have done more than any race or class on the face of the earth to disseminate among the multitude a belief in fortune-telling, magical or sympathetic cures, amulets and such small sorceries as now find a place in Folk-lore’ (Leland 1891, xi). This was primarily due to their women, who ‘have all pretended to possess occult power since prehistoric times’. He saw them as priestly figures in a hidden, archaic, and practical religion that, thanks to the wandering gypsies, could now be found among the lower classes around the world (Leland 1891, x).

The standard folkloristic insistence that ‘superstitions’ persisted among peasants and the lower classes (see e.g., Gomme 1887, 2–5) was strong in Leland, who, however, saw the mental tendencies of ‘prehistoric man’ at work also in those millions of contemporary British and American consumers who supported the market for books of fate, dream interpretation, and fortune-telling manuals (Leland 1891, xiv-xvi). These were all examples of arts at which the gypsies excelled, but the entanglement of survivals and gypsy diffusion went much deeper. For example, the vecchia religione or ‘witchcraft’ of northern Italy that Leland would later (in Aradia) explain as a survival from ancient Etruscan religion, is here seen as another import of the gypsies: ‘Very few have any conception of the degree to which gypsies have been the colporteurs of what in Italy is called “the old faith”, or witchcraft’ (Leland 1891, x). But more importantly, Leland inscribed gypsies in narratives about shamanism, understood both as an ancient stage in the development of religion and as the probable ‘root of all religions’ (Leland 1884a, 336), disseminated through historical contact by the movement of specific peoples.

Leland had been among the first American-born scholars to build on the late-Enlightenment and early Romantic literature on shamanism (cf. Znamenski 2007, 13–15) and to use shamanism as a comparative term for establishing the historical relations of ‘the aborigines of America with the Mongoloid races of the Old World’ (Leland 1884a, v).¹⁷ In Gypsy Sorcery, he argues that the gypsies had also played a role in the preservation and spread of this ancient religious form. We read that

the gypsy magic and sorcery here described is purely Shamanic ­– that is to say, of the most primitive Tartar type – and it is the more interesting as having preserved from prehistoric times many of the most marked characteristics of the world’s first magic or religion. (Leland 1891, 8)

Leland describes this first religion as ‘the religion of the drum and the demon as a disease – or devil doctoring’ (Leland 1891, xii). At its basis was ‘the belief that all the events and accidents of life are caused or influenced by spirits’ (Leland 1884a, 334).

Shamanism had itself developed in two stages, and the gypsies had preserved some of the oldest elements. In this context it is significant that Leland presented the two-stage development of shamanism on both gendered and racialized lines. The first stage, which was known to have existed among ‘the Laplanders, Finns, Eskimos, and Red Indians … was a very horrible witchcraft, practiced chiefly by women, in which attempts were made to conciliate the evil spirits’ (Leland 1891, 6). This was done through the use of dead bodies, poisons and all kinds of ‘unheard-of terrors and crimes’; besides the gypsies, whose magical practitioners remained chiefly women, the practice could still be observed ‘among the negroes as Voodoo’ (Leland 1891, 6). Drawing on emerging anthropological knowledge, Leland suggested that this form of ‘witch-voodoism’ had been the religion of the Palaeolithic, practiced by the Neanderthal, Canstadt, Egnisheim, and Podhava type humans, and having been only partially replaced by the advent of Cromagnon (Leland 1891, 6). The shift to a higher type of shamanism, one which sought not to conciliate the spirits, but to control them, was thus connected with an anthropological shift in the homo genus, but also a shift in balance between the sexes: women witches were replaced by ‘brave and shrewd men, who conjectured that the powers of evil might be ‘exploited’ to advantage’ (Leland 1891, 6). This ‘advanced shamanism’ Leland associated with ‘the religion of the early Turanian races’. The older stage would however survive the emergence of this newer form of shamanism; it ‘was deeply based among the inferior races and the inferior scions of the Cromagnon stock clung to it in forms more or less modified’. Finally, both types of shamanism continued to overlap and coexist with ‘the beautiful Nature-worship of the early Aryans’ and the ‘stately monotheism of the Shemites’ (Leland 1891, 6).

In line with the racist and classist assumptions of late-nineteenth-century folklore, survivals of older stages are connected either with inferior races or inferior classes. The role of the gypsies in this story was primarily related to the issue of class: they were, after all, Aryans, and their characteristics were to be sought primarily in their way of life rather than in their race. Reminding his readers that gypsies had arrived in Europe fairly recently, Leland did certainly not claim that they had been the original carriers of shamanic-type religion. Instead, he argued that the earliest witchcraft stage of shamanism still existed in India among the lowest castes, and that this formed a ‘pre-Aryan, devil-worshipping, poisoning, and Turanian’ type of religion that existed in parallel with Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and all the other religions of the subcontinent (Leland 1891, 10). Working on the assumption that the Indian ancestor population of the gypsies had been of the lower castes, Leland argued that this shamanic ‘faith’ had formed ‘the basis of European gypsy sorcery’ and that ‘[e]very gypsy who came to Europe a few centuries ago set up as a gooroo, and did his [sic!] sorceries after the same antique fashion’ (Leland 1891, 11). As a result, ‘all over the Aryan world’ gypsies became ‘the wandering priests of that form of popular religion’, which included a ‘faith in fortune-telling’ (Leland 1891, 188).

Psycho-Folklore: fortune telling between fraud and psychic ability

Readers will by now have noticed that Leland’s account was not free from contradictions, inconsistencies, and internal tensions. This is not uncommon in writings on ‘gypsies’ (see Saul 2007, 2–15; Mayall 2004, 8–12). In closing this section, we shall return to the tension between the two old stereotypes about ‘gypsy magic’: that it expresses genuine occult powers, and that it is all fraud. Besides his exposition of the survival of early shamanic witchcraft, Leland also develops a completely different theory of how the gypsies’ connection with all things magical first came about. While this theory is primarily focused on fortune telling it also presents a competing origin story of all ‘gypsy magic’.

Leland’s origin story offers a naturalistic explanation that still allows for some degree of psychic ability. In this regard it is entirely in line with how he positioned himself on occultism at large: a sceptical form of open-ended naturalism, similar to that of many psychical researchers of the time (cf. Asprem 2014, 298–316). The story weaves together a number of long-standing stereotypes of the gypsies’ character and racial characteristics, which it projects backwards to deep antiquity: their eyes are wild; wandering has always been in their nature; they are dishonest and sly, possessing no extraordinary power except that of defrauding the superstitious of their purses. On Leland’s story, the origin of gypsy fortune-telling and magic lies in having occult powers attributed to them by others. ‘[W]ith their glittering Indian eyes’, and habit of stepping in and out of the shadows, the gypsies won for themselves an association with the unknown and invisible (Leland 1891, 2):

from the mere fact of being wanderers and out-of-doors livers in wild places, [they] became wild-looking, and when asked if they did not associate with the devils who dwell in the desert places, admitted the soft impeachment, and being further questioned as to whether their friends the devils, fairies, elves, and goblins had not taught them how to tell the future, they pleaded guilty, and finding that it paid well, went to work in their small way to improve their “science,” and particularly their pecuniary resources. (Leland 1891, 2–3).

Leland imagines this to have happened in context of the lower stage of shamanic religion, and explains that ‘it is easy … to understand why a wild Indian gypsy, with eyes like a demon … should have been supposed to be a sorcerer by credulous child-like villagers’ (Leland 1891, 4).

Born from a misattribution of power, real skills nevertheless started developing over the generations. Finding their pretend magical services in demand, the gypsies slowly chanced upon genuine techniques related to the power of perception, reading character, and hypnotism, but also of tapping into the unconscious mind and bringing forth ‘strange facts’ by mysterious means (Leland 1891, 173). The gypsies slowly became master psychics.

Leland’s explanation of how this works comes in the spectacularly misnamed chapter ‘Gypsy Witchcraft’, which deals almost exclusively with his own ‘scientific’ position on occult and psychic powers with applications to fortune telling. His explanation is essentially a psychology of the unconscious, of the same kind that was already prefigured in his Poetry and Mystery of Dreams (1856) and later developed in Have You a Strong Will and The Alternate Sex. In Gypsy Sorcery Leland summarizes it systematically in five propositions. The first three lay out a distinction between the ‘conscious will’ that directs our thoughts and acts during waking hours, and an ‘independent Self’ or ‘dream ruler’ which is active during sleep and has access to a vast storehouse of images and memories. The fourth proposition states that this ‘dream-power’ can intrude in waking life, resulting in creative capacities for making poetry and art. Finally, the fifth proposition states that this unconscious ‘dream spirit’ is also at the basis of ‘magic’, understood as a latent power in all humans to arrive at spontaneous knowledge from the vast reservoir of memories, images, and past experience that they are not aware of in waking consciousness. It deserves to be quoted in full:

Magic is the production of that which is not measured by the capacity of the conscious working will. The dream spirit, or that which knows all our memories, and which combines, blends, separates, scatters, unites, confuses, intensifies, beautifies, or makes terrible all the persons, scenes, acts, events, tragedies, or comedies known to us, can, if it pleases, by instantaneous reasoning or intuition, perceive what waking common sense does not. We visit a sick man, and the dream spirit, out of the inexhaustible hoards of memory aided by association, which results in subtle, occult reasoning, perceives that the patient will die in a certain time, and this result is served up in a dramatic dream. The amount of miracles, mysteries, apparitions, omens, and theurgia which the action of these latent faculties cause, or seem to cause, is simply illimitable, for no man knows how much he knows. Few, indeed, are the ordinary well-educated Europeans of average experience of life, whose memories are not inexhaustible encyclopædias, and whose intellects are not infinite; if all that is really in them could be wakened from slumber, “know thyself” would mean “know the universe”. … It is awful, it is mysterious, it is terrible to learn this tremendous truth that we are indeed within ourselves magicians gifted with infinite intellectual power – which means the ability to know and do all things. (Leland 1891, 169–170).

Leland’s associative flights when writing about this topic reveal aspirations much larger than understanding ‘gypsy sorcery and fortune telling’. He goes on to suggest that future educational reform should teach all children to unlock this potential for magic (Leland 1891, 171, 175). Disseminating access to such training would become a key objective for Have You a Strong Will.

Leland’s gypsies were instructive for showing how this marvellous human potential worked, and, in the process, to break down distinctions between pretence and sincerity, fraud and efficacious practice. He writes that he has

seen and heard of much in gypsy witchcraft and fortune-telling which, while it was directly allied to humbug of the shallowest kind, also rested on, or was inspired by, mental action or power which, in our present state of knowledge, must be regarded as strangely mysterious and of the deepest interest. (Leland 1891, 179–180).

The term ‘humbug’, I submit, recalls Leland’s friendship with the showman P. T. Barnum (1866), the master of humbugs. In fact, Leland goes on to give an unusually detailed explanation of what is now known as ‘cold reading’, that is to say obtaining information from a client by reading their character (age, sex, clothing, body-language), asking leading questions, and making a series of high-probability, generic guesses formulated in ways that make them feel personal and accurate. Besides explaining the principle, Leland provided a list of 14 such high-probability guesses and how to use them (Leland 1891, 181–183) – a veritable list of what psychologists have called ‘Barnum statements’ (see Meehl 1956; cf. Pettit 2013, 230–231).¹⁸ While anybody who follows these rules can create ‘startling cases of conviction’ in their clients, Leland adds that ‘even into this deception will glide intuition, or the inexplicable insight to character, and the deceiver himself be led to marvel … for Truth is everywhere, and even lies lead to it’ (Leland 1891, 183).

Here we come to the point. Constantly reading people, deploying cold-reading rules, gaining knowledge of character through trial and error, ‘must in the end develop a power’ (Leland 1891, 184). Practicing cold reading trains ‘quickness of perception’, attention, and memory, and hones the operations of the ‘dream spirit’. This is the true lesson that science has to learn from studying gypsy magic:

The gypsy fortune-teller is accustomed for years to look keenly and earnestly into the eyes of those whom she dukkers or “fortune-tells.” She is accustomed to make ignorant and credulous or imaginative girls feel that her mysterious insight penetrates “with a power and with a sign” to their very souls. As she looks into their palms, and still more keenly into their eyes, while conversing volubly with perfect self-possession, ere long she observes that she has made a hit–has chanced upon some true passage or relation to the girl’s life. This emboldens her. Unconsciously the Dream Spirit, or the Alter-Ego, is awakened. It calls forth from the hidden stores of Memory strange facts and associations, and with it arises the latent and often unconscious quickness of Perception, and the gypsy actually apprehends and utters things which are “wonderful.” There is no clairvoyance, illumination or witchcraft in such cases. If such powers existed as they are generally understood to do, we should for one case of curious prediction hear of twenty thousand. But the Dream-power is at best fitful, irregular and fantastic in its action; it is at all times untrustworthy, for it has never been trained unless of yore by Chaldæan priests and magi. In some wonderful way facts do, however, manifest themselves, evoked out of the unknown by “occult,” though purely material, mental faculties; and the result is that wonder at the inexplicable – which makes miracles – until we are accustomed to them. (Leland 1891, 173).

The value of ‘gypsy fortune telling’ to science is that it ‘furnishes proof of the ability latent in every mind to perform what appear to be more than feats of intelligence’ (Leland 1891, 185), a latent power that could moreover be developed by all of humanity. ‘We are all sorcerers, and live in a wonderland of marvel and beauty if we did but know it’ (Leland 1891, 185).

Conclusion: perpetuating ‘the essence of gypsydom’

Leland linked gypsies to the two opposing positions in one of the largest folkloristic debates of the time: as ‘colporteurs’ they had a role in grand schemes of diffusion; as tricksters who chanced upon the genuine powers of the ‘Dream Spirit’, they could be studied from the viewpoint of a pan-human, psychological (or ‘psychical’) concept of magic. Leland’s theory of magic was equally ambidextrous: on one hand a sceptical attitude comparable to P.T. Barnum; on the other a theory of untapped unconscious ‘dream power’, inspired by the likes of Justinus Kerner. In a new take on the two old stereotypes of Romani magical practice, ‘gypsy fortune telling’ was presented as a form of humbug capable of activating real occult capacities in the minds of fortune tellers.

Leland’s positioning may seem puzzling in light of the two prevailing narratives on gypsylorism, as a primarily Orientalist undertaking or as detached objective knowledge production about Roma/gypsies. While he did present ‘gypsies’ as an internal oriental Other, and saw magic as a key component of this otherness, he did so from the position of someone proclaiming to possess and practice a more potent form of magic. And while he did present many facts about Romani traditions and embraced a strong identity of being ‘scientific’, his idea of science shared with the Theosophists and the psychical researchers the notion that science and magic were merging into a new superior synthesis. To make sense of Leland’s positioning, along with his motives for presenting ‘gypsy magic’ the way that he did, we must see it in the context of developments in nineteenth-century esotericism, specifically the emergence of occultism as an attempt to reconcile the perceived chasm between science and religion. His criticism of various occultists, from Transcendentalists to Theosophists, should not be read as a positioning against occultism as a whole: on the contrary, criticizing and thereby distinguishing oneself from other occultists was a standard practice within occultism, and continues to be so in the contemporary cultic milieu (Asprem In press). Through a lifelong interest in esoteric subjects, starting around 1840, Leland had witnessed fads come and go. He grew up with Mesmerism and the early Romantic fascination for the unconscious, and read widely in early-modern Paracelsian and Rosicrucian literature, which he would return to throughout his life. He acquainted himself with the Neoplatonists, the Hermetica, and the Renaissance occult philosophers. From this vantage Leland witnessed the emergence of Transcendentalism, spiritualism and Theosophy with some scepticism, but shared with the occultists the central interest in merging science with the supernatural. By the time the new discipline of psychical research appeared in the 1880s, Leland had established himself as a folklore scholar focused on gypsies, shamanism, and Italian folk magic. In Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune-Telling he sought to merge all these interests and launch a psychological (or psychical) theory of magic that, moreover, promised to unlock a vast hidden mental potential in humanity at large. The mix of fraud and genuine prediction that he saw in gypsy fortune-telling provided a model for how unconscious mental powers could be trained; in later work directed at a broader public, notably Have You a Strong Will, he sought to disseminate some of these techniques. In this he was not so different from occultists seeking variously to psychologize or naturalize magic and popularize it as a way of life (cf. Asprem 2008).

In breaking down the distinctions between fraud and efficacious practice Leland was attempting to negotiate two old stereotypes of gypsies. In closing, it is important to note that he did not thereby replace the stereotypes as much as synthesize, repackage, and reinforce them for new generations. He was not alone in doing this: another of the GLS founders and later presidents, David MacRitchie, contributed two articles to Lewis Spence’s Encyclopedia of Occultism (1920, reprinted 1960), one on ‘Gypsies’ and another on ‘Tarot’, proclaiming that gypsies of England and Scotland had long possessed ‘a body of esoteric learning, which included the knowledge and exercise of hypnotism’ (MacRitchie 1960 [1920], 198). Readers of the influential 1962 second edition of Leland’s book were told that it preserved ‘the essence of gypsydom’ (Silver 1962, v). Entirely in the vein of turn-of-the-century gypsylorism, Margery Silver’s introduction went on to describe the Roma as ‘Secret as a bud and slippery as water’, proclaiming that ‘the ethos of the gypsy is a curious blend of elements pagan and Christian, primitive and shrewd, bucolic and bestial’. The 1960s counterculture readership were served an openly essentializing view of the Roma, presenting them as a mysterious and secretive people with a connection to the pagan, primitive, and bestial, remnants of times past who cunningly navigated the civilized world.

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.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Vetenskapsrådet [grant number 31002950].

Notes on contributors

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.

Notes

1 See, however, Andersen’s (1987) insightful but unpublished PhD dissertation on fortune-telling among Kalderasha and Machwaya Roma in 1980s America. Among published works, Trigg (1973) 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. 2006), 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 2006; Strube 2017). 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 (1899a), 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 1998; 2010; Magliocco 2002; Doyle White 2016, 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 1961; Marsh 2008, 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 1997, 301–302), with others coming from Venetian controlled territories in the Balkans and the Aegean (cf. Soulis 1961; Pym 2007, 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 1997; cf. Soulis 1961; Mróz 2015, 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 1894, 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 1906, 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 1906, vol. 2, 222-223. On the Paris and Stockholm/Uppsala/Christiania conventions, see Pennell 1906, 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 1904, 117), and Kerner is known to have generously received “literary tourists” in great numbers (see T. Kerner 1897).

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 1894, 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 2016, 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 1908). Despite being easily debunked on historical grounds (see Decker, Depaulis, and Dummett 1996) it is still occasionally perpetuated by scholars (see e.g. Richardson 2022, 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 1884a; 1884b).

18 Barnum had given some examples of how spiritualist mediums used similar statements to produce the illusion of genuine predictions: see e.g. Barnum 1866, 87.