This perhaps best illustrates their own Earth spirituality, subtly mocking the conventionally pious. ‘You can’t be serious about moving away from the old Earth spirituality, can you?’ the Romani is saying, with eyebrows raised, even after all this time, for the gypsy’s magic prevails and will always be at the heart of any spiritual excavation that is carried out within the Romani mind.
For the true Romani gypsies, no matter what religion is in vogue, at the end of each day there can be no laws except the Earth’s laws. So they would tell you what you expected to hear if you asked them where they came from, but for me, as for all my ancestors, an old legend, such as the story of Kam and Shon, will still prevail and will always carry the best truths.
So I also believe, as my boro dad and many of my elders believed, that my race originally began with the ritualistic incestuous union of two great spirits in the heavens, Kam, the sun, and Shon, the moon, who were themselves born of two yet greater spirits, Earth and Sky, and Earth and Sky are the greatest and most powerful spirits of all. This belief links me with all my ancestors of the past, because it has been passed down through countless generations, and I like to allow my mind to wander back to some of those ancestors and to reassure them that although many Romanies have fallen by the wayside, spiritually, I still believe. I still know the truths of these great stories. And I imagine those ancestors nodding approval and sighing with relief that there is someone in their future who - even though with the greatest of difficulty - has somehow managed to stay on the same path.
Chapter Three
BORROWING THE FIELDS AND FORESTS
A Sacred Romani Law
Red-gold leaves fluttered down through misty funnels of sunlight around me as I lay on my side in the autumn wood. The ground was hard and somewhat cold beneath me, yet something kept me lying there, or perhaps prevented me from getting up.
I thought I was probably dying, for I had not eaten in 24 hours and I was at odds with myself and with the world: an 18-year-old desperately attempting to piece his life together.
Two days earlier I had had a strange but very strong experience, having slipped off into what seemed to be a trance, like a very heavy day-dream, which the Puri Dai afterwards assured me was quite normal for the kind of person I might well become: a medicine man, or Chovihano. The same had happened to Jack Lee in the past and was a means by which he had often conducted his Otherworld rituals, she told me.
We had been sitting in a group talking about the Lowerworld of old and how in earlier times our people were extremely wary of disturbing the Bitee Fokee, or fairy people, who lived in the depths of the forest, for these powerful little beings had always fiercely defended all areas of outstanding natural beauty over the Earth and were a great force to be reckoned with. If you disturbed their ancient habitat unnecessarily, those magical places where they came up to meet human and animal worlds, you invited trouble indeed. The legends and folk tales of old were rich in the trials exerted upon unsuspecting humans who had chance encounters with these formidable guardians of nature. But as a Chovihano you inherited an inner key or pass which gave you permission to access their world, along with the rare honour of earning their respect. A Chovihano was unafraid of the Bitee Fokee; a Chovihano was unafraid of anything that was of the Otherworld, because he could accept challenges and knew how to meet things head on.
At this time in my life I didn’t exactly know if I would achieve the rare qualities of the Chovihano which, among other things, called for high levels of courage and trust, yet I had an instinctive sense of being unafraid of the unknown, which at least furnished me with a head start.
Ever since I had been small I had wanted to take off on spiritual as well as physical adventures, which sometimes drove my mother to despair, but as time went by I would be meeting experiences, which would serve to put these instincts to the test many times over.
Here in this red-gold wood, I was just at the beginning, learning to grope my way through subtle worlds of dreams and psychic experiences, worlds which few in the material world outside might understand. My family had taken a step back from me, which was quite normal, simply allowing me to get on with it all. So I followed my own hunches, as all Chovihanos had done before me, attempting to find my own tacho drom, or true path.
‘Go into a field and lie there,’ was the only advice given me by my grandmother following the experience I’d had. She and some other family members had known what was going on when I had ‘slipped off’, for when I had opened my eyes they had been looking at each other in a rather knowing way. Jack Lee had also been told to lie in a field by his elders when he had been young and I felt privileged to receive the same instruction. I later discovered that this act was designed to help a potential medicine man connect with the Earth and learn more about nature.
In earlier times young Chovihanos and female Chovihanis would have been told to go into the depths of the forest for a vision to help clarify the nature of their paths in life, but in these modern times of land ownership it had become increasingly difficult to find potentially conducive wooded areas in which to do this, so a young Chovihano might be advised to conduct the exercise in a field.
So I had found myself a comfortable spot in a nearby field where I could lie down in the uncut grass, looking at every blade stretching beyond my face to the sky above. There, for a short time, I connected with the Earth, for the grass soon seemed to be taking on a life of its own, cautious at first, but as soon as the grass began singing, it was as if I were, by degrees, being accepted back into its secret world. Then I could hear my boro dad’s familiar musical voice: ‘This is what borrowing the Earth is all about, Jasper.’ He had always put over to me that if you didn’t own or tame the Earth, she was more receptive to you and more inclined to talk, and I was indeed beginning to hear the Earth speak. Dik ta shoon! I thought. It wasn’t long before I felt myself watching and listening on a universal scale. As the warm autumn breezes caressed my face and body, and as the blades of grass continued to shimmer against the blue sky, I could hear another voice whispering and I began to feel that same pulsing energy beating through me as my heart began to thump in a rhythm in my ears, just as it had before. I knew it was the Earth speaking.
But then there was a commotion at the edge of the field, rudely disturbing the new harmony I had found, and I sat up angrily, looking about myself. A middle-aged man, quite obviously the owner of the field, was gesticulating to me angrily, plainly letting me know that my presence offended him.
I held up a hand, acknowledging him, and attempted to tell him that I would soon be gone, but I imagined he hadn’t heard me, for soon he was walking towards me.
‘Did you hear what I said?’ he was yelling. ‘Trespassers will be prosecuted!’ He was pointing to an obscure sign somewhere on the edge of the field, which I obviously hadn’t seen.
Reluctantly, I stood up. This was not a man to reason with. In fact he berated me as he accompanied me to the edge of the field.
This was my first ever solo encounter with an angry landowner over the question of land and as I climbed the fence to the footpath it suddenly sank home that I was being forbidden to practise a custom my people before me had practised for thousands of years. In the old days when common land was abundant it would have been far easier to escape to rural places to carry out communions with the Earth. How little this man knew of the old world, I thought, as I glanced back, feeling an immense sadness that the field and I had had to part company just as we were getting to know each other.
As I walked away I heard the man following on behind me. ‘Are you one of the gypsies?’ he asked.
I turned. ‘No,’ I answered, simply, and kept walking on.
I have mentioned before that we always walked away when someone challenged us. We played it cool and never made a fuss. There might be many occasions when Romani gypsies might be thrown out of pubs or out of public places - and out of fields.
I walked, frustrated, in circles for quite some time and en
ded up in the red-gold wood, feeling, as many young people can feel, that all was futile, that there was probably no place for me in the adult world, and also, as many Romani gypsies have long felt, that there was no more room for our ancient race in the fields of Britain.
Ironically, although I had been advised to lie in a field, I actually ended up in a wood, which served to link me with all the gypsy Chovihanos of the past in their search for a tacho paramoosh, or true dream, a glimpse of one’s own personal destiny. Over hundreds of years Chovihanos would have attempted to find their destiny by going into the ancient woodlands and communing with the spirits there. The dream or the vision of one’s destiny is important. It stretches in front of you but also behind you and forges that vital relationship with the natural world, a world you will be representing, along with strengthening your ability to liaise with the Otherworld. Being told to go into a field was by no means a ‘standard’ initiation for a Chovihano. It was more a test of strength for me personally, I discovered later, so that I would know how to handle relationships in my role. Now when I look back I see the relevance of encountering the man in the field. If I did not meet these experiences in my earlier days, how could I equip myself for the difficulties I might encounter, particularly in the gaujo world, where prejudice has been great and where understanding has been so limited?
I did a lot of thinking over the 24-hour period I spent in that wood. I was there for the best part of a whole night. It did prove to be a difficult exercise, as I wasn’t always alone. Occasionally, someone with a dog would pass, or a group of children, but I kept out of their way as much as possible, determined to carry out my task.
As I lay there on the wood floor looking up into the branches of the trees, I soon had the same feelings coursing through me as I’d had in the field. But this time there was a distinct restlessness accompanying them, an electric energy which was hard to contain. It was as if I had been injected with some vibrant fluid which had suddenly been released in my veins as my heart again began a rhythmic thumping and my body wanted to convulse. I had ingested nothing at all in many hours and was not of course to know at that time that this very act would have contributed to a heightening of my inner senses. Thoughts became loud and I considered that I was probably going mad. I know for sure that had anyone seen me in that wood at that time, rolling and writhing about, they could have been forgiven for thinking that I was having a fit! Indeed, I thought I was having a fit as thoughts rushed into my head only to spin out of control, a strange and quite disturbing sensation.
In recent times I have come to look upon this and successive experiences as what might be termed ‘shamanic’ because of what others studying shamanism have told me. Then I was not so much afraid as confused, and before long it became clear to me that these feelings and indeed this pattern of behaviour were necessary to a kind of trance state when conducting a more troubling form of healing. This ‘state’ can obviously be bypassed, and in fact should be bypassed. It is a step along the way, leading not to a ‘spaced out’, ‘out of it’ kind of feeling, which is now the kind of feeling that is associated with our modern concept of the Otherworld and indeed ‘shamanism’. We should be able to understand that shamans of old were seeking answers to social questions and problems in the face of sudden sickness and social disharmony, which hadn’t always been encountered before, and as such they had to take measures to find these answers. The trance state is therefore the somewhat extreme ‘measure’, the ‘journey along the way’, caused by society; it is not the goal.
I learned eventually that if you know how to handle the weakest and the strongest conditions within yourself, you will know how to handle these within others, and quite simply nothing will ever be a surprise to you, so long as you can journey to these places yourself. To this day I believe that if those who call themselves healers cannot meet the weakest and the strongest within themselves, then they are not at all useful to others. In order to help someone sort out a physical, mental or emotional problem, you must be acquainted with all ‘inner’ conditions and their effects, which is not easy to achieve.
In that autumn wood when I was just 18 I instinctively knew I was on my way to meeting the Otherworld, on my way to becoming a Chovihano and to developing the skills my great-grandfather had long practised. I was on my way to my own tacho drom, that ‘true path’. But there was one basic principle I would need to learn before I could ever go further and that was to understand the true meaning of borrowing. This is essential for all Romani gypsies, and all users of Earth medicine. I was shown its importance by a vision of the past involving the gypsies of old.
In this vision, I was astonished, and indeed privileged, to be an observer of a great procession of Romani gypsies as they moved in their tribes through the trees in front of me. I saw great droves of them with their carts, horses and donkeys, as when first entering Britain in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. They were so very colourful, wearing bright materials and adorned with bright coins on their clothes and in their hair.
It became a procession that moved swiftly through the ages, from this earlier period up until the present day, ghosts of the past, perhaps contained within every tree’s memory, for the trees seemed to spit out the vision, as if regurgitating it, in order to show me what nature had been keeping to herself for so long. I thought, if human beings have not acknowledged these wild people of the woods as a major part of our woodlands’ history, nature has, for the trees remember everything, trees still acknowledge their ancestors, and ancestor tree spirits pass memories and important experiences down to younger trees. I knew this because Jack Lee had told me so. The vision therefore became an exercise in learning that we are really all members of the same family, whether we are human, animal or tree. We all have ancestors and all ancestors are important in our lives, in a great many ways.
As these colourful bands of people continued to move through the trees, I saw the way they interacted with the trees and with all aspects of nature around them. I saw them sitting around their fires, carving, weaving and producing crafts with quick nimble fingers while they sang or talked; I saw them rounding up horses, carrying out repairs, busy with their smithing skills. They were acting in plays, playing the fool, laughing, crying, squabbling, sharing experiences, but all the time they were communing with nature, and nature was happily communing with them. In moving through the trees they were moving through an old ancestral world where they were never alone, in fact where they were always safe, for experience was rich in these places, and the atmosphere was thick with spirits, magic and sacred areas which gave natural access to the Otherworld.
By the time the vision had taken me on to the Edwardian era, the era of the decorative gypsy wagon, however, things had changed considerably, for now the relaxed atmosphere in the forest had gone and fears abounded. The forests were now dark, ugly, menacing places where shadows lurked, so many shadows that nothing of the old ancestral world existed there any more, and what was worse was that the trees were afraid too, afraid of their own shadows, for they couldn’t understand what they’d done to be punished like this by human beings. Was it any wonder, I thought, that the forests were all being taken away? They were no longer valued when they were seen as stark places of fear.
A mist then gathered, obscuring the vision until it was as if sucked back into the trees so that the scene returned to normal, or perhaps back to the way it had been when I had first walked into the wood.
Was that the end? Was that the vision’s message? There was more. Again, I was soon hearing my boro dad’s words: ‘Borrow the Earth, Jasper, borrow!’ And then I found myself reflecting on his great prediction that the whole world would be living under a curse if it continued to indulge in ownership in such an unthinking way, stealing the magic from the forest and from the land. I realized how the whole idea of ownership, as my great-grandfather had seen it, extended far beyond the realms of mere possessions. Ownership was clearly a state of mind.
Reflecting upon
the way the trees had spat out the vision and sucked it back in again, I began to see us all, trees included, as a giant vacuum cleaner, sucking everything up in a greedy fashion: possessions, people, animals, land, ideas, thoughts, and the very soul of life. We human beings had been the inspiration for this - which certainly made me feel ashamed to be human.
I saw it all as an inward-spiralling process and it became intensely uncomfortable to experience consciously, for I was left feeling queasy and irritable, and in desperate need of spitting the whole lot out of myself, rather as the trees had done. I eventually did this, spitting not once, but three times, as I had seen Great-grandfather doing during the magical rites of a ritual. Spitting was often a Romani’s way of sealing something, of swearing an oath: the spittle of the gypsy Chovihano was considered to be extremely powerful.
Afterwards I lay back on the ground, beginning to feel a little more comfortable as I entered another phase of the vision.
A great peace then came over me and it was noticeably quiet - no sound of traffic, no noise but the breeze shimmering the red-gold leaves in the tops of the trees. I could even hear the sound of a single yellow leaf falling softly to the wood floor, like a light, crisp, crinkled piece of tissue paper. We have so much noise in our modern world, grating, unnatural noise, that we have forgotten what it is like to listen to nature as she lives, grows and dies around us. Hearing nature grow must have been very familiar to ancient ears and I felt that was what I was doing at that moment in time: listening as I might have listened many thousands of years ago.
We Borrow the Earth: An Intimate Portrait of the Gypsy Folk Tradition and Culture Page 6
