We Borrow the Earth: An Intimate Portrait of the Gypsy Folk Tradition and Culture

by Patrick Jasper Lee

  I then also caught sight of a single ancestor standing in the wood on his own, reassuring the trees that everything was all right, that many of their own family were suffering as much as the trees were. This old spirit Chovihano of the past was quite calmly telling them that nothing was their fault, and to be patient, and to understand that human beings were unfortunately at that time the most ignorant creatures on Earth, but that there would come a time, it was hoped, when things would change. He was very old and moved with the aid of his ran. This is the staff the Chovihanos carry and which they use to protect themselves and to cast spells. My great-grandfather had one, which he carried with him especially on occasions when vampires were present - or in today’s language, those people who may drain your spirit or waste your time. This old ancestor fascinated me. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. He seemed to be doing his job alone, the job of going about reassuring trees that it wasn’t their fault that we were all the way we were and that better times were ahead.

  I didn’t know at this point whether I should speak to him, but I chose just to watch, as I instinctively felt that this vision was here to teach me as an observer. So I watched and simply waited for something else to happen.

  A sharp wind then seemed to start blowing up in the wood, as if out of nowhere. This is something I have since become familiar with when experiencing ancestral communications. It is as if the elements respond to and indeed wish to take part in what is going on, which of course is because they are a part of what we are: the greater family. ‘They are, after all, living with us in the same world,’ Jack Lee would often point out when the natural world came up in conversation. All aspects of the natural world manifested as beings, he said, and all these beings had a right to be listened to.

  As this strong breeze blew, I had the moving experience of mentally expanding to embrace the immediate wood around me, becoming the wind and the Earth and even every small bird and insect who happened to step within the perimeter of this new existence. The old ancestor had gone now, and I gave my thoughts and energy to what was at hand as I became the very smallest and the very largest of creatures. I knew then that I was tapping into the actual workings of creation, an unforgettable experience that I was indeed privileged to have.

  Within this, I could see clearly that we needed to reverse the inward-spiralling process if we wanted to get back to our natural selves. We had a bad need to exhale, to shout, to scream, to vomit, to get rid of, to be without and generally to let go of everything we had become so used to holding on to - or owning. I saw that was a process we had been developing mentally and emotionally throughout more recent history, until now ownership was deep in our bones, because we had become dangerously skilled at practising the craft.

  As I watched a blackbird pecking about on the wood floor, these thoughts were reinforced. The blackbird did not question his personal rights to the land, for he was a part of the land, as necessary to the Earth as a small sentence may be to a book whose text depends upon every single word for its completeness; it otherwise becomes sheer nonsense. This blackbird was not sucking everything up: he merely took from the land what he needed and no more, and it seemed impossible for him to do otherwise. Boundaries existed for him, of course, where other blackbirds were concerned, but these were based on respect and understanding, a system based on borrowing rather than ownership. Subsequent conversations with wild birds have revealed to me that their territorial rights have more to do with personal space than measurement of space. If this were not so we would long ago have been victims of a massive takeover by any number of species of bird and animal, who might consider it right and proper to have as much as we human beings have.

  I learned then that the land was, and always would be, a personal place, rather than a geographical location. Nature had never intended us to ‘own’ on so vast a scale, and I reflected on the fact that the words ‘own’ and ‘possession’ had no equivalent in the Romani gypsy language, for ‘own’ was only ever used as an adjective, whilst there was no equivalent at all for ‘possession’. Even the verb ‘to have’ was not used in Romanes.

  I soon found myself pondering on this principle in relation to nomadic life, i.e. taking what one needs when the need arises, which I’d learned was a universal principle. Many predators certainly responded to this law, which meant that when they were satisfied they left their prey alone and it was thus safe for prey to wander in the vicinity of a potential killer and come to no harm. That was what hunting was all about, and nomadic peoples, including my own, had long understood this.

  Also, the nomadic art of resting, replenishing and moving on again not only sustained the Earth but also provided important guidelines on how to live in harmony with others. Borrowing each site you stopped at was tied up with the life/death process: that is, using the site only for as long as you needed before returning it to nature again. I had learned about this life/death process from my elders, who taught me that just as a small death occurs whenever a fresh site is left behind, so a new life occurs whenever a fresh site is found. This is also the reason why Romani gypsies always prefer black and white animals, their piebald horses being an example - life and death are constantly reflected in the dark and light shades of the animals, constantly reminding you that life and death (borrowing and relinquishing) are always around each corner, in their many different forms. We always kept animals that were black and white at home, whether they were horses, cats, dogs or chickens.

  But the borrowing principle also extended to all things which came into your hands during your life, and by borrowing - which meant that you avoided clinging to things, particularly in a mental and emotional capacity - you were regularly in the process of accepting change. Romanies have always been good at doing this because as nomads they have never always been able to carry too many possessions along with them. By accepting change we are able to move forward in our inner lives and to learn from experiences in the proper way.

  I have always seen the act of name-changing as a typical example of this. Some of the old Romani gypsies would change their names with every new site they stopped at! This, inevitably, seems a strange exercise to many people today, because we live in a world that thinks largely in terms of labels, measurements and geographical space. How many of us, for instance, could cope with a friend changing their name several times in a year? We would find this very confusing. But if asked to remember the places we might have travelled to within that year, we would more than likely be able to reel them off; in fact, we would probably feel obliged to remember them. If we are trying to get into the minds of the old tribal people, we will need to start thinking in terms of personal space and to spend time thinking about what we perceive it to be.

  When I stood up and laid my palm on a tree on that occasion in that wood, I felt, as the old ancestor I had been watching had felt, that all trees everywhere had been denied the full, rich, happy life they had once enjoyed in our primitive past, when Romani gypsies had been nature’s guardians. I felt that the trees’ wonderfully flamboyant characters - which my great-grandfather told me most of them had - had been suppressed, perhaps just as humans’ free-spirited tribal characters had been suppressed, over hundreds of years. I felt suspense, a tension in that wood, as the trees wondered what was going to happen to them; it was clearly a tension caused by changes in the natural rhythm of things. The Chovihanos were gone, and compared to earlier times all seemed so silent, controlled and prudish somehow. And all because we human beings had made the decision to own rather than borrow, under the illusion that by owning something it was more legitimately ours, when nothing can ever be ours, not at the end of the day, and never in the eyes of nature.

  I knew it would be my tacho drom, my true road, to reunite people with nature, and to champion the very spirit of nature. My work would be about restoring the old bonds between ourselves and the land, as all Romani Chovihanos had done for hundreds of years before me, and to educate people on the borrowing principle. And in doing this I knew
I would also be working to lift the enchantment which had been placed on Europe, and indeed the curse which had been placed upon my family. I knew that there would be a hard road ahead and specific testing to ensure that I was fit for the task.

  In that wood I looked up into the trees and felt the inspiring comforting feeling that all trees give you when you are standing with them. They are good-natured considerate creatures and always want to do their best for you.

  Then from the corner of my eye I caught sight of the ancestor, moving along with his ran again. He had turned to look at me and on his face I caught what I thought to be a knowing smile, as if he knew everything. His lips moved, although I could not hear what he was saying, as he was too far away from me. He was old, not so much in years, but in terms of time; so very ancient, or so it seemed to me at my tender age. At that time I somehow took his presence for granted. He seemed almost a part of the landscape itself as he moved about it so naturally. It was only when I arrived home and described him to my grandmother that I realized who I had been in the company of - the ancestor: the man who had guided my great-grandfather from the Otherworld, and my great-grandfather’s father, and many of our fathers stretching back into infinity. My elders had expected him to appear as he did. It was a sign to them.

  I sat down in the chair, numbed, unable to believe what had happened. My grandmother was meanwhile singing my praises. I was destined now to follow the old destiny of the Chovihano, she said. I would help people on many levels to understand what the natural world and the Otherworld were all about. I would one day enter the world of the old ones and would follow a very different path from most other people, a sometimes harrowing and painful path, until the light of understanding could shine in an ancient way again.

  Her predictions were right, for the path has been different, and certainly harrowing and painful, but it has also been special, and I am indeed privileged to have the ancestor as my guardian, for he has shared with me so many insights about the Otherworld and about the way life used to be for the old Romani gypsies. But he is also a vital link with my distant past, something rare in these modern times, especially in the Western world. He has worked with me to help restore ancestral awareness between people in our modern age and their distant blood cousins of long ago, something that is not only deeply healing but, it seems, a necessity if we wish to move forward in our understanding of the way life used to be.

  At that period in my life I returned to that wood many times, but I didn’t see the ancestor again in the same way. I often spoke to him, nevertheless, as I sat there, sometimes out loud, asking for his guidance and frequently telling him my problems. I had the feeling he was waiting for me to live through certain experiences and to mature before he could work with me in a more significant way, which indeed happened.

  I emerged from that vision in that wood realizing that the art of travelling was - and probably always had been - a spiritual exercise. It was of course also a mental, emotional and indeed a physical one, but the art of travelling used a currency, rather as we might use money to acquire possessions today, a spiritual currency involving the higher human qualities such as courage, trust, wisdom and respect for all things. The nomadic art of borrowing and life itself was all about personal circles and cycles: the human’s personal circle/cycle in a relationship with the land’s circle/cycle.

  I was to discover later in life elements that justified this, particularly when I began studying the history of words. The word jal, for instance, meaning ‘to go’ or ‘journey’ in Romanes, is closely related to jol in Old Norse and the Anglo-Saxon Yule, both which signify a cycle of the year, or in more modern times the Christmas period. Jahr, ‘year’ in German, and even ‘year’ in English are both related to jal. A journey, then, was for the old nomad of the deeper past a cycle or circle, a sojourn with the sun through the seasons within the greater personal space borrowed from the natural world.

  I have also reflected on the fact that there is no word in the Romani language for ‘borrow’. A word that has sometimes been used for it is chore, which means ‘to steal’. I have heard some gypsies saying that they have only chored something, when what they really mean is that they have just ‘borrowed’ it. A friend of mine who is French told me that a word used for ‘steal’ in the French language is chourer, which she believes might well be associated with the Romani language. It has led me to believe that perhaps long ago the gypsies forgot the original meaning of this word, hence using it for ‘borrow’. Or perhaps the verb ‘to borrow’ has always been somehow inextricably linked to the verb ‘to steal’ in their language. Perhaps, like many words, and indeed traditions, in the Romani culture, the essence of it all is buried deep in a time when personal space was more important than measurement of space. There may just have been an age when you could not steal from the Earth because to take more than your share was unthinkable.

  I still go back to that experience given me by the wood and the field, and to those very solid images of the ancestor moving with his ran and his knowing smile through the trees. He has since encouraged me to converse with trees, which is difficult to do in these times when more land is privately owned in Britain than ever before. But I carry a lasting and fond memory of that borrowed wood and that borrowed field and what they both taught me, and I never pass a tree, or walk across a field now, without engaging these spirits in some kind of conversation, just as my ancestor does - a promise on my part that I will do all I can to help things change.

  Chapter Four

  LIFE AND DEATH BEYOND THE HEDGEROWS

  The Gypsy Way of Life

  My Puri Dai told me that once, before I was born, everything that was on the mantelpiece in a house they had been sitting in suddenly fell with a great crash to the floor, apparently of its own accord. She said that Jack Lee leapt out of his chair and had rushed to the other side of the room with eyes blazing in terror. He had then run outside to the garden, where he had fallen to the ground, remaining there for some time, lying against the Earth.

  This had been an omen, my grandmother said, a warning that a curse might well be upon the family if it continued to live in houses and indulge in ownership in the gaujo manner. Later, they discovered that at the precise moment the phenomenon had occurred, a relation had died. She had been in another house, dropped an oil lamp after falling over and tragically burned to death. This marked the beginning of the curse, which has remained in the family to this day.

  As a Chovihano, Jack Lee attempted to carry out purification rituals to charm away the bad luck, but the bad luck considered to come out of gaujo living was strong and it was finally decided that the Bengesko Yak, the Evil Eye, was well and truly upon them all. My grandmother said that Jack Lee left the house and went away for some considerable time following that event; he thought that his magic could not work any more.

  Living and dying, or rather how you live and die was always an important issue for the Romani gypsy. The general belief is that if the old ways are not observed you lay yourself open to bad luck which will weaken you, thereafter inviting harmful magical influences in the form of curses and enchantments to enter your life. These can be a severe threat to health and well-being if not taken seriously.

  When the objects on the mantelpiece took their mysterious unaided dive to the floor that day, my family saw it as a warning to protect themselves. An ancestor’s spirit was not at rest and this is a very serious matter, for it subjects the family to what is probably one of the greatest fears for the Romani gypsy: the Mulo.

  The word mulo is related to the Sanskrit mrta, ‘dead’, also to the English words ‘murder’ and ‘mortuary’. It covers many aspects of the spirit in death in Romani lore and like all spirits, it manifests as a benevolent or malevolent force. When benevolent, the spirits of the departed are seen as trustworthy, and in many ways alive, but alive in another world. They can guide and help those in the flesh in many ways. But if malevolent, these spirits are still considered to be living in this world and are what we m
ight call vampires, zombies or the walking dead, a belief which dates back many thousands of years and which may well have its roots in vampiric traditions in India.

  From my own family I learned that the spirits of the dead are extremely vulnerable just after death, rather like newborns. I understood that after death you returned to Grandmother Earth, the source, and entered places that are often beyond the comprehension of those left behind, as only the Chovihanos have access to these obscure realms. Providing you made your transition back to Puvus, the Earth, through the grave, all went smoothly, and you could move on to other dimensions. But if something interfered with that process, you might well become a ghost, a lost soul, haunting those left behind. Only a Chovihano could then find your soul and bring it to rest.

  It has been common in modern times to associate exorcism with Christian ministers, but post-death soul-retrieval was a common task for the gypsy Chovihano in earlier times. The word drukerimaskro was used to describe a Christian minister who had the power to lay ghosts to rest. Drukerimaskro, originally ‘soothsayer’, described an art, which was linked to the Chovihano. Certainly it was always impressed upon me that a Chovihano must be prepared to help the dead as much as the living.

  The Chovihano’s role will lie not only in rescuing a lost soul, but also in experiencing that soul’s misery and pain, thereby ‘capturing’ the curse or spell responsible for keeping the dead person out of the grave.

  Perhaps new ideas of death, or more correctly the loss of the ancient value of death, have created a fear in our modern times of being buried or contained in the Earth - almost as if at death we are buried alive! Since the Earth’s soil is no longer the ‘source’, no longer the ‘mother’, it is no longer considered to be clean. It has become unhygienic and constantly needs washing away. So the Earth’s soil has become ‘dirt’, a term I find deeply offensive, which is justified on the discovery that the origin of the word ‘dirt’ has its roots in the Old Norse drit, which means excrement!