Built around 2,500 years ago, with much earlier foundations, we were inspired to visit Danebury following the report of a crop circle there, which was an intriguing pattern in the shape of Metatron’s Cube. Apart from finding the crop circle itself of great interest, a casual walk around the settlement revealed a quite different atmosphere compared to the one we had encountered before. There was something rather pleasant about Danebury, perhaps a little too pleasant. A prominent hill fort with a panoramic view of many other settlements in the nearby landscape, Danebury was an influential place, but was nonetheless caught up in the changes imposed by the very same civilized thinking.
Another lady ghost, from the late Bronze Age came into the picture here with another sad story to tell. Having become so traumatized by the social changes that were taking place at such a fast rate, a lady known as Summer Bird and some of her people, had cut themselves off emotionally from what had been going on around them. Summer Bird had been in love with a man from a prominent local tribe whose name was Wing. He was one of those opposed to the domination that was being enforced by civilized reforms. He wanted Summer Bird to give up her stable life with the farmers who were her family, so that she could join him. She had been afraid to do that, admitting that she feared losing her comfort and safety because there was a harsh, unfriendly world going on beyond the defensive gates of her settlement, a world full of ‘savages’ - of which Wing was one! With no means of working out a plan, and remaining full of regrets, Summer Bird died with many ambivalent feelings haunting her, locking her in her sad world.
Her final torment had come, she told us, when Wing, as the last - except for two or three others - of his tribe, found there was nowhere for his kind to go any more. When one looked out across the landscape, there was nowhere for the remaining resistant hunter-gatherers to roam. With the increase in farming and absence of trees, where did one live? How did one practise the old life without coming up against modern ownership? It seemed to be a familiar Romani gypsy kind of story, which I identified with so well.
Wing was one of those courageous and resolute tribal people, of which there were many, who would rather die than live the civilized life. Summer Bird told us, with difficulty, how he ended his life by simply running madly at the heavily defended gates of her own settlement, causing spears to be hurled at him, killing him outright, until he fell down, dead, the last of his kind, the last of the few remaining wild people of this land, who eventually became extinct. Summer Bird regretted forever not going with him, not dying with him, and told us that some of her people, equally traumatized by the times, lived on at the hill fort in an eternal summer, a recreated bliss, which was really the result of being in denial over so much tragedy taking place back in those times.
Even though Danebury had fallen out of use by the Roman era, the ghosts lived on in the same place, recreating their era, continuously reaping summer harvests, continuously wanting peace for their troubled and restless minds. Summer Bird forever pushed away the memory of her beloved Wing who died so fearlessly - until she came into contact with the Chovihano.
After talking to her for some time, we finally got to hear that Summer Bird had rediscovered and reunited with Wing once she had moved on and dealt with her grief, despair and guilt, but the figure of Wing, in ancient Britain, speaks so loudly and clearly of the nightmare which tribal people in these lands were forced to endure. The hunter-gatherers of Britain, natives who had lived without changing for thousands of years, had finally, irreparably become the extinct race, and Britain’s future was destined to be the poorer for the loss of such courageous and wise people.
In Britain, there would be no more unbroken connection with ancestors, no more laughing around the campfires after the hunt, no more simple, light-hearted conversations, no more authentic ancient rituals, no more principles and guidance according to natural law and the old Otherworld. Civilization was here, and here to stay, destined to be irreversible. And the ghosts of people like Teeth and Bones hiding in the trees, Spear guarding the golfing bunkers, Summer Bird in her eternal summer as she mourned her dead beloved Wing, and Black Wind who sacrificed his own soul to fate, give us all a profound message and a very strong, clear picture, causing me, the Chovihano, to ask, What went wrong? What did we sacrifice back in those most ancient times? What made human beings kill off a whole way of life that had been the backbone of our social communities for so many thousands of years? With no means of ever being able to turn back the clock we have been forced to make the best of our strange psychology now in our modern world, where we will need to do some serious work on reshaping our ideas and views of ancient man if we are to understand him as he has really been.
The icing on the cake comes with our visit to Stonehenge. This, it goes without saying, is the jewel in the crown of ancient landscapes in Britain. Sitting on flat land in the middle of Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, the megalithic structure attracts thousands of visitors from all over the world each year. Built by degrees over a period of 4,500 years, Stonehenge has to be at the top of the list for being the most influential stone circle anywhere in the British Isles.
Although I have visited Stonehenge many times in the past, a visit with Anni following our ghost trek along the South Downs, added a different flavour to our view of this most ancient place.
The bluestones having been brought from the Preseli Mountains in Wales, and the sarsen stones having been quarried from nearby Marlborough, one can only marvel at the arrangement of these large stones, which weigh around 17 tonnes each. ‘The Giant’s Dance’, as Stonehenge has been called, always gave me a very frustrated feeling because I never knew what it was all for. Experts (from archaeologists to Druids) have called it many things: a clock, a ritual instrument, a place of burial, and a place of healing. We might ask: Why would man want to erect such impossibly heavy stones purely to create an astronomical clock? Didn’t primitive tribal people know what the season was, and whether it was dawn, midday or dusk, through winter and summer - which they were probably far more instinctively attuned to than we are! Did they need to build so fancy a structure in order to enact rituals when they hadn’t needed one for such purposes before? Did their dead need such an elaborate place in order to be worshipped? Did one need such an intricate arrangement of stones in order to be able to receive healing when people hadn’t used them for healing anywhere in the past? Most importantly, was it necessary to record and capture the sunlight through the gaps in the stones when everyone knew about winter and summer solstices and their natural power prior to the building of such monuments?
Basically, what I am suggesting here is that primitive tribal people were not ‘thick’; they were not stupid. Would we say that Native Americans or Australian Aboriginals or Amazonian Indians are thick today? We have a lot of rethinking to do with our concept of ancient indigenous peoples.
So what was going on? I present these questions because I do not believe we have a clear view of what Stonehenge was all about, or what it was really used for. I believe we have been in the dark about its origins and its use because we are also in the dark about our prehistoric past.
I realized when watching the tourists going round Stonehenge how I needed a prehistoric person to tell me what it was all about. If it transpired that there were no ghosts present here, then I would never understand how or why a need arose to build such a place.
I wasn’t disappointed. Prior to our arrival at Stonehenge, we had been introduced by a ghost further east to a man whom everyone jokingly called, Wristband Man. He had been described as a trader, an archer (we knew this because of his wristbands, which most archers in the Bronze Age wore). We were told he had been instrumental in keeping many people in check in these early times, preventing them from moving on to the Otherworld. Again they were promised an amazing afterlife, and various other rewards, but this, once again, seemed to be a ploy for enslaving people. What we were seeing here was the ghost of a man who didn’t want to move on and accept death, and who ended up enslav
ing other ghosts to serve his overwhelming fear and guilt.
This was becoming complex, and the troubled psychology was growing more intense with every age that followed the Neolithic Age, but we were heartened by the fact that many liberated ghosts were forming bands and were resisting those who were instrumental in keeping others from dying.
Here, I want to mention a little about the landscape ghosts occupy when they are kept from death.
People in general tend to see things as they are accustomed to seeing them, and this is highlighted when they do not die, and it applies to whichever era a person may have lived in - including all the ages that stretch back to the Neolithic Revolution.
People move about in the places or worlds they have occupied, as they have known them. To describe what I mean by this, just for a moment imagine thinking about a place you may have visited in your past, perhaps a house you might have lived in, which you might know has changed in recent times. In your mind’s eye you will still be able to visualize it as it used to be many years before, and it is hard to visualize it as it might be today. This is the way it is for people who become ghosts. All they know and can visualize is the landscape they have lived in; no matter how much it has changed after their time, they will continue to see it, and occupy it, exactly as it used to be, in their shadow world, while their psychological problems serve to keep them there. Their psychological problems in fact remain active there, and unless they develop a desire to move on, they will remain in that same place for as long as they wish to.
In fact, you could say that the person’s shadow world is built entirely out of his or her psychological problems. These shadow worlds can be exacerbated by people like Black Wind and Wristband Man, who cannot face death themselves, but who take personal pleasure in manipulating others who also cannot face death. Rather than help themselves and everyone else, they prolong any pain that people suffer, and all because of their petty appetite for power. Power, greed and ego are usually at the heart of fear trapped by time. So it follows that any ghosts attached to the Stonehenge monument would have been attached to the era they spent there, and were probably under the spell of a sorcerer, an influential trader, a kingly or queenly individual, or an eminent warrior of some kind. Someone who had been in a position of power whilst on Earth would be able to weave a spell or become an influence all too easily.
We discovered that there were indeed ghosts at Stonehenge, but one was prevented from contacting them because they were comfortably hidden and quite settled at the centre of the circle, escaping attention whenever it might be directed towards them. One of these ghosts was a rather vicious and dominant woman, someone who many other ghosts labelled, the ‘Queen’.
We were told that this woman from the Neolithic era would use anyone, whether Wristband Man, her shaman-priests, or anyone else, to hold her position. We never got to have any kind of conversation with the Queen of Stonehenge, but what we did learn was that a group of regular ghosts there fully believed that those hiding away in the centre of the monument had great power. This woman seemed to have a psychology that was every bit what one might one label, ‘passive-aggressive’: someone everyone feared because of her seemingly agreeable way of ruling others whilst at the same time arranging for obstacles to fall in the path of her subjects if they didn’t demonstrate enough loyalty. The prehistoric people had put the stones in place courtesy of a magical power, it was said and, once again, promises were made that a wonderful afterlife would be granted to anyone who supported the power of the dignitaries: people who no one had actually ever seen.
Why we all believe that great monuments such as Stonehenge, the pyramids in Egypt and in South America, are symbols of benevolence and good magical power, I do not understand. Whilst primitive people like Wing are busy fighting for his life and his right to remain primitive, and to live the wild and free life, there is a new breed of civilized individual assuming power, erecting great structures and - well, genocide is taking place under the noses of everyone: in the guise of a new and power-hungry modern world, which the new afterlife believes it has a reason to uphold.
The woman labelled the Queen of Stonehenge was finally taken prisoner by the ‘Resistance’: the Otherworldly warrior bands who fought and who continuously fight to put an end to the artificial afterlife created by civilization, in favour of the original Otherworld, which firmly relates to nature.
Both the Queen of Stonehenge and Wristband Man, who was also captured, were enslaved to those they had enslaved. Whether they make it into the real Otherworld is not for me to say, but when I look at Stonehenge now I see the epitome of our own modern civilization, once powerful, but now so in danger of economical and social collapse. Is it any different today than it was back in the heyday of Stonehenge? I don’t think so. Power struggles and unnatural ways of living and relating to one another are still at the heart of society. Tourists walk the circuit at Stonehenge and marvel at it, not realizing that they are seeing the remnants of one of the first civilizations in Britain, and not realizing also that every civilization, no matter how powerful, no matter how seemingly indestructible, is destined to collapse after rising to a height. It is a fact that this happened wherever civilizations are built throughout the world, because no civilization is able to sustain itself with any durability when its foundation is based upon unnatural power and greed. Only hunter-gatherer society is sustainable, long-term, chiefly because it is not based upon the ultimate power attributed to the few, but the shared dexterity of the whole.
As for that which was labelled, the ‘afterlife’, I somehow doubt that this place existed. It was talked about so much in earlier times, particularly in ancient Egypt and I know there is a lot more around this subject for me to explore, possibly in future books. I believe the ghosts we communicated with along the South Downs were already in the afterlife, and that they therefore could only have had, as we gypsies see it, a good game of the Bujo played upon them! In other words, they had been conned.
Nothing will ever equal or replace the ancient Otherworld. With its myths and legends, it is by far the safest place to aim for when death occurs, which primitive man obviously knew, but which we modern people now find so hard to understand and access - unless we have a good and wise medicine man on hand to help us, one who understands the nature of the primitive and who is not influenced by anything that came after the time of the Neolithic Revolution.
It is said so often by experts that when we shifted from hunter-gatherer to modern man, it enabled us to live better lives. There is no way that this can be true. I believe that civilized thinking meant that a species, i.e. human beings, entered a kind of madness. For we humans were not designed to accommodate civilized modes of thought, impossibly large and heavy stone structures in our social lives where we must worship one single person who assumes power, and an ultimate abandonment of all laws according to the natural world and the Otherworld.
Our ‘shift’, quite clearly, produced an insanity, a pathological obsession with ourselves, a self-centredness as individuals, the like of which we had never known before, and this meant that we also killed the natural, normal spirit, the original primitive human spirit, which borrowed all things it came into contact with, and which usually so naturally released them upon death. Wing’s death, for me, symbolizes that death; there can now be no return to the way it used to be, when the primitive world provided a way of life.
In my own small way I used my Chovihano’s skills to help the prehistoric ghosts as best I could, but it goes without saying that they helped me far more than I helped them. I have also used my skills and magic to uphold the ancient world and what my own people have shared. It is a sad fact that the primitive tribal world can never be rekindled, and this is mostly because ownership replaced borrowing.
We may say we practise modern shamanism, we may say we create new, meaningful and powerful rituals to celebrate events throughout the year, and we may say we believe that we can access primitive ways of seeing things, but we can only
imagine how it once used to be when nomadic gypsies and all primitive people shared the Earth.
If we can look up at a clear starlit sky at night or at the clouds moving across our horizon or at a bud appearing on a tree or at a fading red sunset, we may just catch a glimpse of the old ones there on our horizon, whether they are original Romani gypsies or primitive men and women. These are the original ancestors who were severed from our world, and who are still there, within the activities of nature.
We may rest assured that all of them have known, and perhaps still know, somewhere within the old Otherworld where they safely reside, what it means to borrow, rather than own, the Earth.
GLOSSARY
Ana: female spirit of the mountains
bakterismaskro ran: magic wand
Bari Hukni: the Great Lie or trick
Bari Weshen Dai: the Great Forest Mother
Bavol: Spirit of the Air, or the Wind
bengesko: spirits of the Lowerworld
bengesko yak: evil eye
biti Chovihanos: insects or small clever animals
Bitee Fokee: the fairy or magical woodland people
boro dad: great-grandfather
boro prala: big brother
bujo: a con job
chavvies: children
chore: to steal (or borrow)
Chovihano/i: gypsy medicine man, healer, wizard
devlesko: spirits of the Upperworld
devlesko dikkiben: sacred vision
diddikai: one-quarter gypsy
dik ta shoon: watch and listen
diklo: neckerchief
dordi dordi: oh dear!
dosh: money
drabengro: doctor or man of poison
drom: road, path or way
drukerimaskro: soothsayer or minister
We Borrow the Earth: An Intimate Portrait of the Gypsy Folk Tradition and Culture Page 25
