簡介: |
THIS work contains 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, taken either from works as yet very little
known to the English reader or from personal experiences. Within a very few years, since Ethnology and Archæology have received a great inspiration, and much enlarged their scope through Folk-lore,
everything relating to such subjects is studied with far greater interest and to much greater profit than
was the case when they were cultivated in a languid, half-believing, half-sceptical spirit which was in
reality rather one of mere romance than reason. Now that we seek with resolution to find the whole truth,
be it based on materialism, spiritualism, or their identity, we are amazed to find that the realm of marvel
and mystery, of wonder and poetry, connected with what we vaguely call "magic," far from being
explained away or exploded, enlarges before us as we proceed, and that not into a mere cloudland, gorgeous land, but into a country of reality
in which men of science who would once have disdained the mere thought thereof are beginning to stray.
Hypnotism has really revealed far greater wonders than were ever established by the fascinatores of old
or by mesmerists of more modern times. Memory, the basis of thought according to PLATO, which was
once held to be a determined quantity, has been proved, (the word is not too bold), by recent physiology,
to be practically infinite, and its perfect development to be identical with that of intellect, so that we now
see plainly before us the power to perform much which was once regarded as miraculous. Not less
evident is it that men of science or practical inventors, such as DARWIN, WALLACE, HUXLEY,
TYNDALE, GALTON, JOULE, LOCKYER, and EDISON, have been or are all working in common
with theosophists, spiritualists, Folk-lorists, and many more, not diversely but all towards a grand
solution of the Unknown. |