The Concoctors: Creating Fake Romani Culture

Summary

To be fair, not all fake Romani culture has been faked deliberately; more often it is simply the result of misguided or misinformed hypotheses finding their way into the conventional account, and being repeated by subsequent writers unchecked. A prime example of deliberately faked tradition, however, is found in Manfri Fred Wood's much-publicized In the Life of a Romany Gypsy, which appeared in 1973. Here, he summarized (1973: 65–69) what was allegedly remembered of the original Romani religion. He begins: ‘Now, as to Romany religion, there is not much anybody remembers of it today. There was a prophet called Soster, and a lot of the stories had to do with him’. Wood then goes on to relate the story of the creation of the universe and the world out of a burst of fire, and of the two gods Moshto and Arivell, and Moshto's three sons, and the ginko or maidenhair tree, and of the two clay figures into whose mouths Moshto blew its seeds to give them life.

What is curious is that six years later, Leon Petulengro (Leon Lloyd) repeated the story in his own book Romany Boy, where on pp. 136–37 the same account – of a void within a void, and the explosion of a ball of fire, and of the two gods, Moshto and Arivell, and Moshto's three sons, and the two clay figures, and the ginko tree – is told (Petulengro 1979). But this time the story is attributed to his paternal grandmother Anyeta, who, he says on p. 12, came from Romania. He had already introduced her a decade earlier as ‘Anyeta, a Romanian Zingari, and a true Romany herbalist’ in his book The Roots of Health (1968: 15), though that book makes no mention of Moshto or the old religion. In Romany Boy (1979: 24) her membership in a ‘tribe’ in Romania is referred to, as well as her being the head of her tribe, presumably also in Romania, since Petulengro states that after coming to England she ‘did not live with us but with my father's cousin and his tribe, the Lovells’.