The Demon, the She-Demon, Saint George and the Stupid Gàdjo / O Beng, i Bengi, o Erdelezi tha o Dinelo Gàdjo

(December 2017)

While catching up with my reading-list I have come across a particularly egregious piece of dinelipen by a gàdjo tsiganologist, which prompted me to write not only about yet another example of why the ownership of research of Romani culture, language and heritage must be returned urgently to those who truly know -- the native-speaking Roma -- but also an interesting example of how the imposition of gàdjikane religions upon our ancestors have affected our culture ever since.

I have also had some difficulty in identifying the original culprit, because my research has found that this piece of archeolinguistic khul has been repeated many times over the years without any attempt at fact-checking it, by people who really ought to have known better, including even John Sampson, who was generally a careful and attentive linguist (although I have spotted a few other howlers in his work on Romani).

The author of this piece of nonsense, who clearly doesn't know either our own or ancient Indic beliefs properly, first of all tries to derive the Romani word beng, which correctly means ‘demon’, but has come to be used for ‘Devil’ (the Devil in the Christian sense does not exist in the phuro pachipen or traditional faith of the Roma), from the Sanskrit व्यङ्ग [broken-limbed] (which he mistranscribes into English too!), which just plain doesn't work, the words are not the least bit alike, the Sanskrit word is pronounced something like vyaɖ’ga (the ɖ denotes a voiced retroflex stop, a sound non-existent in European languages), but also then claims that beng additionally means ‘toad’ -- which it doesn't -- bengi means ‘toad’ and also means ‘she-demon’, at least in the older dialects of Romani.

Worse, he goes on to claim that the whole business started when the first Roma in eastern Europe became Christianized and saw icons of St. George and the dragon, and adopted St. George (known as Džurdževan or Erdelezi/Herdelezi in Romani according to dialect) as "their" saint, and hence adopted the dragon, which they mis-identified as a frog or toad, as the personification of all evil. This is totally and utterly backwards! Ràtvalo dinelo gàdjo!

In fact, Beng and Bengi are very old Indian words and refer to pre-Hindu, Dravidian deities of a giant reptilian appearance, to which human sacrifices and other unpleasant rites were performed and came to be seen after the coming of Hinduism as personifying all evil; and the association with frogs/toads is likewise very ancient, amphibians being seen as inherently demonic in the "three-worlds model", which is of ancient Hindu origin: all animals are created to belong either to the land, the sky or the water, and any that "break the rules", e.g. by being amphibious, are evil and demonic, and are therefore màkhade; this belief still survives in Romani culture today. In a very strict interpretation of this belief, flightless birds also violate the three-worlds principle (because birds are ‘of the air’ but flightless birds are confined to the ground) and are therefore màkhade -- and indeed there are some Roma clans who consider chickens to be so... even though in most cases today’s Roma don't remember where these ideas came from or why!

Obviously, all of these beliefs came with us from India -- and when the first Balkan Roma were Christianized (in the Orthodox Church) what really happened was that they identified the dragon depicted in the St. George icons as Bengi, and therefore saw St. George as a tremendously powerful force for good in being able to slay a personification of all evil (I am sure very much analogous, from a Hindu viewpoint, as the power of Kālī to slay the Raktabij), and that is why Džurdževan/Erdelezi is the patron saint of the Christian Roma (and commonly the Muslim Roma too) in the Balkans!

Now, if only these stupid tsiganologists would bother to ask those of us who keep the old knowledge -- usually Chovahània like myself -- before writing such drivel, they wouldn't end up in a situation where "butiako se te ràkeresa, tha bute dinelo dikhlavesa, kana chivdian dui tire pire ko mui" (it's hard to talk, and you look very stupid, when you've stuck both feet in your mouth)...

And one last point about the St. George story, not specific to the Roma but illustrating the tendency of early Christians to “colonize” pre-existing religions in order to convert their adherents to the “new” beliefs -- which I, as an adherent of the phuro pachipen, do not approve of: attempting to push one’s religion onto someone else is adharmic, not to mention downright disrespectful... the feast day of St. George is held around the beginning of May: May 6th in areas where the old Julian calendar is still followed, April 23rd in areas that use the modern calendar (April 23rd was the original date, it “shifted” to May 6th over time because the Julian calendar did not properly account for the length of the tropical year -- but that will be the subject of a future article where I’ll explain why western astronomy and calendrical systems are vastly inferior to the ancient Hindu knowledge, and why the Vikrami calendar instituted in India in 57 BCE is still vastly superior to anything the West has).

There is very strong evidence that the Feast of St. George was placed on April 23rd deliberately to replace, or “Christianize”, a much older, Pagan, fire festival held to mark the coming of summer, closely corresponding to Beltane in the Western Pagan traditions (this is also the source of the "hero returning from the water" trope found among some Balkan Roma groups: that's not Indian). In the slightly cooler north-west of Europe, Beltane was generally held around May 1st, by tradition upon the first day when the hawthorn bloomed; not surprisingly, summer arrives in north-west Europe a week or so later than it does in the Balkans.

I always find it rather ironic, considering the amount of unpleasantness shown by a certain kind of intolerant Christian towards those of us who still follow the old Hindu/Pagan ways, that whenever you draw aside the historical veil on their most treasured “Christian” traditions, they all turn out to be based on Hindu or Pagan beliefs...

 

(Footnote for non-Romani speakers: in the cartoon, the woman says "I beg you, help me" and then to the dragon, "thank you!"; the captions say "Sometimes, the woman doesn't want a man" and "(or, everything green might not be a Bengi)")