“The more artful, particularly of the other sex, go about from house to house, where they tell fortunes, cast nativities, discover thefts, and pretend they possess remedies, to which they ascribe wonders and infallible cures. These nostrums consist, chiefly, of roots, amulets, certain small stones . . . mostly a kind of scoriæ.—Among the Egyptians, likewise, such impostors rambled up and down. These were Ethiopians by descent, who carried on a similar trade.
“From the last considerations, compared with the former, one would be inclined rather to deduce the origin of the Gipseys from the Ethiopians and Troglodytes, than from the Egyptians. But what I am going to add, will make it more probable that they are a mixture of all the three nations. { 161}
“It is well known that people of both sexes, calling themselves Egyptian priests and priestesses, were, in ancient times, scattered through Italy, Greece, and all the provinces of the Roman empire: where they not only introduced the worship of the goddess Isis, but wandered from place to place, begged, and professed the same kinds of ingenuity in which the Gipseys of the Banat, and the rest of their brethren dispersed over Europe, are so thoroughly versed. These said priests and priestesses, which Apuleius ironically calls _magnæ religionis sidera_, not only knocked at people’s doors, in Rome, with their sistris, but even had the skill to persuade the common people, that to refuse them alms and to commit sacrilege were equally heinous. They even went so far as to threaten those who slighted them, in the name of their goddess Isis, to strike them with blindness, or the tympany (_hydrops tympanites_).—Aventin says, the Gipseys could so terrify the people in Bavaria, with the like threats, that they suffered themselves to be robbed by them with impunity. Likewise in the Banat, the women, particularly, are heard to vent the most horrid curses and imprecations if they are reprimanded, or not paid for their calculations of nativities, singing, or fortune-telling.
“The licentiousness and immorality of the Gipseys are extreme. In early youth, when yet young girls, they exhibit themselves, with their dances, before every person from whom they expect any present; and these dances always end in lascivious attitudes and shameful gestures. In like manner, the ordinary women in Egypt used to dance at their orgies, especially at the feast of Bubostes, and the procession of Canopus. The like scenes appeared at Rome, among the wives, daughters, and sponsors of the priests of Isis, agreeably to the mysteries of that goddess.”