Romanistan
The authors of Secrets of Romani Fortune Telling present: Romanistan! Do you love rebels? Do you want to live in a place where outcasts shine their brightest? Welcome to Romanistan! We're your friendly neighborhood Gypsies, celebrating Romani identity and outcast culture, and practicing good diplomatic relations with other marginalized communities.
We love the rebels who are living their truth, even if it clashes with tradition. We also love tradition and honoring our roots. This podcast is for everyone who loves and supports Roma & related groups, and anyone who feels like a misfit and wants to uplift others to create a beautiful community.
We feature pioneers in culture, fashion, art, literature, music, activism, cuisine, and everything good. We adore the intersections of gender, sexuality, spirituality, ability, and identity. We cover all topics, from the difficult to the glorious. Let's sit crooked and talk straight.
Hosted by Paulina Stevens and Jezmina Von Thiele. We reclaim the slur Gypsy, but if you aren’t Romani, we prefer you don't use it. xoxo.
P.S. The Romani people are a diasporic ethnic group originally from northwest India, circa the 10th century. Now, Roma live all over the globe, and due to centuries of oppression, slavery, genocide, and other atrocities, Roma are still fighting for basic human rights. We seek to raise awareness of who Roma are, and highlight Romani resilience, creativity, & culture.
Romanistan
Live from the Welcome to Romanistan Festival: Stewarding Traditions Panel with Lilith Dorsey, Paulina Stevens, Jezmina Von Thiele, and Bimbo Yaga
We're releasing it from the vault! It's the Weiser Books' Stewarding Traditions Panel, which we recorded on 3/29/25 at Cottage Magick as part of our Welcome to Romanistan Festival tour in New Orleans for our book, Secrets of Romani Fortune Telling. Lilith Dorsey joined us for the discussion and Bimbo Yaga moderated. What a wonderful evening!
Since 1991, Lilith Dorsey has been doing successful magick for patrons of her business. She is editor/publisher of Oshun-African Magickal Quarterly, and filmmaker of the experimental documentary Bodies of Water:Voodoo Identity and Tranceformation. Lilith Dorsey is also author of Voodoo and Afro-Caribbean Paganism, The African-American Ritual Cookbook, Love Magic, and was choreographer for jazz legend Dr. John’s “Night Tripper” Voodoo Show. In July 2013, she led her first ever Voodoo Zombie Silent Rave, complete with very confused Thriller flash mob. Please contact her at voodoouniverse@yahoo.com for information about psychic readings and services.
Bimbo Yaga has graced our podcast many times, and you can follow her at @bimboyaga on Instagram.
Thank you for listening to Romanistan podcast.
You can find us on Instagram, TikTok, BlueSky, and Facebook @romanistanpodcast, and on Twitter @romanistanpod. To support us, Join our Patreon for extra content or donate to Ko-fi.com/romanistan, and please rate, review, and subscribe. It helps us so much.
Follow Jez on Instagram @jezmina.vonthiele & Paulina @romaniholistic.
You can get our book Secrets of Romani Fortune Telling, online or wherever books are sold. Visit romanistanpodcast.com for events, educational resources, merch, and more.
Email us at romanistanpodcast@gmail.com for inquiries.
Romanistan is hosted by Jezmina Von Thiele and Paulina Stevens
Conceived of by Paulina Stevens
Edited by Viktor Pachas
With Music by Viktor Pachas
And Artwork by Elijah Vardo
Welcome to Romanistan. Wear your friendly neighborhood gypsies. I'm Jez Paulina is on the recording you're about to hear and I'm just here to intro the Wiser Books-sponsored Stewarding Traditions panel that Paulina and I did with Lilith Dorsey, a wonderful Wiser author, as part of our Romanistan Festival to Celebrate Secrets of Romani Fortune-Telling, our debut book. The panel is moderated by Ilva Mara Razhizhevsky. We had a really great time. We talk about so many things. There's a Q&A, so we really hope you enjoy and we have a very loving request for you If you enjoyed Secrets of Romani Fortune Telling, please give us a five-star review and say something nice on Goodreads or Amazon. It's a wonderful thing to do. For any authors you love. It's a free and easy way to make a huge difference in their support. So thank you so much for being here. We love you, we appreciate you. Please enjoy.
Speaker 3:Lilith, would you like to introduce yourself and your book?
Speaker 4:Yes, alright.
Speaker 4:I started writing about voodoo and African traditional religions when I was an undergrad my second undergrad degree in anthropology and I had a pale, stale and male professor who said there was no such thing as magic in the United States or divination, and that was all fake and my girls were little at the time and I wanted to prove him wrong. I wanted them to have powerful images of their heritage, from both an academic and a practical perspective. So that was pretty much where this book was born. I used to have the Oshun African Magical Quarterly, which we used to go to the copy place and fold it over and hand it out to people for free, starting in 91. So that's how long this has been going on.
Speaker 4:But yeah, I am a New Orleans-style voodoo priestess. I also have initiations in Haitian voodoo. I have initiations in La Regla La Kumi. I do have a degree in Haitian Vodou. I have initiations in La Regla La Kumi. I do have a degree in anthropology. I have my own spiritual house here in New Orleans. We've been going for about 15 years and I don't know. There's a lot of other things. I do a lot of other things.
Speaker 4:I'm in a play, it's great, come see it, and I rewrite my bio every day, so this is where we're at right now, but for the purposes of this I have been studying and practicing for four decades now, so it's a lot. It's a lot and it's beautiful, and it's taught me to really understand things from the sacred feminine perspective, which was not given to me or my daughter when we were growing up. So I think it's an important voice and people have told me this book saved their lives and even if I don't make a dollar, that's important enough for me to keep writing and keep talking about the religions. Thank you so much.
Speaker 4:Beautiful.
Speaker 3:Anything else to add? No, I think that's great. No, I don't think that's great Jasmina, will you introduce yourself and impart your relationship to this book?
Speaker 1:Hi, I'm Jasmina Von Thiele. I'm so grateful to be here. I'm so grateful you're here and I'm so grateful we do these things, and so grateful to you too. Thank you.
Speaker 3:So much gratitude and thank you for being here.
Speaker 1:Everyone we really it means so much to us Really really does so. I grew up in New Hampshire. I'm mixed and assimilated, which means that only my maternal grandmother is Romani, and she also spent an enormous amount of her time raising me and teaching me what her relationship was to her Romani culture. She grew up in Nazi Germany, hiding her ethnicity in plain sight. She was not allowed to speak her language and at the same time her grandparents risked their lives to teach her their cultural practices as much as they could in secret, and so when she came to the US, she did not raise her children with a context for the customs that they grew up with and told them when they were adults that they were Romani. And my mother and my auntie, I think, maybe got a little more information because of gender norms within Romani traditions, and my grandmother was raised to do what she would call women's work in quotation marks and she would also be like but my grandma was so progressive Like she knew I was queer before.
Speaker 1:I did it she also was very proud that her grandfather also read and she saw I don't think she thought a lot about restrictions and um. So I was fortunate because her relationship with her adult children was strained for a lot of reasons and definitely not helped that their cultural context was hidden from them. So I was incredibly fortunate that, as a really small child, she decided to just pour all of everything she knew about her fragmented relationship with her culture into me, and so I was really lucky to be connected with Paulina and we've been working on Romana Sun podcast since 2021. And we really wanted to make it a place where we could uplift Roma from all different walks of life, whether you are traditional or you're a mixed, or you're assimilated or grew up in culture, if you're queer, whatever your relationship is, if you're adopted.
Speaker 1:And we interview folks from Roma, but also non-Roma, who are doing really cool things that we think intersect with Romani community interests, like land-back movements and things like that. And we wrote this book together because we kept getting questions about where do people go for resources, about romani fortune telling, and we were like, well, we guess you have to talk to some people about it and then we were like we should write this book, um yeah because you all are the people that most people prefer people to talk to about it and so this is a book of cultural and historical context of fortune telling.
Speaker 1:It's a survival trade, but it's also a how-to and it's also a memoir of how we grew up in fortune telling traditions in different families, in different ways, but also with a lot of similarities. Yes.
Speaker 3:Thank you and Paulina, will you introduce yourself and your relationship to the book that you and Jasmina have written?
Speaker 7:Yes, so everything that Jess said about gratitude, I also feel that way.
Speaker 7:And so, yeah, thank you guys for being here. This book has been such an interesting process. We actually learned so much writing it and it talks a lot, lot about. We talk a lot about our histories, but also we go into some of our trauma, some of our healing. Um, sometimes, to be honest, it's even triggering reading from this book. So there's a lot of like deep-rooted history that goes into it. I grew up in a small, closed Romani community in California called the Majwaya community, and I was taken out of school. I actually rarely even went to elementary school kind of throughout my life and I was engaged at 14. I was married. I actually did turn my phone off, but for some reason, that wasn't a alarm.
Speaker 3:I was letting you know we were getting started. Yeah, time to start. Thank you all for being here okay.
Speaker 7:So, um, where was I okay? So, yeah, arranged marriage, and then we were actually only allowed to do fortune telling growing up. It was just one of the trades that Roma were able to do kind of on the go throughout, kind of like persecution and like war and stuff like that throughout the world, and so that's kind of how I got into it, since, since I was a child and all of my ancestors before that have also practiced it, so we held on to fortune telling and I decided to leave my small community, but I I'm obviously still Romani, and so I felt like, yeah, I felt like we really just put all of that information into this book Some closed practices we do not share in this book, but some practices we do share. So that's what it's about, and I stopped fortune telling for a little while and I took a break and I came back to it. I also did a little podcast with the LA Times called Foretold that talks about Just a little podcast.
Speaker 7:A little podcast, just a little podcast with the LA Times and they just talk about my story and leaving my community and kind of walking between both worlds, and so that's where I'm at, and none of this would be possible without Jess. Jess, honestly, has been my partner in crime, but I don't want to say that because you know we're gypsies. I don't want to say that but y'all know what.
Speaker 2:I mean though, and that is it. Thank you so much. I want what I mean, though, and that is it.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much. I'll introduce myself too. I'm Ilvamara Radjushevski. I go by Bimbo Yaga. I am also of mixed Romani heritage. My mother is Romani she's mixed Romani, sinti on her paternal side, and Romangro and Croatian Rom on her mother's side, and my father is a Polish and assimilated Ashkenazi Jew. We were raised very Orthodox Catholic, and so the context that I bring is somebody who grew up in two, three very distinct cultures of diaspora, within an American context, but also within a semi-closed, assimilated family system. So I feel like I sometimes ping around, I don't often know where I land, and so for me, in this conversation, I'm going to be asking questions of the three of you that I personally want you to answer. I love that, because nobody gave me any questions. So now Mama is off the leash, that's what we wanted.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 3:So I'm going to present a little context for each question and I'm going to ask the question. I want you to just answer them however you want. So are you okay? Yeah, question, and I'm going to ask the question. I want you to just answer them however you want. So, okay, oftentimes, as a cultural bearer, um, I, I think that there is a misunderstanding from non culture bearers that we learn these ancient secrets in these arcane systems and these arcane methods. And you know there's, there's a I. I often get asked the weirdest questions about the roots and source of my knowledge. However, in my experience, the most profound arcana that I ever learned is from observing the most mundane tasks of, often, my grandmother, my aunties and my mother. So my question for you all is what mundane tasks that you grew up with, observing people in your family or elders or mentors in your life, taught you the deepest secrets that you carry with you? Does that make sense?
Speaker 3:so another way I would say this is um in the, in looking at the foundation of your personal practice, um can you share a little bit about and if that's true for you you know, if it's true that you know the mundane really teaches the foundation um. Can you speak a little bit to the inspiration from the mundane and how you transmuted that into your personal practice of cultural stewardship? Does that make sense? Mm-hmm, okay, whoever would like to start? I'll start.
Speaker 1:I like to go first. Sometimes you can start, jess, I love to talk. Thank you for letting me talk here today. Um, yeah, so I the first things that come to mind. Um, I got to spend a lot of time with my grandma.
Speaker 1:I slept over her trailer all the time when I was a kid and it was really special and I'm happy my mom, had that child care and um so the biggest thing that we would do is talk about our dreams every morning, which is so interesting because I oh hello, welcome in. Thank you so much for being here. We're so happy to have you we just asked the first question yeah, you're just in time, will you will?
Speaker 3:you reiterate my question. In the way that you do so eloquently, make more sense than I did, baby girl no, you're perfect.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so Ilva just asked us in what ways did our experiences of the mundane in our household, the kind of daily things that we do in and out, teach us profound spiritual lessons or parallels that are spiritual teachings as well? And I was saying that I got to spend a lot of time with my grandma and one of the things that she would do is she would always ask me what I dreamt about. I didn't know that this wasn't necessarily a typical American experience. When I was older, I found out that it was considered a little rude to talk about your dreams because everyone thought that was boring. But in my family and probably like lots of others, it's not just a Roma thing, but it was really normal to talk about our dreams, talk about what our sleep was like and what did the dreams mean, and we would parse them apart in the morning and it was so interesting.
Speaker 1:All of her dreams were horrifying, absolutely horrifying, and she shared them with me and I was four or five and I was five and we would analyze each other's dreams and, um, so that was a really big one and that that's really, I felt, like the cornerstone.
Speaker 1:You know, paulina, and I write about this like dream interpretation.
Speaker 1:It's a cornerstone of a lot of romanian intuition practices and exercises and we we talk about our dreams now to make decisions together, and so that was really special and magical and I didn't realize I was learning anything special at all at the time and the other things that I thought I feel like are mundane within Romani households. And then when I got older, I was like, oh, I guess that is something special is that we would often go outside and forage together and I thought this was like a totally normal experience and we would even forage in places because at the time we were living in Salem, new Hampshire. I wasn't living there, she was living there and, just to clarify, but there was this place that I always I was like, oh, grandma, can we go to the meadow? And she's like, absolutely, let's bring blankets and not touch anything. And I was like, okay, great. And then I went back as an adult and there are hypodermic needles, needles everywhere in our meadow, which was like a scrap of land behind the post office.
Speaker 1:It was horrible there but, there were really beautiful wildflowers that grew there and even dandelions and other things, and so she didn't let us eat the things that grew there, because we shouldn't. But she did let us work with them energetically. And she would have us pick the dandelions and she would ask me to kind of sit with them and let me know, like what does a dandelion suggest for us today? Like what's the medicine? And then we would pick better dandelions later at a different place.
Speaker 1:We would use them as, like you know, the greens and everything else, and so foraging, I think, was something that felt really normal to me and even also was passed down through my other side of the family, the Italian side of the family, and so, um, and lastly, there was one other one, with tea preparation stood out to me and, um, my grandmother was really into, I mean, she loved tea leaf reading it. It might've been her favorite, I'm not sure, but um, the tea preparation was always something she did with a lot of sacredness. The idea is that scalding the pot with the hot water was a blessing, that putting the tea leaves in was a moment to connect with the plant and let them know, like, what we needed from them. Pouring the tea was a time to breathe and sit with our meditation and reflection as it was steeping, and pouring it and talking was an opportunity, like through conversation, to share the kind of energy that we wanted to bring into the reading.
Speaker 1:And it really was just making tea, but then when I started teaching these things I was like, oh, that was ritual and so that was a really. And there's so many things like cleaning our houses and all of these things, but those were the top three where I immediately go Beautiful.
Speaker 3:Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 7:Thank you so much, paulina. Yes, so I feel like when you said cleaning our houses, like I was definitely thinking about that Cleaning was so important energetically to us. So if you had like dirty clothes, like it was always like oh my gosh, like wash them like asap, or whenever we were feeling a certain way like we had to wash our porches with salt and soap, um, that was one thing that I really do feel like I can sleep better, better and breathe better when, like, the house is clean and it really does help kind of, I think, cleanse the energy out, especially if, like, something happened in the house, like I quickly clean something and then it feels a little bit better.
Speaker 7:Um, using food for medicine was also something that was really um, I had thought that everybody kind of did that. What we were eating every day, our very traditional food, is just pork and lard and rice and tomato sauce and some vegetables.
Speaker 7:But when we were feeling down, it was pretty normal for us to use food and herbs as medicine, just like some teas. Sometimes there would be a lot of soups, just a lot of random things, or putting whiskey in the baby's mouth or teething and stuff like that. There were some things were healthy, some things were not, but the healthy things were are definitely something that I still try to implement now and then also one thing that I thought was kind of weird but really I think prepares me a lot, was working at a young age and I also thought that I was working like other kids at school. When I did go to school, um, when I was present, kids would say like, oh, you know, I went with my dad to work today and I was like oh yeah, like I work with my parents every day like we're on the streets every day Like.
Speaker 7:I thought that was normal. And in a weird way, my work is such a big part of my spiritual practice too, and when I'm not working I feel like I should be, like I should be doing something either like healing, talking to someone you know, working, writing, like there's just a little bit of that like hustle culture that I think um is a part of my spiritual practice in a weird way.
Speaker 3:So when you say working and then you list those things, like it makes me think of um, I have some, there's so many parallels, as also a gypsy woman, uh, but also it makes me think of this um thing my, my Nana, used to say of, like, moving with purpose, like everything you do, you have to move with purpose, move with purpose, and that that is what she called working in the world.
Speaker 7:Yes, you know, like everyone was working together. We all had our own like little jobs and it was fun, like when you're working with your family and your cousins and like, um, it was a, it was an interesting thing, and I kind of feel like I'm still doing that now, like we are totally family and we're probably related somehow.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much, and Lily.
Speaker 4:Oh, I feel like both of you said such amazing things. Thank you. A lot of it really did resonate with me, and it was things that I didn't think again were magical, or things that I didn't think other people did or didn't realize that they were doing. A lot of it was centered around the kitchen, a big kitchen, which, if it goes down to that, you know, I remember being two years old and climbing up to the counter and helping them and you know, if you stirred it the wrong way then you'd get yelled at you know okay, this is going to be the healing soup.
Speaker 4:Don't put that in there. Why not? You know?
Speaker 4:so things that you might think were practical were really magical, and I didn't realize that until I was much older, so that was really special. The thing about the babies my favorite story was when I was I got into the divine feminine with my ancestors, but when I was four years old they put me in the nativity play and I was supposed to be the Virgin Mary Of course right, so I'm sitting up there four years old. They gave me a real baby. Gave me a real baby.
Speaker 4:I was up there for two and a half hours with a real baby and I'm into it. I'm like, oh yeah, it didn't cry. It was great. Everybody was happy. I know the gang. That was fun.
Speaker 4:But there were so many things I learned about you know. Oh okay, this is what this noise from the baby makes. This is what you do and, yes, a lot of it's practical. Maybe they're gassy, but maybe there's spiritual reasons that they might be crying, or anybody who's been around young children knows that they see things that we don't see sometimes and you have to take care of that, you know. So I feel like I was trained at a very early age on what to do and what not to do, and it was really funny to me. One day, my auntie came over and I didn't grow up with her, but I was cooking one of my feasts for my ancestors and I made all these dishes and she was like your great-grandmother made this exactly the same way and I almost was like crying because I never met this woman.
Speaker 4:My own grandmother died when I was like one year old, so I didn't get that in a practical way, but somehow I knew this is how it's supposed to go together to heal my family, to heal my spiritual family, to take care of me, and it's something that I'm really proud of. My daughter now works for all these, like Danielle Ballou and David Chang and all these famous Michelin chefs and whatnot, so now it's like I've passed it on to her and she always sneaks a little magic into the menus and stuff like that.
Speaker 4:It's beautiful, but it's just so important, right, we have to clean our houses, we have to take care of our children, we have to make the food, and that's not female work or debased work, that's what it's really all about, because if we don't have those things, we're not going to survive and thrive. So for me, that was always more important, and I didn't care what outside people were saying about like oh, you're not, you know, doing the big important work. I am doing the big important work, you know. There was also a lot of practical, like hex breaking things that they gave me. You know what I?
Speaker 4:mean Like don't touch somebody with your broom. I remember being in the fourth grade I had this game called sweep up, where I just hit the nasty bullies in the class with the broom and then they were out and I was like this is the witchiest game I could have come up with in the fourth grade, but it was great here we go, yeah, you're dirty. You got the broom on, yeah but yeah it was. You know you got to get rid of your enemies.
Speaker 3:I was trying to say you from an early age.
Speaker 3:Yes, thank you so much what I love about these, these answers, and in this question too, is that it is an invitation for, I think, all of us even in this room, to think about what were those moments of our own upbringing, whether we are connected to our culture, our culture of origin, our families or, or you know, whatever. However, we were stewarded as children looking at the ways ritual played into your daily life and maybe invited you or influenced you to, um, yeah, just to kind of experience your world, um, with a bit more purpose and a bit more whimsy, or a bit more magic and meaning. And so, whether or not you are connected to root culture, your own root culture, I think it could be a really beautiful thing for us to think about the ways that maybe daily rituals still inspire us. Or what about those little mundane moments of learning do we carry with us and still make sacred from? Does that make sense? Does that make sense? And I think what I was also hearing in your responses is that in these moments of mundane chores or tasks or things that have to happen, there is opportunity for telling stories and for sharing wisdom and information and learning songs.
Speaker 3:Oftentimes, when we think about tending tradition, there are usually family stories that go along with certain recipes. Um, or at least in my family there were, you know, like with your great-grandmother. There's certain stories that go along with certain recipes. Or there's certain songs that go with certain actions, whether it's your mother listening to Seven Wonders while washing dishes and smoking a joint, or singing a traditional polyphonic Slovakian Romani song, it's all that kind of magic, right? And that is, I think, part of what the beauty of traditional practices are is that it is making sacred the most mundane things, which are essential for not only survival, particularly as diasporic people, but as culture bearers. So next question tradition for tradition's sake sometimes requires us to hold certain historic perspectives, and my question for you is particularly myself, as a transsexual Romani woman who is disowned from my cultural system because of my identities and other things. There are aspects of our cultural traditions that would be considered tradition but maybe don't need to be anymore. Mm-hmm.
Speaker 3:Right, you see what I'm saying. Need to be anymore, right, you see what I'm saying? So, as cultural stewards, how do you navigate, holding historic context of tradition while also nurturing the spirit of cultural tradition into a more elevated expression of itself? How do you put to rest the active enactment of certain cultural traditions so they can rest, so we can move on? And how then? What comes next after that? Like, does that make sense? What takes its place? Because I think that everything has a place in its purpose, and when the place and purpose for one thing, um resolves, it leaves a space for something else that must naturally be tended to. So how do you tend the garden of tradition and pull the plants that are sick and dying, or cut the plants that no longer actually are beneficial for the garden? And then what do you do? How do you then tend to the space that it creates, whether you fill it or whether you let it go fallow. Does that?
Speaker 3:make sense that question Lilith?
Speaker 4:would you like to start? Sure, I think this is definitely an interesting question when we look at the African traditional religions, because there's so much that is anti-LGBTQ, there's so much that that is just something they don't speak about and at its roots, it's really and I'm going to be real with you because that's where we're at today there's so much less about who you sleep with, but you're not supposed to be a bottom, so that, to me, is about this like internalized misogyny right like oh, as long as you're not that one, you're okay.
Speaker 4:You know, and I think that that's not the world we're living in. You know, if you go back a hundred years, a lot of times this was brought in when we look at the more you know latinx based societies years. A lot of times this was brought in when we look at, the more you know Latinx-based societies that have a lot of that machismo, culture and stuff that is very misogynistic and can be very misogynistic. But if you open it up and you know the history, there was always a space for people that were different and it didn't necessarily have to other them. So I think once we look back at the history, then it's easier for people to accept that. So if you point that out, maybe people don't want to be trying to hear that, as we say here in this town, but it's the truth and a lot of my God.
Speaker 4:Kids who study with me they've been with me for 10, 12 years now. It's funny because I've seen them be like 16, 17 years old, graduating from high school, and now they're like adults with their own place and their own lives. So it's beautiful to see them grow up like that. But most of my students are LGBTQ and together we have a family that does welcome us. So I think that creating the different spaces and trying to educate people allows a little bit more space and a little bit more space and a little bit more space.
Speaker 4:And you know, we'll kick the door down when we have to and we'll argue with people when we have to, and I think that there's so much and we'll get into this later, I'm sure but there's so much fake and lies because it is a closed tradition or an initiatory practice. It is something that we stayed quiet because we had to stay quiet, right, like there's a Babalago. He started the Yoruba theological ceremony it's seminary, not ceremony and he used to say that, you know, the religions were in the basement because it was safe in the basement, and he was on a panel talking about oh, we can come out of the basement. Now it's great. He's like are you so sure it's safe? You know, and we look at the world today and I'm not so sure it's safe, but we're more out of the basement than we were before. So we'll just have to deal with it.
Speaker 4:But I've never been one to sort of be quiet or shut up or get in the background.
Speaker 3:So I think that, by you know, being in people's faces and explaining this is who we are and you have to accept us this way. So that's how I handle it. Ask a follow-up question. You said a couple of things I thought were really interesting. Like, when you look at the actual history, you see that there was a a long I would I would add a long time, a long history, a deep precedent of spiritual queerness, yeah, and spiritual transness and spiritual other and um, and there was a time where that long history had to go into the basement, as your mother always said. And I think that in the preservation of these histories there perhaps is an assimilation into over cultures dominate, dominating perspective of other, yeah, and how do you? How this is a bigger question, sure, but how would you suggest we I want to say like wrestle or tend to that this that the spirit of that dominating over culture when tending that garden, when liberating those histories from the basement, does that make sense?
Speaker 4:Yeah, and I think a lot of it was just sort of a don't ask, don't tell kind of thing. You know which again we're moving away from? But if you look at, like you said, a long history most often when people talk about these issues they talk about the Orisha Shango, who is all over the place. If you look at the Caribbean and there's a goes back to the 4th century BCE. So we're talking about 2,500 years almost of history, of the first evidence of Shango. And one of the favorite Shango stories was Shango ends up having to sort of evade people who are chasing him and ends up cross-dressing and going out like that. And his wife also cross-dresses and pretends to be him and sticks a beard on her face and stabs everybody. So they've got this nightly relationship so, and they even say that you know, oh yeah, it takes a beard because of war.
Speaker 4:So there's this way in which a different understanding of gender and gender roles is already present there. So if you look at that, going back 2,500 years, how can people argue with that? This is a story that everybody knows. Everybody's taught this story from, you know early times and and, like I said, it does go back as far as you can. So when you look at that, I don't think people can deny it, really, you know.
Speaker 4:And then, if you look at it practically, there are leaders who have just been sort of suppressing that and I think, now that we make it easier and easier for them to be who they are and how they feel, that it's more and more accepted. And part of the thing that happened to especially again if we're looking at Lukumi is that the role of women got suppressed again a hundred years ago and this sort of people be we're talking about Babalawas before we were talking about this sort of high priest would come in and that was the thing and you all had to go to the high priest. But that's changed as well yeah you know.
Speaker 4:I mean we're doing an event next weekend where the head babalaw of benin is coming and actually one of the priestesses call and she's like I have more initiations than he does.
Speaker 2:I'm doing the ceremony with him so they're both going to do it together next weekend, all right it's beautiful, but I think again, that's what we have to do.
Speaker 4:We have to sort of step up and speak for ourselves and take our power back when necessary, and that's just a fact thank you two things I want to say out loud, just to bookmark them.
Speaker 3:Uh, three things. First is the spirits know themselves. Sure, the spirits know themselves, and so we get to. Maybe what I hear you say is we need to let them reveal themselves the way they know themselves to be, yes, and then I also hear you saying that we need to also support the spiritual leaders in these traditions to let them know it's okay to disarm and to reveal themselves the way they know themselves to be as representatives of these spirits, would you say that's fair to say.
Speaker 4:Yeah, definitely, and I don't want to monopolize the conversation but, I, have to talk about my girl mom Bobani Devlin. My girl mom Bobani Devlin. She put herself through Harvard Divinity doing a dom act out in Provincetown in New.
Speaker 4:England and she would dress up like the gay day in purple leather and whips, and that's how she paid for her thing. So you know, but it was about her. Yes, she was initiated and I think she was allowed to do more things because she was also a drummer, so people needed her, and she was also highly educated Harvard divinity, right, like so she made inroads where other people were not able to, so I'm really so pleased that I could know her, and you know she's no longer with us, but I miss her every day, thank you yeah, and thank you yeah um, the third thing I wanted to bookmark is uh, let's circle back around.
Speaker 3:Uh, remind me at the end to ask you all the question of how can people find you what events are coming up, so we do a little promo. You remember that thing? All right, same question was kind of it on the line, just me now um, I just mentioned how progressive my grandma was, which was really lovely.
Speaker 1:Weirdly, my mom did not take the same direction. She was she loved drag queens. She was friends with a lot of gay men but I think it was really, really important to her the idea of me getting married, having babies, kind of fulfilling like what she felt like was a like the role. I don't know if she was necessarily raised with that. I oddly never thought to ask either of them, and now they're both dead so I can ask them through tarot.
Speaker 3:We'll we're doing an ancestor workshop tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Let us know you can join us but um, so, but I kind of that doesn't even really feel that important to me. But I noticed that she really did have these pretty heavy um expectations and it was a really big deal that I was queer and I did marry a man when I was 21 but I was infertile and that was a huge problem actually and that wasn't my fault, um, but also I didn't want to have kids, so it worked out great for me but, I, just um.
Speaker 1:So the expectation of being like wife and mother, I think is really heavy, because it's just not everyone's path, or like parent and spouse, or whatever that is for you also. I mean, um, the idea of gender, I can be really heavily oppressive, and if we're looking at ancient India to Lilla's point, that wasn't gender, was not solid. There were really revered and respected third genders and more. And so it's just. This is really the effects of colonization, and why would we be led by colonization? And.
Speaker 1:Pauline that's going to talk about this later, I'm sure, because I know her. You know also things that we customs, we created out as a response to slavery, and those things are not relevant to us anymore mm-hmm the other thing that I think I like to push back again.
Speaker 1:So, like I like to push back against gender roles and the expectations of what relationships should look like, I also think it's important to push back against secrecy with however you feel comfortable doing that, and so it was a really, really big deal for me to talk about my Romani heritage, why I was doing fortune telling. I was sort of expected to operate doing fortune telling work without telling anyone why or who I was, and if anyone asked me, you know, because New Hampshire is white as hell y'all people were really curious about where I came from and I could only really say that I was Italian and I would get in really a lot of big trouble if I shared anything else. So naturally I shared that we were Roma right away and it went really terribly and even um.
Speaker 1:But my family has always been angry at me for for doing this podcast, for publishing this book. A lot of my family passed away around the same time when I started doing this work. But I told my grandmother maybe a few weeks before she died. You know, grandma, I'm actually writing a book with you, with one of my besties, and it's about you and everything you taught me. And she looked me dead in the eye and said no, and at no point has my family felt comfortable with me openly sharing this lineage that I'm really proud of.
Speaker 1:And I do it because we're going to be othered anyway. Like they know, we kind of exist anyway. I just feel like how are we ever going to get anything done if people don't actually know who we are and why we're doing it? And I understand why the secrecy existed. My grandma was literally hiding from Nazis. I and she would. She would not have been surprised for the turn of events that our politics have taken now. That would not have surprised her at all. I'm not saying that we shouldn't sometimes be quiet. I'm not saying that we shouldn't sometimes be careful, but I do think it's worth pushing back against certain things that you know we think of as our protection and you know, getting married young is also for our protection, but they don't work for everybody and yeah, and if it feels like it's getting in the way of you being who you are and living through your values, I think it's smart to challenge tradition.
Speaker 7:Hell yeah.
Speaker 3:Paulina.
Speaker 7:Yes, so I was also excommunicated from my community on purpose. Okay, I wanted to do that. I was blackballed it's the English translation actually For so many different reasons. For one, after my arranged marriage, I also had that pressure that Jess was saying was like you know, you have to get married. Um, I didn't technically pick the person that I was getting married to, but it was like you have to have kids, blah blah. So I did have kids super early. I had a couple of daughters and I just felt like, um, it was really weird, like they shouldn't have to do this, you know. So I was excommunicated for one, going to like outside court systems when I left, because I wanted to have custody of my daughters, which I'm actually still going through, like almost seven years later, which is super crazy. But, um, that was really bad.
Speaker 7:We have our own court system. Romani people have their own laws and their own court system and their own head of the court people that make it, which is just only men as well. Women are not allowed in the closed conservative community that I come from. Not all roma experience this and not all communities are like this. I just happen to come from one of the most conservative communities and so that was one tradition.
Speaker 7:I was like this is crazy, like I need to step outside of that. So that was my first like, oh, like you're out, and then dating outside my community, you know, was like so wrong and like still today I get messages and I get, you know, a lot of persecution publicly. We have things that are written about us like just crazy, crazy things because I'm not, you know, not dating in my community and or I don't have a, you know, partner from my community. Like it's just all those things. As well, as you know, I do understand why the communities had to do this. I understand that these arranged marriages, young child marriages, happened because they were trying to protect their young girls from being sold into slavery. So they would, you know, sell them.
Speaker 1:Can I just clarify that a little bit yeah?
Speaker 7:I don't really know all this part, so they were already enslaved, so they were already, you know, sell them.
Speaker 1:Can I just clarify that a little bit? Yeah, I don't really know all this part. So they were already enslaved, so they were already sold to slavery. But what they were trying to prevent was sexual abuse from the people who had, you know, enslaved them. And so the idea was that, the hope, if they married their girls really, really young, maybe that would prevent further sexual abuse.
Speaker 7:Yes that, but obviously I feel like they're just traditions that we don't have to practice in a way that I like to like, teach my daughters and also share with the world. Um, just coming out with this information like hey, like these are practices. We don't like these practices. But there's a lot of other beautiful parts to my community and my culture that I do talk about, like the music, the community itself, how everybody kind of works together, um, the closeness of of everybody.
Speaker 7:Um, sometimes it's a little too close, everybody's in each other's businesses, but maybe not that close and you know everything music, food, um all that stuff. I I feel like there's a way to incorporate all of the good things 100 and just leave out some of the bad practices, and that was when we created romanistan podcast. That was literally our whole point is that there's people from our community that are banned from being in the closed part of the community and we're like this is crazy, so outcasted people, romani people, gypsies we're already outcasted people from the outside world in general, and so we jokingly call ourselves at Romanistan the outcast of the outcast, and so, yeah, that's what our community is all about.
Speaker 1:Beautiful thank you, and I also wanted to add I'm divorced now.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's awesome.
Speaker 3:I want to ask one more question. Then we're going to take a break and I'm going to come back right. So at the second half of our conversations I want you to be thinking about any questions you might have and also you all, all. What questions might you want to answer? But this question I want to ask now is yeah, we're kind of well, we'll keep it relatively heavy, we're gonna peek on that heavy questioning and then we're gonna take a break, come back. We're talking about fun stuff. This question, this question I asked with all due respect to everyone in this room how do you, as cultural stewards, remain optimistic, inspired, encouraged to continue your work of sharing amidst all of the cultural theft associated with the cultures that you come from? Does that make sense? Do you even? Yeah, how do you? Another way I would say this is like how do you remain stalwart and inspired amidst the misinformation and misappropriation and cultural appropriation often associated with people taking from the cultures you steward?
Speaker 7:let's start with paulina, okay, yes, so this is a great question because not a lot of people even know about this. But Romani people have inspired so many different things Also, like bohemian fashion is one of them. But I do want to tell you guys. So back in the day, so back when I was in my clothes community, I had to wear a long head covering not always, it wasn't always a long head covering but you have to have your hair packed, you have to have a head covering, you have to wear long skirts.
Speaker 7:You know you dress conservatively but like a lot of colors, a lot of layers and like sometimes not sometimes, yes, but whatever it is when I was um fortune, telling it was, sometimes I would be spit on, like sometimes, you know, really, really horrible things would happen a lot at.
Speaker 7:You know, get things thrown at us, food thrown at us, because people would say, oh, like dirty gypsies, like choo-choo, like you know, throw things at you. And that's why we were not allowed to tell anybody, but we were gypsies, but we couldn't hide it. Like they're not going to take our head coverings off or change our clothes or whatever. I obviously don't wear that stuff anymore, but you know, but sometimes I do by choice and then, like we, you know, turn around and we see different people sometimes. You know other cultures that will really like kind of like whitewash, our traditional practice that we've used for. You know other cultures that will really like kind of like whitewash, our, our traditional practice that we've used for, you know, survival for I don't know a thousand years or so or however long it was, were they right on that you were so, um, doing that, and then they wouldn't get persecuted for it yeah, you know what I mean.
Speaker 7:Like they weren't getting persecuted for stuff like that, especially wearing long skirts or head coverings, and like they could kind of make it look a little better, like a little this or a little that, or kind of conform it like with society and um, what's make it fashion?
Speaker 7:yeah, like make it fashion basically and so then it was like going to these places and they're profiting off of our culture um 100, using the word gypsy for one, which is our term, um, that was also created through persecution then making money off of it, and ultimately I feel like, um, there's a way to do fortune telling, which we talk about in this book. Anybody can do fortune telling. You can practice Romani fortune telling specifically. You can practice Romani, everything without appropriating the culture, not calling yourself a gypsy, not dressing like a gypsy, and if you want to dress like a gypsy, buy from a Romani person's fashion and just kind of spread the word about it or whatever. But that's kind of how I feel about it. I guess that's how I feel about it, because that's what it is beautiful thank you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, beautiful answer, thank you, and maybe we'll jump to Lilith and then we'll end on Jasmina all right um, for the commodification is the thing I mean, especially with this book, since it's a bestseller.
Speaker 4:I have a lot of people, Did you hear that?
Speaker 2:Hold that bestseller up. Hold that bestseller up, Hold it up.
Speaker 3:Congratulations, that's wonderful.
Speaker 4:No, but I mean, it makes me feel good yes, of course it should I'm not teasing you. I mean, I am, but I'm proud of you.
Speaker 3:No, we're teasing with love.
Speaker 4:Fuck yeah, come on bestseller but I mean people will send me messages. Oh well, I'm a white person, so I can't read your book. And I'm like, huh, you know, so many of us grew up hearing traditional myths from you know, greece or Rome or things like that that were completely culturally irrelevant, right? So we had to learn that. We had to learn all this. You know colonizer history and so many people don't understand this. So for me, I I think everybody should be educated, you know, and unfortunately we don't get it in the schools, so we need to take that time and effort to educate ourselves in a different way about things where there might be holes in our knowledge or what's lacking. But for me, the thing is the money. I don't care if somebody's practicing or whatnot. What I care is if they're setting themselves up as an authority and they are taking money, jobs, you know, business away from actual practitioners that are doing it.
Speaker 4:I remember it was maybe we're here in New Orleans, right. So five or six years ago I had a reporter from Al Jazeera contact me and they wanted to write about Marie Laveau. So I'm having this. I'm like, okay, fine, this is a big news outlet, I'll answer this guy. So we're having like these hour-long conversations about Marie Laveau and New Orleans voodoo and everything like that. And then, when the article came out, the guy calls me up and he says you've been whitewashed. They have removed you from the article. They've replaced you with two white priestesses here in the city that they thought would make a better story or a better picture. He's like I can't believe they did this. It's my editor. I have nothing to do with it. I'm sorry so, but so many times I see things like that happening and I see people not taking the time and effort, like you said, to support businesses from people that are actually from that culture.
Speaker 4:And if we look at some of these people that have sort of capitalized on it, a lot of them aren't initiated, a lot of them are full of fake information, and I think that that's what really gets me. It gets me that they're taking the money because a lot of us don't have a lot of money, so that's upsetting to me. And then it really gets me. It gets me that they're taking the money because, you know, a lot of us don't have a lot of money, so that's upsetting to me. And then it also gets me that they automatically set themselves sort of oh, okay, I'm going to declare myself an expert. I'm an Oshun. I had it, you know unverified personal gnosis.
Speaker 4:And this is what I was talking about at the American Academy of Religion last year. And here we are. You know, we thought the internet was going to open up knowledge and we'll all learn, you know. But now there's all these people that like, oh, in a dream the Orisha came to me, so now I'm a priestess and it's like that's not how this fucking works, that's not how any of this works. You know, you could feel like you have a personal connection, but there is initiation, there's tradition, there's learning, there's studying, the. The reason we have our systems that way is because it's a set of checks and balances. You know, I mentioned my godparents. You know, if your godparent dies, you get another godparent because there's and they have a god parent. So it's always this system of checks and balances. So if I step out a line, I know somebody's going to call me out on it, and that's why the tradition has survived so long, I think. You know, and it's not just one size fits all, it's not just oh, this happened to me in a dream, so now I can go teach it to everybody.
Speaker 4:It makes me really sad that there are some other authors that I know will tell me oh well, I gotta write a hundred spells for my book and I'm like, what? Like anything that's in my book has been tested under so many different conditions for, you know, 20 years at least. Is it going to work on a child? Is it going to work on somebody below the equator? Is it going to work on somebody of a different gender? I need to know that I can't't just say, oh, go ahead have this. Because, the same way that if you're allergic to peanuts, I can't say, go ahead and eat this peanut butter sandwich. It could be dangerous. So that's why we have divination, that's why we have individualized teachers what might be okay for one person might be deadly for another person, and it's not something you can just pick up because you had a damn dream. It's ridiculous.
Speaker 4:So that's my point about that. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:I just want to like fully agree with everything you both said. So, yes, so I think the thing that gives me like I don't feel like I have anything else to add to that, because it's like, yes, absolutely all of that. There's all of that, um, the thing that gives me hope, um, is that I really enjoy hearing from people who have felt like they really learned how to responsibly engage with a cultural practice that is not theirs but they admire or connect with for whatever reason, and I feel like they actually really heard it and they also take the extra step of being like I'm going to share this with other people, I'm going to educate other people, I'm going to invite you onto our podcast, I'm going to carry you in our bookstore, I'm going to host you for a whole ass event. It's like all of all of these real, true gestures of meaningful allyship Cause we have a lot of those kind of empty ally gestures too, and, um, whenever someone advocates for you, you know, shares with you, uplifts you, spotlights you, or or other people who you're like, yeah, they deserve that spotlight and they're of community with me or or another marginalized community, or you know, that is super meaningful to me, and I heard a really um cute story recently from I wish I could remember who, but it's a Romani person I'm tangentially connected to and they had shared with me how cute it was.
Speaker 1:They were talking to someone and they were like oh yeah, well, I mean, I'm such a gypsy about whatever, whatever and a person kind of overheard them and were like I just want to let you know that that word is actually a racial slur and it's only okay for Roma people to use it and she's like, oh, baby girl thank you so much.
Speaker 1:I am Roma, but like I love that you're out here doing that work and so I think that that's the stuff that it's like okay, this is hitting, this is someone cares about this and a lot of people do not. And I'm not trying to change the world, even though I did kind of hope that, writing this book together, we would end anti-gypsyism forever and I think I have to let that go. But yeah, that definitely gives me hope.
Speaker 3:Beautiful. Thank you, anything that any of you would like to add so far to the conversation, before we take a break and we come back.
Speaker 7:I do also want to say we are extremely grateful to you both and also for you know, helping lift our voices by being such amazing and wonderful hosts. Yes, thank you. Honestly, honestly, voices, but being such amazing and wonderful hosts. So, yes, thank you, thank you honestly. We're about to cry back here we're grateful for you, very grateful, thank you all right.
Speaker 3:So I think we should take maybe like a 10 minute break, get a little stretch on, think about any questions you want to ask these beautiful stewards, um, and then we'll come back in about 10 minutes. All right, welcome back to the second half of Sewerding Traditions Doing it. Yep, we're going to mix things up, we're going to get a little sassy and the panelists are going to actually ask each other questions that they're curious about in regards to their cultures. So let's start with Lilith.
Speaker 4:Yes, and it's funny because we kind of had the same question that we were ready to ask each other, which I think is fantastic you were like, yeah, well, what I was thinking of, which is very similar to what you were thinking of, is that how is this expressed in different parts of the world?
Speaker 4:I have friends from Ireland that are travelers, which is very similar to a lot of the Romani culture that you're talking about, but it doesn't seem to have had the same kind of oppression that was faced by a lot of the stories that I hear. The concept of community was very different and much more open than what I've heard. I have good friends that you know. They had nine children and they traveled in the covered wagon and then they finally settled down and now all the kids live with them on about 10 acres and all their kids have kids and they still live in this communal space, you know, and all their kids have kids and they still live in this communal space, you know, and they seem to have navigated the world a hell of a lot better than what some of these stories that I hear. So that was really my question that if you had experienced similar things from other Romani people that live outside the US.
Speaker 3:What I want to also add to that is if either of you would be willing to speak to the overarching identity that is sometimes called grt the gypsy roma traveler community and the differences okay because travelers are not romanians. Yes, yeah, but we are nomadic and so there is a shared. There's a shared culture, particularly, particularly with the United Kingdom, so maybe we'll start with Jasmina.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love to nerd out about like. I was going to say arbitrary, but it's not arbitrary. I like to get into the nuance. Roma are a diasporic ethnic group originally from India. Gypsy is a word that not everyone feels comfortable with. Some people really claim it and were raised with it and feel really proud of it.
Speaker 1:Some people are like that is a racial slur and it continues to be a racial slur and I don't want to use it, and then people have experiences with the word. Like across that spectrum. The word gypsy has been applied to pretty much any nomadic group, including who Lilith mentioned Irish travelers who are indigenous to Ireland and the British Isles. And what's really interesting, too, is that the word gypsy has also been applied to people who are not from an ethnic group in which persecution or other circumstances have created nomadism, which is our situation, in which people are talk about sometimes with travelers to which I don't know a lot about that, but I think that there are a lot of really amazing resources about traveler history if you want to dig into that, and that can be. So.
Speaker 1:The word gypsy has also been applied to people who work in like circuses or who are showmen.
Speaker 1:That's more typical in the UK than here, although sometimes people use it very colloquially here and like self-identify in a way that has no connection to culture at all and it's more of an appropriate of misunderstanding of what the word means, and so we really like to make it super clear that, like culturally, we are really different from Irish travelers.
Speaker 1:However, we do share, like, the history of persecution and nomadism, and all nomadic groups tend to share a few things in common about um, especially like cleanliness and conduct on the road and things like that. But the acronym GRT is used a lot in the UK and Ireland because there are so many groups to which the word gypsy is applied to. So it's Gypsy, roma and Travelers, and the hope with using the acronym is to be inclusive, but the reality of it is kind of complicated because you have people that I mentioned like showmen, other groups who are maybe also there's a term called new age travelers, who people who have adopted, not out of persecution but out of choice, a nomadic lifestyle, sort of emulating either irish travelers, romani people or kind of melange of the two.
Speaker 3:it also exists in the states as well, it does, yeah absolutely van life, hashtag van life, and so this anarcho-punk.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, so identify as travelers, whether they're true travelers or not and so we've run into this really interesting thing where it's like, okay, so those experiences are wildly different and so that acronym starts to mean nothing and it also becomes very problematic because we've had an issue with people who are nomadic by choice, who are not ethnically persecuted, obtaining funding, funding meant for Roma and ethnic or heritage travelers.
Speaker 1:And that is a problem for, like, obvious reasons, because the heritage travelers you know, irish travelers and the Roma obviously face really specific ethnic persecution.
Speaker 1:That creates enormous obstacles. And, yeah, so now we're sort of reexamining the acronym GRT and we try to clarify too, because a lot of Roma who are like the Roma from, you know, originally India, sometimes also call themselves travelers for, you know, lots of reasons and so the terminology gets super confusing. But I think the takeaway could be like, you'll see, the acronym grt and a lot of roma are starting to feel less and less comfortable with it because it's been sort of misused and adopted in a way that the word gypsy has been misused and adopted and with some to similar ends. Thank you, yeah, beautiful, if you want to um talk or if you want to see someone's commentary on that john henry, who is on, and he is a Romani archaeologist. He writes a lot about it really in a really interesting perspective, and he's actually from the UK, and so where the acronym is used more and where the misuses of the acronym are more, that's a word impactful.
Speaker 3:Thank you, and also to Lilith's question for more research on the reality of Romani persecution outside of the United States, particularly within Europe, where we do have more systemic anti-Gypsy racism. We, our cousins, have more systemic anti-Gypsy racism. A systemic anti-gypsy racism. Uh, there's a great book that was written and it's probably very outdated, but I don't think things have changed. I'm curious what you think about this book. But it's, uh, the gypsy menace oh yeah and it's uh it, it goes.
Speaker 3:Gosh, I forget who wrote it in my brain, but you can look it up gypsy menace. It is essentially. It's a really interesting modern history of anti-Romani laws written throughout Central and Eastern Europe pertaining to Romani people and how those laws also inform. The foundation of anti-Romani laws in the United States formed the foundation of anti-Romani laws in the.
Speaker 3:United States and you can even see in the United States where that's relevant we still have anti-Gypsy task forces that are being funded by police all through this country Louisiana included, oklahoma, kansas, are primarily the places where a lot of anti-Gypsy laws still exist and task forces specifically targeting Romani people who look Roma, who, literally, are wearing what we need, you know, culturally wear. This book is written by Michael or edited by Michael Stewart, and I think it is a anthology In that case, yep, so just wanted to kind of put that out there too for just a little bit more research. Fascinating, yeah, it's really very interesting. Um, I want to add to that too and say you know, something that jasmine and I have spoken about privately off and on for years is is the American Romani experience is one often of surviving assimilation and navigating what that looks like to reconnect within closed, assimilated culture Like my family was assimilated and closed at the same time, you know and so that that, I think, creates a very interesting barrier even to having conversation with other romanian communities, even in the states, let alone in europe, and a lot of us here don't have connection to european roots or or even balkan roots or, um, you know, east asian roots because of the need to both assimilate and escape, and some of our ancestors didn't survive.
Speaker 3:You know that we do come. One of the reasons I have three different romani lineages is because those lineages intermarried you, you know, as a way of surviving. Yeah, did you have anything you wanted to add to that question? Or did you want to ask Lilith your question?
Speaker 3:Or did you have anything that you wanted to follow up.
Speaker 1:I meant to say too, like persecution in Europe is so exaggerated and so much more for Romani people In America, we can pass a little easier, but it's still very real and it's shaped both of our lives a lot. But I always kind of want to be like take a look at what's happening in Europe though.
Speaker 3:Oh for sure, Absolutely. I mean in Europe, in Italy, france and Spain, the governments still have very open government agencies and policies to sell Romani people to other countries as workforce. That still exists now. It's modern-day slavery and they they do it as a work trade. Certain countries will get different. I don't know how it work, I don't know what's it they'll get. It's an economic boom. You know they'll get like a little favor from the selling country if you just take these gypsies off our hands, you know. So those things still very much exist yeah, do you?
Speaker 7:have anything to add? I feel like you answered it very perfectly. Do you think there are places?
Speaker 1:in the US where there's, like, more anti-Roma incidents.
Speaker 7:I actually was going to say. What's super weird is, I would say like 50 to 70% of the time, that there was times of strong Romani racism. Was people actually from Europe and the United Kingdom that were just visiting here? And that was a big majority of the time that had moved here and I was like whoa, so like even a lot of the persecution that I from my own experience I can't speak for everybody, but like they have actually just been people from europe primarily same same experience.
Speaker 3:Yes, you know what's interesting about that is when I went to poland in 2013, my father passed away and I I took his ashes back to where he wanted to be when he died, in Gdansk, in the Baltic Sea, when I was traveling, not in Kraków. In Kraków, everybody was like, hey, you're a Pole and started speaking to me in Polish. And when I was in Warsaw and when I was in Gdansk, everybody, not everybody. But when I was in Warszawa and when I was in Dęsk, everybody, not everybody. But more often than not, I was called gypsy and I was spat at or people would clutch their bag and I am very white, passing, you know, and so it's so interesting that it still reads like it's so ingrained in that in those cultural systems, you know, and my grandmother, being from Poland, was very anti-Gypsy to my mother that was, and my mother's mother like that side of the family.
Speaker 3:It was always very difficult, but that is very interesting that a lot of the American anti-Roman racism is from Europeans. I lived in that house. I lived in that house. Would you like to ask Lilith your question, then we'll open it up. That's a good question.
Speaker 7:So my question is slightly different but kind of similar. But how do you feel in different places of the world while practicing Almost like do? You feel like the different energy vibrations, like are they stronger, are they not? And have you seen the differences in how your culture, kind of, I guess, expands or how it's practiced?
Speaker 4:basically, yeah, I mean there's so many different variations that go into things, you know, I mean it's going to look, and I think that's because of the indigenous cultures in all the different places, like how we were talking earlier about Cuba, how it's practiced in Cuba, how it's practiced in Jamaica, how it's practiced in Cuba, how it's practiced in Jamaica, how it's practiced in, you know, trinidad. I think originally there were different enslaved people that were sent there. There were different indigenous people there. There was all these different blends of things that were happening. But what we were talking about quickly in the break was I had the opportunity to go to Benin last summer you know, birthplace of voodoo and everything like that, and it was much more balanced.
Speaker 4:In a way. It was obviously open and they tell you, you know, I went to the sacred python temple, which is great. Anybody who likes snakes you can't kill a snake in Benin. You have to pick up the python and bring it to this temple. The pythons can come and go as they please. It's just amazing and you can go in there with them and, you know, take a picture with them, put them around your neck, dance around, whatever. It was great. So. But what? Across the street from the sacred python temple that's been there for thousands of years is a Christian church, and they say we go to the Christian church in the morning and then we go pray in the Python temple in the afternoon. So everything was much more balanced.
Speaker 4:You know, we have a deity called mommy water, which is just the spirit of water everywhere. So every even this you know Lacroix is mommy water, because there's no difference for us. We have a concept called asha, which you hear people talk about, which is the sacred energy and the vibration of things. So we're not talking about oh, a goddess is up here and not down here in called ashe, which you hear people talk about, which is the sacred energy and the vibration of things. So we're not talking about oh, a goddess is up here and not down here in this water, a goddess is everywhere simultaneously, up there and also in that water.
Speaker 4:But the other thing that they do there is for mamiwata. Every time you have mamiwata, you also have papiwata. So there's always this sort of fluidity and balance between the male and the female and they don't necessarily have traditional gender roles. But they looked at me like I was crazy, because here in the US we have so many things that aren't balanced, that aren't androgynous, that don't appear, as you know, male in some cases and female in other cases, so they just thought they're like how do y'all walk around unbalanced all the? Time.
Speaker 4:That's nuts, so they just thought how do y'all walk around unbalanced all the time? That's nuts. So I was like, oh, very interesting. But I did say to you that one thing that really touched me was they said they felt like all of us were their stolen children coming back home, and it made me want to cry. Just this thought of we had these kids that were sold away to slavery and we haven't seen them for 200, 300, four hundred years. And now they're coming back to us and it's so beautiful to be able to see. You know how we've survived despite all these challenges and everything like that. So that was really beautiful to me to see that, and also surprising as well to just see the fluidity and the partnership between the traditions, which you know they still don't get along all the time, but they get along a lot better than we do over here here. It's all which wars and fighting and all of that like you think regular, which is fight, forget it the.
Speaker 4:ATR is fight like nobody's business.
Speaker 7:I actually have a follow-up question. I heard, I hear the term Ashe a lot. Can you describe that a little bit more?
Speaker 4:Yeah, sure, like I said, it's this. You know, I was at one point calling it the voodoo chi, but then that seems appropriative of, like you know, other cultures, so I stopped saying that, and ours is better.
Speaker 4:So there we go, but it's basically the sacred energy of things like it doesn't even really have a definition, it's just the sacred energy that permeates all things and everything when we talk about our deities. You know, if I stick with oshun, because I'm a child of oshun oshun is simultaneously the river water, she's honey, she's oranges, she's sacred dancing, she's, you know, fertility and childbearing, she's all of those things at the same time. And then anyone who's initiated to her is also a physical representative of that ashe. So when you get somebody there and it's funny because you'll see people if I meet another Oshun, we always get along. If I get an Oya, who we traditionally doesn't get along in the stories, I immediately just don't like them and they don't like me either, and then I'll be like oh you know, you're a child of Oya.
Speaker 4:That's why I don't like you, you know.
Speaker 6:And then it just makes sense, and then we move forward from there.
Speaker 4:Okay, that's why I thought there was something shady about you. Okay, here we go, let's move forward. So yeah, so yeah, but it's an interesting way of thinking of things and it's very not a Western way of thinking of things. Right Like that oh, how could you be praying to the river, or how could you be praying to an orange? But that's a sacred thing and we treat it as a sacred thing and we have to give it that respect and it'll give us respect back.
Speaker 1:I love hearing that so much because so much of Romani spirituality, kind of outside any religion that Roma might have adopted to try to assimilate or hide better. It's also an animistic tradition and we talk to our bread. Oh nice.
Speaker 1:I like that. That's where blessings apologize to it If we drop it, and everything has a spirit. I like that. It's a really interesting experience growing up, I think, in America with a kind of syncretic belief system. No matter what your syncretic belief system is but yeah, they're not contradictory to us. You can go to church and also pray to your woman.
Speaker 3:No, problem, if I may contribute a response to as like a follow-up or like building on that. Um, when I grew up uh, growing up my grandmother would call well, there's two things. One it makes me think of this the idea of like the animistic, animistic world, or the gods of all things in all things simultaneously. My grandmother would call them angels, and she also would call the energy. She taught me hands-on healing and prayer, and so we would pray the liturgical hours. The liturgical hours. I was raised Eastern Orthodox Catholic. We prayed every hour for until I was 17 years old and I was like I can't do this anymore. I don't know why. I'm still doing this.
Speaker 3:Um, took a break, um, but we would pray the liturgical hours, uh, because it would connect us to the angels of the world and it would help us to gather what she would call God energy, so we could lay the hands. My other grandmother was Polish and she would call it the whispering the szewska, so she would pray to gather the God energy to lay hands or whisper gather the god energy to lay hands or whisper.
Speaker 3:And there's a man he's Ramana Shell, jasper Patrick Lee who wrote a book called we borrow the earth, and when I was reading that book he called what my grandmother called angels.
Speaker 3:He said we called deva like spirit right and devla being god but also the deva of the world, and then he called that god touch energy ka. So it's like in romani culture. There is a way that we call that vital force or the ashe, and like that ka, that god touch energy comes from your relationship with the deva, or the angels or the spirits of the world, and it's a way that we also find our place in it and there's affinities that we might have for certain devas or certain world angels that that speak to our god touch energy, or, you know, our ka and uh, it sounds similar, different with similar, and it's like a. There's a.
Speaker 1:And it's like Hinduism. Yes, exactly it goes back to Hinduism With the pujas and like the praying of the hours and, like you know, you gotta, you gotta yeah, it's very interesting. No, it's fascinating.
Speaker 1:My grandmother also used a similar kind of language where it's like she would say like, okay, so we're, we're talking to God, but I need you to understand that god is this, um, this earth, god is the water, god is all of our spirits guiding us, and it was just like so, god is all things and god is all elements, and that's what I mean. And, yeah, I think that's so. It's really beautiful too because it it also masks itself in an acceptable language when you've assimilated, where it's like we're just praying to god, don't look over here, look if you were in a bad way.
Speaker 3:If you were in a bad way, if you were in a bad mood, if you caught an ugly, my grandmother would take out her pocket rosary and she would start chanting and praying and she would lay her hand and she would be like oh, they're just having a fit, she would pray and pray and pray. And Lord Hail Mary full of grace. Lord, help me not beat this child.
Speaker 3:You know what I mean. She would be transmitting that God energy that got her her own cop, her own God touch. You know, this was really beautiful, I think. Shall we open it up to see if anybody has questions? Does anybody have quite?
Speaker 7:yes, you used. You used the term ATR. What is?
Speaker 4:what is that African traditional religion, thank you. So basically it encompasses any Afro diaspora in religion, but I think we sort of dropped the diaspora lately and just call it traditional religion. Oh, thank you. So basically it encompasses any afro-diasporan religion, but I think we've sort of dropped the diaspora lately and just call it traditional religion. But there's there's as many as there are people, that sort of diaspora it out you know like and some of them getting to what I was saying before.
Speaker 4:Some of them are stronger than others. You know, I have a god daughter that's jamaican, and she grew up going to ceremonies. But if you asked her grandmother, did you practice obeah?
Speaker 3:they would say absolutely not my grandmothers would be like. We are not witches.
Speaker 4:But they did the things to her. She knows yeah yeah, thank you.
Speaker 3:I got a question for you too. Do you have the mano de ruda or are you?
Speaker 4:Yes, I have my mano de ruda and I have my guerreros and I have my aliques, obviously, but I'm not crowned yet. You're not, so you're just a shun right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you too hey see, I like you yeah yeah, yeah, no my godmother passed, unfortunately, so I never, and I practice New Orleans voodoo most now, so I haven't gotten crowned yet.
Speaker 4:But it's still on the list you know, that's what they tell you, but it is very integrative. I mean, for those of you who don't know, you know, I know you know. But one of the things when you there's lots of divination, there's lots of teachings and things like that, and one of the things you get when you do get crowned, which is sort of they put the orisha onto your head. Some people call it lifted, some people call it seated, depending. It's the same thing, because we're not measuring up or down, we're measuring distance from the center.
Speaker 4:So I think that's also very interesting, not a western concept we're all about which way are we going? And this is like no, there's a right middle space for you to be in and a right path for you to walk, and then those other things are just deviation from that Center. But when you do get crowned and you get that initiation, you get a book, you get your ETA and that has the rest of your life in it and it tells you everything like when you're gonna die and all those kinds of things like what you should eat, what you shouldn't eat. I have a very good friend who's a Babalawa. When he got his Ita, he wasn't allowed to drink coffee anymore.
Speaker 4:So he was like a five-cup-a-day Starbucks person. But as always, he found out very quickly afterwards that he had health conditions, that if he kept drinking coffee he would have died.
Speaker 3:So it's always that kind of thing where you're just so annoyed that you don't want to have this thing and you're a etah and this taboo, but it always kind of makes sense afterwards.
Speaker 6:Thank you, any other questions? Yeah, yeah, uh. So I did not grow up with uh traditional culture, right, so very white, and then it's just not here and there, but I did. I've always been intuitive right. So I guess my question is because you grew up with traditions, you guys learned skills. Do you find, when you read and you you know work with other people do you find you rely more on intuition or more on skill that you learned?
Speaker 3:Such a good question.
Speaker 1:Can I answer that I love it, I think you should answer that one first.
Speaker 7:I feel like it literally depends on the hour.
Speaker 3:That is such a Romani way of answering questions.
Speaker 7:And I really feel like and I say that like, obviously I do this professionally and I say that not to discourage anybody, but it's like, if I'm really tired, like maybe I'll just be like, okay, I know exactly what this card means like blah, blah, blah. Like buy the book, like whatever. And then sometimes, like, it'll just come to me and it's in my brain and like it works. Or sometimes I'm really tired and I can't think about what the card says Like and like it works. Or sometimes I'm really tired and I can't think about what the card says like. It literally just depends on that moment, and sometimes it's a combination between both. Or sometimes my skill and my intuition completely contradict each other, where I'm like this looks kind of crazy, but whatever, they are both somehow simultaneously true at the same time, and so, yeah, it really depends on the the time yeah no, I agree with you, I think sometimes there's things that are really strange and I apologize, trigger warning here.
Speaker 4:I had somebody I was doing a reading for once and there was like a really dark, you know incestual situation that she had or he had with his wife and going over to the family and stuff and I was like, oh damn, I really don't want to say this you know, and that's when you have to open your mouth and say he was like holy crap, what, what card is that?
Speaker 4:and I'm like, no, there's not really a card, that's just. I know that there's some really messed up crap going on in your house and you have to deal with it.
Speaker 4:You know so. But yeah, I mean, it's everything really. You know, I see you've got the jungian tarot thing on the wall and stuff like that, and I just did a tarot book and for me there's everything in there. You know, like each of the cards is simultaneously a food and a musical note and uh, you know all of those things together and it's your intuition that's going to help you pick which one. But you need to have the knowledge of. These are the 50 things that this could mean when it presents itself this way.
Speaker 1:I love a surprise too. When a card, sometimes too, with like the sequences of cards, or when I, if I'm doing a, spread the relationships between them, it's like, oh, I haven't seen that before and that's exactly what that means and that could be like a little bit of the. I understand the relationships between these intellectually, but also there's like a strong feeling that comes with it and that happens too in palmistry too.
Speaker 1:I was reading someone's palm today and I saw something I'd never seen before and I was just like well, I know what that is immediately, and it was just so funny because it's not like a thing that you look for in palmistry. It was just like well interesting.
Speaker 3:Let's dive into that. I also have a response to that, if I may. I grew up with storytellers in my family, musicians and storytellers and hands-on healers on both sides the Romani and the Polish side and my, my Baba, my Romani grandmother would, and her primarily her sister, my aunt, my mom, kelly. She would say that every card has a story and every card has a story and a relationship with another card and its story, and sometimes, like with Oshun and Oya, they don't get along.
Speaker 3:But then you get a third card in and it's the mediator. So these three cards together tell a very different story. That might contradict what you think or have been told what these cards mean. So you have to. It's not about reading the cards necessarily. It's about understanding relationship.
Speaker 3:And when I teach I'm on sabbatical right now, but when I would teach witch school, I had a school of traditional magic. I would tell people you're never going to be as versed in your craft as a witch. As somebody who was raised to be versed in their craft, you're never going to have the opportunity. I've been an apprentice for my family since I was a child and with professional witches since I was 15 years old. I'm no longer 15, and I'm no longer a child. I'm decades on myself. No longer 15 and I'm no longer a child. I'm decades on myself. But what you all do have is a relationship with your own stories, don't you? What stories bring you hope? What stories make you fearful? What stories make you angry? What stories bring you love? That is the skill that you have that I will never have right. That your relationship with your own stories will never be. No one will have a stronger relationship with your history than you do. So it doesn't matter if you were raised up traditionally or not. You have successfully made it this far. What have you learned and are you doing something with that learning? What are you doing with that learning?
Speaker 3:And these are the things that I often will say to people who want to read or learn how to be psychic or be more honed in their skills. They just say lean into what you know is true, even if it's difficult, and the things that you are not certain about ask different questions of. Because, also with the trinkets that I'll read, every trinket has their own story, but then the placement of each trinket tells a different relationship to that story, and then what's following is a whole other thing. And, like Jasmina says, you look at a palm. You've seen 100 palms. All of a sudden, it's like these lines here are very. This is something else. So I think that's what I wanted to contribute to. That is like thinking about tradition from a personal and intimate perspective as well. Even if you did not grow up culturally connected to your own root cultures right or intimately connected to your root cultures, you have an intimate relationship with the stories that you carry.
Speaker 1:In a personal lexicon of symbols, you know like you associate different, different omens or animals or objects with different things, and that's, that's your lexicon.
Speaker 3:It's your personal tradition and that can't be undervalued. You know it can't necessarily be replicated or applied to other people. Maybe it can. It might not be something you can teach others, but it's a place you can help from Beautiful. I think that maybe wraps up. There was one more question. We can do a rapid fire. This is kind of a general Beautiful. I think that maybe wraps up. There's one more question.
Speaker 5:Okay, great we could do a rapid fire. Yeah, let's do it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, hop, hop, hop. Right. This is a general question, but when you have had people come to you for the meetings or the questions and they seem particularly vulnerable or ready to believe anything or judgment, how do you deal with that? How do you approach it? I love that question.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you approach I love that question. Yeah, will you. Will you recite that question back into the recording?
Speaker 1:yeah. So when you have a particularly vulnerable client who you feel like could maybe believe anything or be particularly impressionable, how do you deal with that? I immediately like to um, make the reading more uh, what's the word cooperative, and ask questions and really emphasize that the person. I like to validate their experiences because obviously they're going through something, and I also really like to use it as an opportunity to empower a sense of choice agency direction and remind the person that they are the ones who get to make their choices, because there are people who are unscrupulous, who will be like amazing goldmine, and so I really like to counteract that and remind them that these tools are meant to help us understand ourselves, not to tell you exactly how your life is going to be or what to do, and that things change and they get to be agents of change.
Speaker 3:I love that, I love that. I love that.
Speaker 7:I'll also riff on that a little bit. I tell people that, like I will tell people, like right now I just feel like you're taking all information and like you need to challenge your thoughts and feelings and other people's thoughts and feelings period I love that. That's it All right.
Speaker 4:My rapid fire about this is I will tell them that together we're going to make this reading a safe space, that they won't hear anything they can't deal with or they're not ready to handle. But there are actionable steps they can take to improve their situation and we're gonna find those together my rapid-fire response to this question.
Speaker 3:If I may, please do.
Speaker 3:I like to ask people to make a choice and I give people permission to choose no to something even if they feel like they should be saying yes to something I say you can say I'm aware I have some trauma that's being activated and I am choosing to say not right now. All right, I know I'm going through something difficult, but I'm choosing not to let that take, take over right now. So I often like I'm a virgo, so I like what can you do with what you have right now and what would help you find the most immediate next stable step, even if that's saying I, absolutely not today, you know. And so giving encouragement, essentially for people to reclaim agency in that moment just to get to the next step, and then do that until they can start thinking about a few steps out. A few steps out. Sometimes you need to slow down. You know, sometimes we all need to slow down and just think about the next step.
Speaker 3:You know some people are on step eight and they're actually they need to be back on step two.
Speaker 4:My godmother used to say next right action which one of my friends said, the new.
Speaker 3:NRA.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 3:The next right action? Yeah, exactly, and that's something I learned from my mom, mom Kelly. The next right action? Well, not that specific phrase but I love that, but it's that spirit for sure. What can you do right now?
Speaker 4:What's next? For sure, what can you do right now? What's next? Baby steps? Yeah, yeah, yeah, and I loved her for that because she had her PhD in psych. So it was like she was my spiritual leader, but also I knew she knew what nuts was she knew exactly yeah.
Speaker 1:Here we go. Okay, great, what a good question. Thank you Great.
Speaker 3:Great question All right? Is that all that's it? Yes, all right. So what if we do a little ceremony? Yeah, don't you think Sounds good to me. So I will talk a little bit about what the ceremony is. We're going to make a blessing bundle but in order to welcome in blessings we've got to clear out what can be cleared. We're not going deep, we're not purging grandma-grandma trauma, we're not talking about daddy issues, we're just saying like a little evil eye clearing.
Speaker 3:You know, like just a gentle, get it off so I can make the next right action. Right, that's what we're doing.
Speaker 3:So great question. There is a tray of herbs that we'll take out with us, um, and on the way out maybe people can take their chairs and we can go around the fire so you can have a place to sit. But there are little scraps of purple material that, um, that everybody will grab one of and then I'll have the uh strings and then we'll have this tray of herbs and we'll pass the herbs around and people can take pinches of it. But the herbal blend are heart-opening herbs. There are a lot of ancestral herbs that Romani we cook with, like allspice and cinnamon and anise and lemongrass. There's some patchouli herb, there's rose, there's a hibiscus wanted to come tonight, um and some holy basil also is in there, um rose rose and also some black pepper.
Speaker 3:I was like who, who?
Speaker 4:is that I brought rosemary I brought some rosemary.
Speaker 3:okay, great, yes, of course yes of course, add that to it, and then basically, what everybody will do is they'll take a pinch and they'll put it in, and then we'll teach you how to fold it up, but each of us will talk a bit about making bundles as we do that. Is that okay? Yes, all right. So shall we transition out and I won't record the ritual, so sorry.
Speaker 7:This. I won't record the ritual, so sorry, this is something that we don't do. Thank you for listening to Romanistan Podcast.
Speaker 1:You can find us on Instagram, tiktok and Facebook at Romanistan Podcast and on Twitter at Romanistan Pod, to support us. Join our Patreon for extra content or just donate to our Ko-Fi fundraiser, ko-ficom backslash Romanistan, and please rate, review and and subscribe. It helps people find our show.
Speaker 7:it helps us so much you can follow jez on instagram at jasmina dot vontila and paulina at romani holistic. You can get our book secrets of romani fortune telling online or wherever books are sold. Visit romanistanpodcastcom for events, educational resources and more. Email us at romanistanpodcast at gmailcom for inquiries.
Speaker 1:Romanistan is hosted by Jasmina Von Tila and Paulina Stevens, conceived of by Paulina Stevens, edited by Victor Pachas, with music by Victor Pachas and artwork by Elijah Barado.