Are they new to gypsie fortune tellers or pre-historic?
This site has them starting in the medival period
http://www.paranormal-nyc.com/cb.html
Btw, the term you’re looking for is spelled “Romany”, and scrying by means of crystal balls isn’t a Romany tradition. Any Roma who does it picked it up from the gadje.
You have to separate the use of crystals - crystal quartz, beryls, or rock crystals - which have been used by peoples all over the globe for millennia and the classic media image of a crystal ball, which probably only dates back to Victorian times.
Volume 18 of Man, Myth and Magic has a long article on scrying, which has been practiced with media from bowls of water, ink, or other liquids, to mirrors and lenses, as well as crystals.
To get more to the point:
By then, large balls of glass could be cheaply purchased, allowing the lower classes to get in on the game. Glass balls rather than true crystals are what the media shows its gypsies reading, and those are a relatively modern invention.
I think what Captain Amazing is saying, for those not in the know, is that the term “gypsy” is often considered a racial slur. The polite term for said Eastern European nomadic peoples is “Roma” or “Romany”.
Eastern European ?
My understanding is that Gypsy comes from Egyptian, and that they originally really came from India.
Quite a lot there, but the consensus seems to be Northern India / Pakistan via Iran.
I guess I’ve always associated Gyp-- Roma People with Eastern Europe, regardless of their Asian origins.
Not without justification, it turns out. Discounting the New World, the largest Romany populations are in Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Hungary, Greece, and Turkey. (Wiki Cite).
No. Gypsie is a perfectly accurate word. www.m-w.com
It may be “accurate” word, but it’s still derogatory.
The term crystal unfortunately also means glass made from melted quartz crystal. I’m sure there are plenty of baseball size nearly clear crystals around. And I see them in rock hound shops where they have been tumbled to round them off. You can see a lot of funny things in them when you tilt them back and forth, like cats-eye. And of course if they have a couple of nearly flat sides you can look at people through them and see their faces contorted.
Sorry, again, to disabuse you of your PC notions, but I do know gypsies and that is how they introduce themselves. At the local county fair they like to charge for gypsy tea readings and and tarot card tricks, wouldn’t find any clients if they used your term.
I would agree with that, if one wanted to be derogatory then one would say Gippo or Pikey
To use the term gyp, meaning “to cheat”, would be derogatory. But there is nothing derogatory about the term “gypsy”.
• Association of Gypsies/Romani International.
• The Gypsy Lore Society.
Seconded. I’ve been to a gypsy festival (organized by gypsies, targetted at gypsies, and attended overwhelmingly by gypsies), where gypsy singers would take the stage and proudly proclaim their gypsy ethnicity using the word “gypsy”.