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Customs and Beliefs of the Roma and Sinti

Some of our customers have been surprised to get Gypsy/Romani population matches in their results for the DNA Fingerprint Test. Typically, these are combined with Middle Eastern and Indian matches due to the Gypsies' historical migrations. Other customers were not surprised at all and called to tell us about the fortuneteller great-grandmother or mysterious ancestor who traveled with the circus. Gypsy heritage is not unheard of among Melungeons. So for those who think they may have Roma/Sinti or Romechal (the term used in the British Isles), we have compiled the following list of customs and beliefs taken from an excellent authority.

Strict monotheism similar to Jews

Keeping the seventh day holy

Lighting candles on the evening of Parashat (Friday)

Blasphemy a sin, as is cursing an elder

Beng (Satan) the enemy of God and of the Roma people

The Evil One called bivuzhó (impure) and bilashó

Code of Law

No social classes, only a division into Roma and Gadje (non-Roma)

A court of justice called Kris (Judiciary Council), composed of clan representatives as judges

Both men and women serving on Kris

Issues between Roma to be judged only by the Kris, not by Gadje

All Roma equal before the eyes of the Kris

Belief in blood revenge and compensatory payment for clan of victim

Banishment from territory of victim’s clan for wrong doing

Forfeiture of protection if banished offender reenters

Roma not even to acknowledge or greet one who is banished

Accursed or banished called mahrimé (impure)

Roma not to ask interest for loans to other Roma, only from Gadje

Sexuality, Marriage and Childbirth

Nudity is taboo, allowed only with a husband and wife

Showing naked legs before an elder disrespectful

Homosexuality an abomination

Not allowed to wear clothes of the opposite sex, even as a joke or disguise

Virginity before marriage essential

Tokens of virginity shown to the assembly after wedding

Prostitution strongly condemned

Incest taboo, defined in the same way as Mosaic law (including step-siblings and in-laws)

Permissible to marry your cousin

Members of the Kris must be married

Lack of a spouse makes a man or woman incomplete

Groom’s family pays dowry to the bride’s family

Dowry for a widow amounts to half that for a virgin

A man dishonoring a woman should pay the dowry to her family anyway

Runaway couples considered legitimately married

Marriage endogamic, even within the same clan

Clan recognized by a common ancestor within a few generations

Divorce admitted:  husband sends wife out or she leaves

Remarriage expected after divorce

Levirate law practiced (Deut. 25:5-6)

Childbirth impure, must take place outside the home

Mother giving birth isolated with baby for seven days strictly, followed by 33 days of less strict isolation (cf. Lev. 12:2, 4-5)

New mother cannot show herself in public or attend religious services

Both sexes marrying very young (child marriage)

Funeral and Mourning Rituals

Dead to be buried intact (autopsy or cremation sacrilegious)

Close relatives of the dead impure for seven days

Not to touch a dead body

Family and relatives of deceased forbidden to bathe, comb their hair, cut their nails for three days

On third day after a death, relative must wash thoroughly, and then not again until seventh day

All food in house where a person died is thrown away as defiled

On third day after a death, the house is purified (“the ashes of the burning of the sin”) and a virgin sprinkles running water

The same ceremony repeated on the seventh day after a death, with food brought to the mourners from another dwelling place

Mourners stay at home

Sitting on low stools

Covering mirrors

Not using oils or perfumes or cosmetics

Not wearing new clothes

Not listening to loud music

Not taking photographs or watching television

Not painting, cooking, and cannot greet people

Day mourning extended after seventh day remembrance ceremony until thirtieth day

Another remembrance ceremony on thirtieth day, closing the strict mourning period

Beliefs in Afterlife

Death is final, no reincarnation or return

Soul goes to Paradise or Hell

Purity and Impurity

Concept of marimé (similar to kashrut)

Lower body and things associated with it impure

Sleeping regarded as an impure state

Not to greet anyone upon waking until washed

Disrespectful to greet anyone in an impure state

Dogs and cats impure

Horses, donkeys or riding animal impure

Carnivorous animals impure

Avoidance of horseflesh

Shoes, pants, hose, skirts, trousers, etc. impure

The camp pure

Restrooms built outside the home

Clothes for the lower body and menstruating women washed separately

Dishes washed in a different place from clothes

Other Practices

Custom of mangel, asking for favors from Gadje

Painting doorposts of dwelling with animal blood to protect against angel of death

Invoking the Prophet Elijah, particularly when seeing lightening or hearing thunder

Firstborn son considered a special blessing to the family

Wearing of whiskers

Left hand related to the public domain (Gadje), impure

Separate dishes and cups for Gadje

Only eating ritually slaughtered animals

Slander considered very a very serious offense, worth taking to Kris

Lack of belief in divination (contrary to general view of Gypsies)

Practice of Tarot cards and crystal balls for Gadje only

Having a Gypsy name besides a civil name

Names that are Hebrew, Greek, Russian, Spanish, Hungarian, Persian, never Indian or Hindu

Beef a favorite food

Interest in bullfighting

Middle Eastern music and dance with zithers, etc. (Flamenco in Spain)

Fingernails and toenails filed with an emery board, not a clipper

Going to a church called Filadelfia (Brotherhood)

Claiming to be Egyptian in origin

Making pilgrimages to the burial places of your ancestors

Source:  Abraham Sándor, “Comparison of Romany Law with Israelite Law and Indo-Aryan Traditions”

Why You Do Not Have (and Don't Want) Enemy Ancestors

When I first visited Chaco Canyon in northern New Mexico I got a creepy feeling. Who were these people? The staff, mostly Navajo and not descendants of the original inhabitants of the site, said they were the Anasazi, a Navajo term meaning "enemy ancestors." When I pressed for more answers, I was told they belonged to the Chaco Culture. They were Chacoans.

Anthropologists are used to calling people they don't understand a culture, but as I learned more of this one I don't think they had much of it. The culture of the Anasazi turns out to be one of head-hunting, terrorizing human slaves, drug use and cannibalism.

 Hamatsi, a Kwakiutl Indian of the cannibal spirit. Feldman.

In a book subtitled A History Forgotten, George Franklin Feldman dispels the parlor concepts and sanitized history surrounding Native American practices and pieces together the frightful truth. It is the only book on its topic:  Cannibalism, Headhunting and Human Sacrifice in North America (Hood:  Chambersburg, 2008), and the author's work was an uphill battle against political correctness.

Forget about the Donner Party. When anthropologists and explorers first encountered the monuments and ruins of the people politely called the Ancestral Pueblo they found widespread evidence of a cannibalistic society that had gotten out of control and succumbed to its own inhumanity.

"The best documented indication that the Baskemakers were headhunters is . . . Kinboko Canyon, evidence discovered by archeologist Samuel J. Guernsey of the Peabody Museum of Harvard in 1915, and reported in a 1919 publication of the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology," writes Feldman in the chapter on the Anasazi. He goes on to describe this and other early excavations in the Four Corners area that were quickly hushed up and reburied in horror, including Battle Cave in Canyon del Muerto, now part of the Canyon de Chelly National Monument inside the Navajo Indian Reservation. We read now of flesh-stripping, bone crushing, roasting pits, and sliced off mastoids.

Around 950 A.D., eleven persons, including women and children, were killed and butchered, cooked, and eaten on Burnt Mesa in New Mexico north of the San Juan River. At a site near the Hopi villages in Arizona, a group of thirty individuals, forty percent under the age of eighteen, were slaughted and eaten. In a Colorado rock shelter, a large jar was found filled with splintered human bones. . .

The grisly record goes on and on. Feldman writes that by the year 2000 the number of such sites in the San Juan drainage where the Chaco Culture was centered had risen to forty (p. 136).

To their credit, the Indians who were the Chacoans' food supply eventually overthrew their masters and left the area to settle far away, on the three Hopi mesas in Arizona and along the Rio Grande in new pueblos that survive today such as Taos and San Juan. We suggest that the aristocrats of Chaco may have been subject to degenerative neurological disorders like kuru or mad cow disease. But whether they self-destructed or were destroyed by their subject population, it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to claim them as ancestors.

Mary Settegast is described on the jacket simply as an archeological researcher, the 20-year-old book being Plato Prehistorian; 10,000 to 5,000 B.C. Myth, Religion, Archaeology (Hudson:  Lindisfarne, 1990). It's obvious she is not a member of the entrenched academic community of archeologists and prehistorians, for she spends most of the introduction to her fascinating study inveighing against the Old Model and New Archeology and defending the value of myth. She then retells the Egyptian Priest's tale from Plato's Timaeus about how Solon's ancient Greek ancestors defeated an aggressive Atlantic sea-power situated on a now-lost continent beyond the Straits of Gilbraltar--the so-called Atlantis myth, which has no other source but the writings of Plato. Her thesis is that Plato is representing what he believed to be historical fact. Among other arguments, Settegast points out that it would have been impious for him to contrive a political fiction and put it in the mouth of Critias, who attributes the story to his grandfather, who received it from Solon himself, given the occasion of the dialogue, a celebration of Athena's festival day. She asks, "Would Socrates have Critias offer to the goddess as 'a just and truthful hymn of praise' (Timaeus 21) an intentional misrepresentation of Athena's own past history with the Greeks?"

Once Plato's word and intentions are vindicated it is possible to study the scattered clues he gives us to prehistory of the Mediterranean world in a new light. Settegast makes a good case that the Magdalenian cave art of 17,000/15,000 to 9000 BCE preserves the fading glory of an Atlantic culture of enormous power and sophistication that came to an abrupt end toward the end of the tenth millennium. She brackets the question of the location of a sunken continent and dwells instead on the blunders of modern prehistorians who fail to grasp the advanced picture of civilization left to us in Paleolithic remains like the Lascaux paintings. For instance, most anthropologists have explained the paintings as vehicles for sympathetic hunting magic without noting that it is the horse that is most commonly depicted while excavations of Magdlenian sites reveal almost exclusively the remains of reindeer as their principal animal food. The religious significance of the animals is lost on most analysts. Plato, as usual, provides the pertinent clue: the Atlantics worshipped Poseidon and regarded his sacred animal the horse with great awe. A revisionist look at the horses in cave paintings clarifies that the lines on horses' heads represent harnesses, not natural contours or anatomical details, proving that the Magdalenians or Atlantic peoples had tamed the horse by 12,000 BCE, some eight thousand years before the date assigned to the domestication of the horse in the conventional model.

Upper Paleolithic writing recovered from Magdalenian cave sites (top) compared to characters in three early written languages:  (b) Indus valley signs, (c) Greek and (d) Runic. Settegast (p. 28) after Forbes and Crowder, 1979.

I've just started to read the book and will conclude this "preview" for the blog by mentioning that one obstacle to accepting Plato's story at face value was that he describes the Atlantics as literate. The recent reevaluation of the "magic signs" in Magdalenian caves as a writing system with heirs in many Old World alphabets seems to bear him out once again...and make his detractors look stupid and full of hubris. It is the effect many Socratic dialogues were meant to have on their readers.

Addendum:  One of the offshoots of Atlantic Culture according to Plato Prehistorian was the Çatal Hüyük civilization that flourished in Anatolia from 6200-5300 BCE. Only 2-3 % of the 32 acre site has been excavated, but what has come to light so far includes amazing cyclopean walls, refined wall paintings and peculiar religious practices such as a vulture-bull rite, leopard shrine and Mistress of the Animals cult reminiscent of Venus figurines. It is conceivable that Atlantic Culture itself was spurred to life originally by admixture of Europeans with Neanderthals, since there are numerous signs of Neanderthal culture in  archeological remains. Significantly, the Venus figures once associated with Gravettian Culture now appear to have had their origins with Neanderthals, who occupied Europe for 350,000 years before H. sapiens sapiens. Venus figurines were worn about the neck by Neanderthals, as proved in several excavations in Spain and elsewhere. In 1961, archeologists unearthed the skull of a Neanderthal man in the ancient site of Chalcedon on the east side of the Bosporus in Asia Minor, although the find is seldom mentioned today.

Our Neanderthal Index is based on affinities with archaic populations presumed to carry the highest rate of admixture with Neanderthals. These include many of the Atlantic and Mediterranean populations mentioned in Plato Prehistorian, including Greek, Turkish, Syrian, Arabian, Basque, Egyptian and Berber.

In an article titled "Indian Tribe Wins Fight to Limit Research of Its DNA," Amy Harmon reports that Arizona State University has agreed to pay the Havasupai Indians of the Grand Canyon $700,000 and return blood samples collected from them for diabetes studies in the 1990s. The university's Board of Regents apologized to the tribe for...well, that part of the story is not clear. Not informing them that the samples might be used for "wider-ranging genetics"? Not informing the subjects that they reached negative conclusions and found no "diabetes gene" as they believed they had in a Pima Indian study? Not getting permission (no, that was done with simple-to-understand, signed consent forms, as was proper)? Coming to different conclusions about the Havasupai's origins than their myths and legends? Allowing people to "get degrees and grants" using "our blood"? Implying that the Havasupai are inbred? One Havasupai woman found that offensive.

Many tribal members were disgruntled because they were still suffering from diabetes after the university "took their blood."

Sorry, Havasupai Indians, a project participation consent form is not a treaty. But if you signed it, you should honor your word. You cannot go back now and require the researchers who use your samples to come to research conclusions that suit you and be silent about those that do not. Science (and society) doesn't work like that.

The tribe's dictates to the University were mercenary and the University's decision to pay the tribe off, wrong. The case sets a bad precedent and places another barrier between Indian peoples in remote areas and the real world. 

DNA Consultants’ 18 Marker Ethnic Panel Reveals Native American, Jewish, Other Hard-to-Find Lines in Your Family Tree

PHOENIX – (April 7, 2010) – The market leader in autosomal DNA testing for ancestry, DNA Consultants announced that it has introduced the latest enhancement to its DNA Fingerprint Test™ ancestry tool. The add-on to its popular all-in-one ancestry tracing product is called the 18 Marker Ethnic Panel and sells for $50.00.

“With the 18 Marker Ethnic Panel, you can easily verify Native American, Ashkenazi Jewish, African and other ethnic lines that may be hidden in your family tree,” said Donald Yates, the company’s founder and principal scientist. “If you get a check mark for Native American marker I or II from either parent, you have Native American ancestry…it’s that simple.”

Like the DNA Fingerprint Test upon which it is based, the 18 Marker Ethnic Panel uses the same unique DNA profile familiar from television police shows like CSI. The markers were discovered by the company last August after statistical validation showing they reflected population splits in early human migrations.

“We’re not talking about ancient history,” said Yates. “These markers reflect recent genetic contributions to your overall ethnic mix within a relatively shallow time frame of about the last ten generations.” The reason, he said, was that Native American and the other types of DNA are “so distinctive their genetic signature lasts and never completely goes away.”

The 18 Markers include tell-tale evidence for Native American, Mediterranean, East European, Ashkenazi Jewish, Sub-Saharan African, Asian and several other definitive ethnic groups.

 “The test doesn’t tell you how much of that ancestry you have,” Yates added. “It only tells you if you have it, even if it is a minor line.” The panel also reports whether you have a given ethnic heritage from one parent or both.

To obtain the 18 Marker Ethnic Panel you must first order or submit results from a DNA Fingerprint Test. The core test is a comprehensive analysis of all your ancestral lines and gives you matches to populations and countries around the world where you have accumulations of ancestry. It sells for $250.00. Combined with the new 18 Marker Ethnic Panel, the test is called DNA Fingerprint Plus and costs $300.00.

Order online at dnaconsultants.com or call toll free 1-888-806-2588.

For more information, maps and sample report, visit DNA Consultants’ product page for the DNA Fingerprint Plus at:

http://dnaconsultants.com/_product_60282/DNA_Fingerprint_Plus.

DNA Consultants’ complete and total ancestry analysis is based on human prehistory but detects recent ethnic contributions to your DNA.

Donald Yates discovered

new DNA markers in 2009.

Ethnic admixture markers included in the DNA Fingerprint Plus 18 Marker Ethnic Panel range from Native American to Sub-Saharan African.

Press Release dated April 7, 2010

DNA Consultants

Home of the DNA Fingerprint Test

26438 N. 42^nd Way

Phoenix, AZ 85050

Tel. (480) 292-9820

Website:  www.dnaconsultants.com

The explosion in commercial archaeology has brought a flood of information. The problem now is figuring out how to find and use this unpublished literature, reports Matt Ford in the current issue of Nature magazine.

"I became aware that what I was teaching would be out of date without looking at the grey literature (unpublished reports)," says one professor at the University of Reading in England.

A policy shift in 1990 required all construction projects to document archaeological remains in Britain and generated an avalanche of findings that cannot be absorbed by the official academic field. The result is that our picture of the past is very much outdated. Academia is not likely ever to get caught up. Nor are academicians ever likely to warm to new theories of population genetics like diffusionism and trans-Oceanic contact and colonization, since few of those theories ever received a hearing in the halls of academe in the first place.

Read the full story in Nature, "Archaeology:  Hidden Treasure."