Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune Telling

Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune Telling is a book by Charles G. Leland, first published in 1891. It collects Leland’s wide-ranging notes on Romani magical practices, charms, incantations, remedies, and divination gathered from nineteenth-century sources and oral accounts, presenting them in a readable, often anecdotal form.

The book moves between catalogue and commentary: Leland records spells and fortune-telling methods, illustrates medical and protective charms, and frames these materials with observations drawn from comparative folklore and his own fieldwork. Far from a dry ethnographic list, the volume has been read both as an accessible popular anthology of Romani beliefs and as a product of its era, shaped by Victorian curiosities about folk magic and the limitations of contemporary scholarship. It has influenced later collectors of folklore, students of Romani culture, and readers interested in historical occult practices.