Combine the following ingredients. Stir well.
1. The renegade place of many musicians in society.
2. Footage of female dancers we saw in the last class.
3. The dateless/timeless recitation of history by the village leader (last class too).
4. The general phenomena of capturing someone’s mind through music or musical arts that seems to be a common theme of pride on the part of gypsies, and which forms part of a sort of discriminatory fear on the part of the general population.
Bake in your 6x8 pate for a few minutes and you have an incredible (IMHO) analogue of the Bene Gesserit of Frank Herbert’s Dune.
They too have the ability to manipulate others directly through careful training of their voices and are despised agents of cultural change. One way they do this is through indirect control of culture via seeding religions across the universe. These all contains shards of the same central belief, but take on local flavor and become property of locals who may despise the order. A large part of their power rests in the way that the consciousness of all preceding females in the order descends on the Reverend Mothers via the spice agony. This collective past is the source of wisdom, but those who fail to embrace it properly cannot survive. I see this as analogous to the way in which some gypsies talk of the way of the world that makes them not just persecuted, but the persecuted. These skills require training from early childhood. Additionally the Gesserit are truthsayer’s – not necessarily fortune tellers, but adept at discovering a person’s subtle habits that betray their path.
I’ve just pulled a couple of aphoristic quotes from various Gesserit “manuals” too illustrate what I mean....
Those who would repeat the past must control the teaching of history.
Perceptions rule the universe.
and....
We do not teach history; we recreate the experience. We follow the chain of consequences -- the tracks of the beast in its forest. Look behind our words and you see the broad sweep of social behavior that no historian has ever touched.
Me again...
I’ve tried to be very general in the terms I’ve used here in case you haven’t read the books, but those who have can obviously interpolate some more of what I’m talking about. So now (one of ) the question(s) is: are gypsies an inevitable result of any large scale (or in the case of Dune fully conceived) human universe? Does humanity require a class of people with these stereotypical skills – skills that necessarily exist alongside a tortured consciousness and despised place in society - but a place that members can embrace with pride?