O Beng

Nothing existed but water. God was in a poor temper about it, having no brother, no friend, and no clear idea what sort of world to make, so he threw his walking stick into the flood out of pure irritation. The stick took root. It swelled and branched and climbed until it was an enormous tree with its roots somewhere down in the dark, and sitting in the new shade, as comfortable as a sparrow in spring, was a smiling young man.

Good day, my good brother, he said. You have no brother and no friend. I will be both to you.

Notice what he does not do. He does not tempt anyone, because there is nobody to tempt. He does not rebel, because there is nothing yet to rebel against. He offers company, and God, who is lonely, accepts the second half of the offer and refuses the first: a friend, not a brother, since nobody can be brother to God.

They travelled the great water together for nine days. By the ninth, God had worked out that his new friend did not love him.

The plan was simple enough. Dive, bring up a handful of sand from the bottom, and God would speak his own name over it and make an earth. The young man went down, and under the water he had a better idea. He took the sand in both hands and said his own name instead. The sand went hot. It scorched straight through his fingers and he dropped it and came up empty, reporting that there was no sand down there, which was a lie. He tried it again the next day, and the next, nine days of it, and each time the sand burned worse than before, until on the ninth day he surfaced black as a cinder to the elbows and God looked at him and said: you have gone black, and you are a very bad friend. Go down once more, and this time keep your mouth shut, or the sand will finish you.

He obeyed. God spoke, the earth came, and the devil was delighted with it. He stretched out in the shade of the great tree and announced that he would be living there, and that his dear brother could go and find lodgings elsewhere. At which point an ox came out of nowhere, got its horns under him and carried him off into the wide world. He screamed. The scream shook the leaves off the tree, and where the leaves landed, people stood up.

That is the Romani account of how the world and its inhabitants were made, and human beings are in it as an accident, a by-product of a devil in pain.

The tale survives in three versions, which matters more than it looks. The oldest was written down in Transylvania by Heinrich von Wlislocki and printed in 1886, and Wlislocki is a name to handle with tongs, since much of the tidy Romani pantheon that circulates in English rests on him alone and on nothing else. But four years later an independent collector, Vladislav Kornel, published his own Hungarian version in the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, and in 2006 Alberto Melis printed a third from the Xoraxane Roma of Sardinia, a group at the far end of Europe from Transylvania. Three groups, three languages of transcription, one plot. Whatever else is doubtful about the nineteenth-century record, this story is not one man’s invention.

The name is the oldest thing about him. Beng is simply the word for a devil in every dialect of Romani, from Hancock’s glossary of Vlax terms to the Slovak spoken in a settlement today, and it comes down unbroken from Old Indo-Aryan vyanga-, which means crooked or misshapen and also, as a noun, frog. The Romani devil is the one whose limbs are put together wrong. And the tale knows it: he lives at the foot of a tree whose roots are in water, he goes down into the deep and stays there, and he comes back up breathing. In Zoroastrian doctrine, which the Roma passed through on their way west and which they were exposed to for some four centuries, frogs, toads and creeping things belong to the Evil Spirit outright, and the Bundahisn describes Ahreman as looking like a frog before Ohrmazd gives him the face of a fifteen-year-old boy. The Romani devil is both of those at once, an amphibian with the manners of a smirking teenager, and Domenico Giuseppe Muscianisi has argued that the resemblance is inheritance rather than coincidence, right down to the bull: in the Avesta the star Tishtrya takes the form of a bull with golden horns to drive off the demon of drought, and drives him away rather than killing him.

That last point is the shape of the whole thing. In most European folklore the villain is destroyed. Here he is shooed off, and the reason is structural. Ian Hancock describes the Romani world view as bipolar, a universe that falls naturally into pairs: Rom and non-Rom, clean and defiled, upper body and lower, luck and misfortune, God and the devil. The word for the balance between them is kintala, and balance is not something you win. It is something you keep by behaving correctly, and it can be upset from either side.

Which is why the everyday reality is smaller and stranger than the cosmogony suggests. God is everywhere in Romani speech, in the greetings, the proverbs, the opening formula of every tale. The devil is not. Among the Slovak Roma the word beng mostly gets used about a bad person, while the abstract unclean power that stands against God is called bizuzo, and the animals thought to carry it are the frog and the snake. The Roma are monotheists whose picture of the world happens to be dualistic, and the devil in it occupies noticeably less room than the Virgin does.

He is also, more often than not, the one who loses. A Lovara storyteller has a Rom play the fiddle so well outside a church that the wooden Christ starts crying, and the devil comes to listen and asks to be taught, and is told his nails are too long and must be trimmed first. In Sofia in 2002 a Kalderas narrator recorded a version in which the devil grants every wish a table of Europeans can think of, collecting their souls one by one, until the Rom asks him to straighten a single curly hair, and he works at it for years and finally bursts. Petra Cech, who catalogued the recording, notes that there is hardly a Romani group with a storytelling tradition that does not know this plot.

He wins sometimes. In the tale of how the fiddle was made, a girl named Mara begs him to help her get the huntsman she wants, and he does it by taking her four brothers for strings, her father for the body, her mother for the bow, and finally the pair of them as well.

His powers come from being there first: he is coeval with God, he cannot be killed, and he is a shapeless enough idea to slide into a shadow, a sick child or a dog on a road at night. His weakness is the one his name gives him. He is crooked. He cannot make anything, only spoil the making, and the moment he reaches for a creator’s work by speaking his own name over the raw material, it burns him. Say nothing and he can fetch and carry. Say his name and the sand goes hot in his hands.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is O Beng in Romani belief?

O Beng is the devil of Romani tradition, the dark counterpart to Devel or Del, who is God. Romani belief is monotheistic, but the Romani picture of the world is dualistic, splitting into pairs of opposites held in balance. Beng is one half of the most important of those pairs.

What does the name Beng actually mean?

Beng is the ordinary Romani word for a devil, found across the dialects, and it descends from Old Indo-Aryan vyanga-, meaning crooked or misshapen, and also frog. Adding the definite article o turns the common noun into a name, exactly as English turns devil into the Devil.

Did O Beng help create the world?

Yes, though unwillingly and badly. In the Romani creation tale God orders him to dive into the primordial water for sand, and he keeps trying to make a world of his own instead by speaking his own name over it, which burns his hands black. Only when he obeys and stays silent does the earth get made.

How did human beings come into existence in this story?

By accident. After the earth was finished the devil tried to claim the great tree for himself, an ox charged out and carried him off on its horns, and his scream of pain shook the leaves down. Where the leaves fell, people stood up.

Can O Beng be defeated?

He is never killed, only driven away, which is the point: the balance between good and evil is maintained rather than won. Individual Roma beat him constantly in the stories, usually by cunning, as in the widely told tale where the devil grants every wish put to him and is destroyed by a request to straighten one curly hair.

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