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Two Documented Folk Healing Traditions, Described Without Reproducing Their Working Material

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Two Documented Folk Healing Traditions, Described Without Reproducing Their Working Material

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Recorded Oral Tradition gathers two of the atlas's entries for living folk healing traditions transmitted person to person, where what the atlas holds is documentation of the tradition rather than the tradition's own working material.

The Braucherei Charm Tradition, called Braucherei in Pennsylvania German and powwowing in English, is a Christian healing practice in which a practitioner treats illness and misfortune by spoken charm, laying on of hands and the use of biblical verses; its charms have circulated in print since the early nineteenth century, but the craft is still traditionally passed from practitioner to practitioner, and living practitioners today hold material outside print. The Recorded Corpus of Hoodoo Conjure records something narrower still: not hoodoo itself, a living African American practice with roots in West and Central African religion, developed under slavery and drawing in Native American plant knowledge, European folk magic and the Bible, but the first hand testimony about it gathered by outside fieldworkers, chiefly Zora Neale Hurston in the late 1920s and Harry Middleton Hyatt between 1936 and 1940, together the largest documentation of any American folk magical tradition.

Both entries describe rather than teach. The atlas records that Braucherei's craft and Hoodoo's working knowledge both belong to living practitioners and are transmitted outside the printed record it can cite, and it holds the record of each tradition without reproducing either one's charms or conjure work as instruction.

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Sources
Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition
Yvonne P. Chireau, University of California Press, 2003View the Source
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