The Braucherei Charm Tradition

Braucherei is practised by Pennsylvania Germans and is understood by its practitioners as Christian. The Brauchers are church members. The charms invoke the Trinity, draw on biblical verses, and are used for complaints that a community treats as ordinary: burns, bleeding, erysipelas, sprains, warts, colic in children and in livestock. A practitioner is consulted in the way a neighbour with a particular competence is consulted, and payment is traditionally refused or left to the recipient.

The English name has caused persistent confusion. Powwow is borrowed from an Algonquian word, and its attachment to a Pennsylvania German practice is a piece of nineteenth century American English rather than any indication of Native American content. Nothing in the tradition's language, its sources or its self-understanding is Algonquian. The borrowing tells us about how English-speaking neighbours categorised what they saw, and about the period's habit of using an Indigenous word for anything that looked like unofficial religion.

Transmission is by person, not by book, and it is commonly reported that a charm must be passed between a man and a woman rather than to someone of the same sex as the giver, which puts a structural limit on how quickly the knowledge can spread. That the printed collections exist alongside this does not make the books the source; practitioners have consistently distinguished between a charm one has been given and a charm one has read.

The charms entered print early. John George Hohman published Der lange verborgene Freund at Reading, Pennsylvania in 1820, and it circulated widely in German and then in English as The Long Lost Friend. The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, a German grimoire tradition that this atlas holds separately as a text, moved through the same communities. Print gave the tradition a public face and a set of texts an outsider could buy, and it is where most non-practitioners have met it.

In 1928 a Braucher named Nelson Rehmeyer was killed in York County, Pennsylvania, by men who believed he had hexed one of them and who were seeking a lock of his hair and his copy of Hohman's book. The resulting trial drew national press coverage under the label of a witch murder. The effect on the tradition was immediate and lasting: what had been an ordinary neighbourhood competence became something a family did not discuss with outsiders, and much of the practice moved out of public view without ceasing.

David Kriebel's ethnography, published in 2007, is the substantial modern study, and its most useful contribution is simply that it treats Braucherei as a practice with living practitioners rather than as a folkloric survival to be salvaged. Practitioners are working now, and they have views about how their tradition is written about.

This atlas therefore describes the shape of the tradition, its transmission rule, its documentary history and its scholarship, and does not reproduce the charms. Hohman's book is out of copyright, which settles a legal question and not the other one. A charm that a practitioner receives from another person, under a rule about who may give it to whom, is not made public property by the fact that somebody printed a version of it in 1820.