Pennsylvania Dutch Powwow

Pennsylvania Dutch powwow, Braucherei in the dialect, is the folk-healing tradition of the German-speaking settlers of southeastern Pennsylvania, and its name is its first complication: powwow is an Algonquian word, he who dreams, applied by English speakers to the German healers, whose own name, brauche, means trying or using, the practitioner the Braucher or powwower, the hex doctor when the work turns to lifting what was laid. The tradition distinguishes its two faces with a firm boundary: Braucherei is healing, Hexerei is malicious witchcraft, and the braucher's job is the unhexing.

The practice is spare and physical: whispered or subvocal charms, prescribed gestures, the laying on of hands, household objects put to use, and the Bible as the main source of power, in a tradition that is Christian, Protestant with Catholic roots in the medieval saint blessings the Palatinate carried. Transmission is the tradition's discipline: taught orally only, never written down, the admonition against writing being itself part of the teaching, passed to someone of the opposite gender and often skipping a generation, and given to those who intend to help people. Anyone could ask a powwower for help; learning the work is the gated part.

Where it came from, briefly: the German migrations of 1683 to the 1770s brought the Palatinate and Swiss healing lore, the grimoires the settlers carried, the Romanus-Büchlein and the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses as the hex book, and the Pietist religiosity that framed the charms as prayer. The tradition's documented figures run from Mountain Mary of the Oley Valley in the eighteenth century through the Reading doctors the newspapers covered, and its book is John George Hohman's The Long Lost Friend, compiled from plagiarized German sources and printed in Reading in 1820, never out of print since, carried by its owners as a talisman that could not drown in water nor burn in fire, and spread by emigration into Appalachia and the Ozarks, where it fed the power-doctor tradition.

The tradition's most documented event is a murder: on Thanksgiving eve 1928, three men killed Nelson Rehmeyer, a York County powwower, in his house in what the papers called Hex Hollow, seeking his Long Lost Friend and a lock of his hair to break a hex they believed he had laid, and all three were convicted of second-degree murder. The trial coverage made hex a national word and drove the practice underground, away from printed texts and toward religious healing, a suppression the tradition absorbed into its silence. The other famous emblem, the hex signs, the painted barn stars of the region, were and are decoration by the scholarly consensus, farmers' barn ornament from the early nineteenth century whose occult meanings were invented for the tourism trade, a coinage of 1924 and a festival commerce the heritage centers now document honestly.

The scholarship is unusually strong for a folk tradition: the first academic study in 1888, Don Yoder as the field's doyen, and David Kriebel's dissertation work, which found only a handful of living traditional practitioners at the turn of the millennium and documented how few Pennsylvanians had even heard the word without embarrassment attached. The revival since the 2000s is the current chapter: practitioners who learned from surviving elders and train others, guilds meeting over video calls, a public presence the tradition never had, and the contested border where neo-pagan reinterpretation meets traditional Christian practitioners who want none of it. The community is the Pennsylvania Dutch population and the revival's students beyond it, and access splits as the tradition always has split it: open to receive, since anyone could ask, with the oral, opposite-gender, secrecy-ruled transmission as the gate for those who would give the help rather than ask for it.