Himmelsbrief (Letter of Protection)

The Himmelsbrief, the 'heaven's letter', is a protective text that a person carries folded on the body: a broadside or a small printed sheet purporting to be a letter from heaven, promising that whoever carries it faithfully will be preserved from fire, water, sudden death, the enemy and the evil one. The genre is older than Pennsylvania and reaches back to late-antique heavenly letters; German examples include the medieval Sonntagsbrief and a Munich printing of about 1501 - and in Pennsylvania they were sold and carried alongside the charms of the Long Lost Friend, folded small and sewn into a coat or a pocketbook. It is the clearest case in the corpus of a Christian devotional object used as an amulet.

The letter is bought or given, folded, and carried on the person - sewn into clothing, kept in a pocketbook, placed in a house or a barn - and it is not read as ordinary correspondence: it is a text whose presence protects, and the tradition's rules are about keeping it, not about reciting it. Variants were printed with a promise attached, and some were used for livestock and for the household as well as for the person. The Long Lost Friend prints related charms and passes between the two genres freely.

The Himmelsbrief is a devotional object of Christian households and was printed, sold and given within a community that understood it as an act of faith; it is not a spell that anyone may download and print to order. The genre also has a long history of being counterfeited and sold to the credulous - the promise attached to the text made it a good product - and the modern trade in 'protection papers' reproduces that trade rather than the practice. The corpus records the object and not a text to be copied.