Pennsylvania Dutch Braucherei (Powwowing)

Southeastern Pennsylvania (Berks, Lancaster, Lebanon, York, Lehigh counties), and the German-settled country down the great valley into Maryland and Virginia

Braucherei is the healing and protective craft of the Pennsylvania Germans, brought by German-speaking settlers in the eighteenth century and written down in printed charm books. Its founding text is Johann Georg Hohman's Der lange verborgene Freund, printed in Reading in 1820 and sold in English as The Long Lost Friend - a working manual of charms, prayers and seals rather than a grimoire of spirits. The tradition is Christian, Bible-centred and transmitted in families and by apprenticeship, and it is still practised in some Pennsylvania German communities, though far less publicly than in the nineteenth century.

A Braucher is called for healing, for stopping bleeding, for burns, for warts and swellings, for protecting livestock, for finding what is lost and for un-doing a charm. The work is done by speaking: charms, Bible verses, and the formulas printed in the Long Lost Friend, with the hand, with breath, with a stroking pass, and with written papers carried folded on the body. There is no summoning, no pact and no spirit hierarchy; the power is understood to be God's, mediated by the words and by the practitioner's gift, and a Braucher is expected to refuse work meant to harm.

Braucherei is the practice of a particular ethnic and religious community, transmitted by apprenticeship and family, and its standing to work is conferred by that community's recognition rather than by possession of the printed book. The charm books are in print and freely bought, which has always tempted outsiders to treat them as spell lists; the tradition itself regards the gift as given for healing and protection, holds that it is lost or turned back on a worker who uses it to harm, and does not recognise a self-taught stranger as a Braucher.