History of the Pennsylvania Dutch Pow Wow
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 16 มิ.ย. 2020
- Learn more about the history of the PA Dutch Pow Wow practice, and discuss techniques and hear of some personal stories from those who were treated. “Porcupine Pat” of the Schuylkill Conservation District will shed light on the pow wow tradition and its importance to the rural lifestyle and elaborate even further on its history and practices.
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Awesome
My grandmother was from Pottstown and was a Pow-wow she also repotted seeing spirits and communicating with the dead, but also was an early licensed mid wife and she milked rattlesnakes she kept in her basement to sell to a Pharmacist in Harrisburg. Sarah Ritzman or Grammy Ritzman iwas her name.
That was a great day
Thank you!
Rob Phoenix offers legitimate trainings. He has a great website online
My maternal grandmother always told us our ancestors were "dutch", but then my mom researched our lineage and it turns out out ancestors were German Lutherans who settled in Lancaster County PA in thev1730s, then migrated to Kentucky shortly before the beginning of the Revolutionary War.
Your maternal grandmother probably was told that her ancestors were "Dutch" without realizing they were Pennsylvania Dutch, who are actually Germans. My moms family is PA Dutch.
Most of us, PA Dutch, headed north and northwest, searching for farmland after arriving in Philadelphia. A minority went south.
B-R-A-U-C-H-E
The verb "brauchen" means to need ("gebrauchen" = to use, "verbrauchen" = to consume) and a "Brauch" is a ritual, a tradition, a habit.
Btw: AU sounds like the English OW, just like in "braun/brown" or "Eisenhauer/hower". So "Brau(che)" sounds pretty much like Pow.
What brought me to this video was watching several videos about Patrick Meechan's experience's in Holmes County after building his dream home there. He wrote a book titled "Nightmare in Holmes County". I see some people look at PowWow as a good thing while others believe it is a dark and demonic practice. This topic is very interesting and in many ways disturbing. I don't know enough either way to make a decision, what do you think about it??????
Very informative and fascinating. Wonder where porcupine found those charms, especially Holy,Holy chicken dirt...,?
I would trust the Pow wow more than the JAB
I have the book.
Possum is great!
How to get my luck back if someone took it
Braucherei
This is a subject which can be MUCH more interesting than this video portrays. Pow wow was, and still is, a mixture of folk magic, sometimes very dark, which came from the German peasantry and combined with the Indian witch doctor medicine to become Pow wow. It often involved hexes and spells intended to injure or kill the person receiving them. Black magic and hauntings were involved, and few people ever spoke about the Brauchers and their arts. If you can, find out about Hexenkopf Hill, just south of Easton, Pa. and the stories the old people still tell about it. A lot of the darker stories involve what the old Dutchies called the Eck, up at the top of Hawk Mountain and the evil Indian manitou that lives there, and the posessions, murders and cannibalism which drove the Indians away from living anywhere near it, and may still be felt in the area. All those cute hex signs people put on their barns in the olden time were mostly to ward off evil. Look up the York, Pa. hex murders if you have time.
Wow, thanks for that great comment! I'm in the process of doing research for my thesis, which will focus on powwows and their relationship with their books and written text. Is there any texts you would recommend that showcase the darker sides of powwowing? I'll definitely look up the stuff that you've mentioned above. Cheers!
You are likely thinking about Hexerei not Braucherei (known as Powwowing in English because of historical reasons). And even then it's less 'dark' then that and more a nebulous boogey man that came about because of the witch hunts and the inquisitor's bullshit.
Braucherei is largely speaking just the cumulative ritual traditions of the Pa Dutch (and certainly wasn't something nobody talked about, a general feature of folk magic is that everybody does a little bit of it, though sadly not so much anymore), largely stemming from early modern German folk traditions along with innovations since then.
There really isn't that much if any influence from the indigenous peoples of North America, and that claim largely derives from the name "powwowing" and that's about it.
The reason it's called Powwowing in English is because English speaking settlers thought that Pa Dutch Braucherei and indigenous practices looked similar, and was likely originally a negative term or pejorative. But as Pa Dutch continues to die out among the people who would practice Braucherei, i.e. the Fancy Dutch (the plain folk don't do this kinda stuff), "powwowing" is what ends up getting used.
Take the herbs that're often used as an example of indigenous influence. Almost every herb that pops up in relation to Braucherei comes from ones brought over here from Europe. Just because it's herbalism doesn't mean that it came from indigenous peoples, that whole idea comes more from the exotification of such peoples.
Similar shit happened during the New Age movement, like the dreamcatchers and that kinda stuff. Legit indigenous thing that then gets caricatured and appropriated by non indigenous people.
In regards to the Hex murder (singular not plural in regards to the one in York County), that sordid story relates more to mental illness and the inherent problems with Hexerei than anything else.
In the early 19th century the Long Lost Friend was published, part of a larger revival of the occult and the grimoire tradition specifically (the continued tradition of occult texts had greatly dwindled over the previous 2 or so centuries). You can think of the Long Lost Friend as a sorta folk-grimoire, taking a lot of material from older sources like Albertus Magnus' 'Egyptian Secrets' and the Romanus-Buchlein stemming largely from Early Modern Germany.
That book in particular got really popular throughout the 19th and 20th century, but interestingly acquired some talismanic qualities over time (there was a bit in the book that essentially stated that having the book would protect you, originally in the back, that page got pushed forward in later editions to make it more central likely as the belief evolved/grew stronger) which is where it ties into the hex murders.
John Blymire suffered from some kind of chronic mental and physical fatigue and paranoia, for which he was eventually incarcerated in an asylum. He was actually on the run from said asylum and operating under the false name of John Albright when he and two teenaged accomplices murdered Nelson Rehmeyer, a Braucher who had treated Blymire before as a child and who Blymire had been led to believe had cursed him with his unexplained illness by another Braucheren by the name of Emma Knapp through a divinatory technique (or parlor trick as may also be appropriate in this case).
Blymire himself was a Braucher, even came from a line of them, and was trying for the Milton Hess family, who believed themselves to be cursed due to poor crop harvests, by their neighbor Ida Hess (sister-in-law) with who they were having a property line dispute.
Blymire convinced the family that it was a Hex who'd cursed them, perhaps hired by Ida Hess, specifically that it was Rehmeyer who'd done it even though none of the family members had ever had any contact with Rehmeyer or had a motive for the supposed Hex.
It's from that family one of Blymires accomplices had come, Milton Hess's 18 year old son Wilbert, along with one John Curry who Blymire'd met earlier. Curry had fallen in with him after suffering from a very similar illness as affected Blymire, who had been operating as a Braucher after having escaped the Asylum (he'd managed to escape, gotten put in county jail where the people searching for him couldn't find him, and thus after a year had his case closed by default)
Blymire was about 30
Curry was only 14
Wilbert, 18
Wilbert confessed to his family the next day, after they'd burned Rehmeyer's house down (apparently unsuccessfully as the house supposedly still stands and is considered haunted), which is how they all were caught, with the aid of another Braucher by the name of Charles Dice.
The main effect of this court case was to start what was essentially the alpha stage Satanic Panic, and in fact the media publicity and condemnation even reached to Germany and Switzerland where these practices and beliefs came from originally. One of the major sources of information we have for this time, albeit heavily biased, is Rev. Kurt Koch, whose works about how "occult influences" lead to mental illness were translated to English and widely distributed in the USA to evangelical Christians during the Satanic Panic.
The damage this did was in all likelihood intense and, coupled with the World Wars and Anti-German sentiments, economic changes leading to the decline in viability of independent farmsteads (and thus to urban migration into primarily English contexts), and the changes to the traditional education system (where English language only education became the enforced norm), is what had led to the great decline of Pa Dutch among all but the more conservative plain groups like the Old Order Amish (who now in fact outnumber the Fancy Dutch due to a combination of factors) and the general assimilation of the Pa Dutch into mainstream anglophone American culture.
If anything led to the hex murders it was the concept of Hexerei itself, perhaps exasperated by an ineffectual mental healthcare system (I certainly wouldn't count getting locked into an asylum as good care) which drastically failed Blymire.
All Hexerei is is the shadow of the witchhunts, a too-old conspiracy theory that was used to justify murdering people, and which has sadly had a great impact on folk magic deriving from European traditions. History is history and some influence is to be expected and all fine and dandy, but not when it leads to people getting murdered because they looked at you wrong (see Mrs. Susan Mummey, Schuylkill county, who was killed with a shotgun by a man who believed himself to have been cursed for the previous 8 years after Mummey had apparently stared at him)
Braucherei is its own thing, a real thing in the sense of being an actual practice rather than some nebulous conspiracy theory that never actually existed at all, and there's no need to make it 'edgy' or 'dark,' it's just ahistorical and does more harm than good.
*also hex signs being magical in nature largely comes from mid 20th century advertising aimed at tourists, misinformation and pseudo-history that is sadly still extremely prevalent (even when the painters of said signs say very pointedly that it's literally just folk art)
Notably Johny Ott, the one largely responsible for the introduction of both magical meanings to specific patterns (largely of his own design) and the idea of making smaller signs for sale (he never even painted or had anything at all to do with barns), publicly disparaged Braucherei while capitalising on his made up "Hexology" (he invented the term).
@@ruminate5866 There really isn't a "darker" side to Braucherei (powwowing), it's just folk magic and this or that about something like this being 'dark' largely comes from edginess more than anything else.
I can strongly recommend Patrick Donmoyer's "Powwowing in Pennsylvania; Braucherei and the ritual of everyday life" however if you want a really in depth and properly academic look into both present and historical developments of Braucherei; notably for you he includes a whole ass section regarding written materials and their influence upon the oral tradition (Braucherei was and is primarily and traditionally an oral tradition, not a written one, and writing it down or sharing has often been frowned upon (not that people followed that all the time as evidenced by our written materials))
His book is where I get most my information from regarding my really overly long comment under the same OP, and it is excellently sourced as well.
Donmoyer himself is a traditionally trained Braucher and is the current head of the Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center of Kutztown University, Pennsylvania (he also has a youtube channel along with being in several videos outside his channel regarding pa Dutch culture and Braucherei)