Every few weeks someone at the desk asks to see the most powerful book of magic we have. They usually expect something bound in black, with a lock. I bring them a thin paperback of about a hundred pages, its cover printed in two colors, and watch their faces. It is The Long Lost Friend, and by the measure that matters to a historian, the number of people who have owned and used it, it has a fair claim to the title.
The maker
Johann Georg Hohman arrived in Philadelphia from Germany in 1802 with his wife and son, too poor to pay for the passage, and worked off the debt as a bound laborer. By the 1810s he was living near Reading in Berks County, where he printed and peddled broadsides, hymns, devotional booklets, and a home medical book. In 1820 he published Der lange verborgene Freund, "the long hidden friend", a collection of charms, prayers, and remedies for people and animals.
He wrote a preface that is still worth reading. He says he has published the book to help those in need, not for money, and that he expects to be mocked for it. He then prints certificates of cures he says he has worked himself, of burns, wounds, and fevers, with the names of the patients and of witnesses. It is the voice of a working healer who is also a small businessman, and it is entirely sincere.
What is in it
Open the book anywhere and you are in a farmhouse. There are charms to stop bleeding, to take the fire out of a burn, to cure the fever, the colic, and the toothache, to heal a lame horse and a sick cow. There are recipes for salves, eyewashes, and a good ink. There are instructions for cutting a rod to find water or ore, for making a thief stand still until he is released, and for protecting the house and stable against witches and the nightmare. A few are clearly older than the book. The charms in which Christ or a saint meets a sickness on the road and sends it away belong to a family that runs back to the Middle Ages and across most of Europe.
Almost all of it is Christian. The words are spoken in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, often three times, and many charms call on Mary and the saints in a way that would have startled the Lutheran and Reformed congregations who used them. That is the sign of their age. They were learned before the Reformation and kept after it, because they worked, or because people believed they did.
The book closes with a promise that whoever carries it cannot be harmed by enemies, drowned, or burned, nor die without the sacrament. Many owners carried it in a coat pocket for exactly that reason, which is why so few early copies survive in good condition.
The healers who used it
The practice the book served is called Braucherei in Pennsylvania German, from a word meaning "to use", and in English, for reasons that are still debated, powwow. The English borrowed that word from an Algonquian term for a healer or a ceremony and applied it, by the nineteenth century, to the German healers of the region. A Braucher or Brauchfrau healed by words, by touch, and by prayer, usually without charge. Many held that the gift should be passed only between a man and a woman, never man to man or woman to woman.
Hohman's book did not invent this practice, and most healers learned their charms by mouth. What the book did was fix a set of charms in print, give them a name and an author, and make them available to anyone with a few cents. English translations appeared in 1846 and 1856. Cheap reprints followed in their dozens, many of them unauthorized and some of them altered. In the twentieth century it was sold by mail order across the United States, and it found readers far outside the Pennsylvania German community, among them practitioners of the African American folk magic called hoodoo, who took several of its charms into their own tradition.
A shadow on the book
In 1928 a man in York County was killed by men who believed he had bewitched one of them and who had come to take his copy of the book, or a lock of his hair, to break the spell. The trial put the book on the front pages of the national press, which presented the whole tradition as ignorance and crime. Healers who had practiced openly for generations became careful about whom they spoke to. The murder is part of the history of the book and we do not hide it. It is also a poor guide to what the book meant to the thousands of families who used it to treat a burn.
How to read it
- Find out which edition you have. The German text of 1820, the English translations of 1846 and 1856, and the later reprints differ, and some reprints add charms from other books. Note the printer and the date.
- Read it as a record of worry. The contents tell you what a farm family feared: fire, fever, theft, the death of a cow. That is valuable evidence for social history, and it is easy to miss when looking for the marvelous.
- Hear the prayers. Read the charms aloud, as they were meant to be used. Their rhythm is part of their meaning, and much of the language comes from the liturgy.
- Look for the owner. Old copies are often marked: names, dates, extra charms written in on the blank leaves, and the wear of a pocket. These are the best evidence of use. See our essay Readers in the Margins.
- Remember that it is not medicine. The remedies are historical. Some are harmless, some are not, and none should be used in place of a doctor.
- Remember that it is not over. Braucherei is still practiced, quietly, by people who regard it as a gift and a duty. Read the book with the respect owed to a living tradition.
On our shelves
We keep several editions of the book in facsimile and reprint, from the German text to modern paperbacks, at the South Gate in class L 6 with the other charm books. They sit beside the Egyptian Secrets that circulated with them and a short run of the folklorists who first wrote about powwow, in the years when many of their neighbors still practiced it.