A new generation is bringing Pennsylvania Dutch folk magic back to life

Alice Miller kept her business to herself. It was the 1920s, and even though the Great War was over, anti-German hysteria still swept America. As a Pennsylvania German she already had enough skeptical eyes on her, waiting for any misstep to prove lack of allegiance to the United States. Publicly performing healing magic wouldn’t help.

Not that she thought of her Braucherei practice as magic, according to her descendants. It was folk healing, rituals and charms performed in conjunction with her Christian faith, often ending with prayers in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Braucherei had been part of the Pennsylvania Dutch culture since her ancestors had first immigrated to the region in the 1700s, making it one of the oldest North American expressions of European folk belief to survive to the 21^st century. But that didn’t stop others from fearing the practice, derisively calling it powwowing for its similarities to Native American spiritual practices.

Forced underground, some feared the practice would die out, or become seen as a relic of the past.

But in the quiet of Pennsylvania Dutch homes, Braucherei lived. Elders passed the practice down to their descendants or other trusted people in the community through a strictly oral tradition to preserve the secrecy of their most sacred rituals—often passing from a man to woman or vice versa to preserve gender equality among practitioners.

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By the time Miller’s great-grandson Robert Lusch-Schreiwer was growing up in the 1970s, he didn’t think twice when his grandfather attempted to heal him after a fall by chanting a simple rhyme in Pennsylvania Dutch language three times. It was just part of daily life, alongside the modern medicine practiced by his father, a doctor, and mother, a nurse.

Schreiwer thinks Miller would be shocked that not only is her great-grandson now a Braucher himself, but he is also one of the forerunners of a resurgence of interest in Braucherei. He has trained dozens of young practitioners and even wrote a book about it. Groups, now sometimes called guilds, are now growing across the country, fueled by Zoom trainings and even Instagram Reels, marking a significant break from the mostly furtive trainings of the past. Brauchers have even reclaimed the word “powwowing” once flung at their ancestors as a slur.

And Braucherei is not just a passing hobby or interest, says Heather Greene, an editor at the publisher of spiritual books, Llewellyn, which acquired Schreiwer’s most recent, Heathen Traditions of the Pennsylvania Dutch. Schreiwer, along with other modern practitioners and teachers, are “reviving [Braucherei] to a viable modern practice that people can use today.”

But while the resurgence of interest is helping to preserve Pennsylvania Dutch folk magic, some argue that these modern adaptations are going too far. Schreiwer has talked with more than 170 Brauchers for his research and says many are still “a lot more nervous about getting information out,” he says. “For some of these people, I had to get a vouch from somebody they knew,” he says.

Their hesitation has raised a question for him and others at the forefront of the revival: how do you bring a traditional folk practice into the era of social media and retain its soul?

Magic as a means of survival

At its core, Braucherei is “the collection of ritual traditions that are specifically used for healing, protection, and assistance in times of need,” says Patrick Donmoyer, director of the Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center at Kutztown University, who is a practicing Braucher and author of Powwowing in Pennsylvania: Braucherei & the Ritual of Everyday Life. 

The practice traces its roots back to folk magic systems that immigrants from German-speaking regions of Europe brought with them to central Pennsylvania in the 18^th century. Those rituals were then influenced by American traditions like Appalachian folk magic and hoodoo, the folk magic practiced by enslaved people in the American South.

Braucherei was deeply tied to the rhythms of daily life. Many of the practice’s oldest rituals deal with healing people and livestock, ensuring safety, and promoting good fortune for one’s home and farm. Practitioners removed warts, cooled burns, and stopped blood flow from their patients’ wounds.

“It was basically how the early Pennsylvania German settlers survived,” says Rob Phoenix, who has practiced Braucherei for almost 30 years and still lives in Pennsylvania, like his ancestors who also practiced. “It was just their how-to book of getting through life.”

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Basic healing rituals involved laying on of hands, a gift of a charm or talisman, and prayers repeated aloud three times in Pennsylvania Dutch language. To protect a home, Brauchers might place a broom by the door. To heal homesickness, they might stir dust collected from the four corners of a home into coffee. Brauchers might also feed written prayers to cattle to prevent parasites or use smooth barnyard stones to heal a working drafthorse.

Healings were done in person and often had an aspect of counseling or advice-giving alongside the physical and spiritual healing. That intimacy was a major feature of the tradition, says Josh Brown, professor of German & Linguistics at the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire who researches Pennsylvania Dutch culture.

“You have another human being maybe from your same community working with you on an individual basis and providing you with a very tailored healing,” he says. “It really is something that hits hard in terms of the very human and very intimate side of healing that is often missed, I think, in Western society.”

Secrecy, or at least discretion, was another core principle. In addition to saying the prayers sotto voce so even a patient couldn’t overhear them, Brauchers were also strictly forbidden from even writing down certain, sometimes more powerful, charms or rituals. The tradition was strictly oral in part to protect the integrity of the practice but also to prevent the charms or rituals from falling into the wrong hands. To “pass the power,” or teach someone how to do Braucherei, varied by community but was almost always also structured to protect secrecy.

All Brauchers worked a little differently, leading to a diversity within the tradition that continues today. Phoenix, for example, believes Braucherei ought to be practiced in a Christian context, while others like Donmoyer and Schreiwer, say that evidence shows Braucherei was always practiced within a mixed-faith context and should continue to be.

Reimagining a folk tradition in the social media era

You typically can’t sit in on a Zoom session of Braucherei without first dedicating yourself to the practice. But longtime practitioners say they’ve seen a significant growth in the number of aspiring Brauchers seeking the experience.

“They've been saying now for 70 years that it's dying out and it's not,” says Phoenix. “If anything, there are more powwowers or Brauchers now than there were 30 years ago.”

The biggest growth has been within the last five to 10 years, which Phoenix attributes to the rising costs of healthcare. In 2015, Phoenix had about three or four people in his community. “Now, there are just about 60 of us,” he says.

Many are members of the LGBTQ+ community, including teachers like Schriewer, Donmoyer, and Phoenix, and newer practitioners like Rebecca Beyer, an apprentice within Schriewer’s guild.

“I think [we queer people are] already used to being on the liminal, and the outskirts, on the edge, on the margin,” explains Beyer, so it’s easier to consider alternate modes of living or connecting to body and spirit.

Jack Montgomery, now in his 70s, has practiced Braucherei for 52 years, and has witnessed the renewal of interest in this folk magic firsthand. But even though he’s had quite a few people ask to learn from him, he’s taken a hardline policy personally.

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“I don't formally teach people to be a powwow. I’ve always refused it. Call me if you need to ask me a question, I'll answer you as best I can. But I'm not going to take someone on as a student,” he says.

He thinks the best people to learn the practice and carry it on are those who have a family history of Braucherei or have seen it done as a child—not to gatekeep but to make sure the next generation “understands the groundwork for what a responsible magical practice is.”

Montgomery is fine with others taking on apprentices—and even with Zoom trainings, so long as students are vetted to a certain degree. And Schreiwer points out that he takes great care to abide by tradition even as he adapts it.

For instance, his guild has a policy that the tradition’s most secretive rituals can be shared orally in a closed Zoom group. However, writing them down in a Zoom chat or talking about them in a Instagram Reel? No.

Beyer, who is learning Braucherei remotely from North Carolina, says she supports these restrictions.

“When you tell lots of people outside of your little crew how to do something, or how it works, it takes away the collective power of the centuries that that practice has been done,” she says. “One could look at it [as] kind of like poking a hole in a bag of water. You let all of the magic out and it won't work again the same way twice.”

There can still be downsides to sharing even non-forbidden information online, however.

“There's a price for everything,” Montgomery cautions. “The visibility also brings out the con artists.”

Still, he’s not too worried about the negative impacts outweighing the positive of more healers in the world.

“I've always been sort of philosophical about it,” he says. “I think the charlatans will become known and people will have nothing to do with them.”

Ultimately, there’s not a real chance Braucherei—or any folk practice—will remain entirely unchanged for posterity. But Josh Brown of the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire argues that might be exactly what will keep the tradition alive.

Braucherei “has always been changing,” says Brown. “It's always this very fluid, very dynamic practice. And so when people say, Oh, it's changed so much from how it used to be to today, that really is just because that's our lived experience. Those kinds of changes, for me at least, are inspiring to see because it means that it's still alive.”

In his own practice, Donmoyer is consistently trying to find new ways to apply ancient rituals to modern contexts. Take his friend’s lost cat, for example. To help find the feline, he resurrected a Braucherei ritual dating back to the 1700s originally designed to compel lost livestock to return to their owners. But instead of using the traditional livestock manure fork, Donmoyer took the kitty litter scooper from his friend’s litter box, stuck it into the ground where the cat was last seen, and recited an invocation. He was unsure if it would work but three days later, a symbolic period of time in Braucherei, the cat returned.

If the ritual could only be performed with a manure fork and only for livestock, it would probably be lost to history. Instead, the ritual lives on.