Witchcraft in Early North America - Alison Games [31]
Whether or not laws existed, however, or whether accusations found their way into a courtroom, people undoubtedly carried a wide range of beliefs with them, and these beliefs manifested themselves in practices that have come down to us as quaint folkloric customs. The hex sign, for example, adorns barns in Pennsylvania (see figure 6). But the first documented use of a hex sign, a pentagram or “witch’s foot” whose purpose is to ward off evil, was only in 1850, so we do not know if it was something that was part of the folkloric practices of the first German migrants.126 There is, however, extensive evidence of folkloric transmission of witch beliefs and practices in the eighteenth century. German migrants, particularly pietists who believed in an intensely personal and internal spiritual life, brought a range of mystical and magical religious practices with them. One such figure, Johannes Kelpius, even cast horoscopes for visitors from his cave outside Philadelphia along the banks of the Wissahickon in the late seventeenth century.127 In Pennsylvania, these mystical figures joined British Quakers, who also had occult beliefs, to the dismay of their leaders. Other Germans brought a host of curing and healing rituals that required special words and potions. German healers in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania, for example, invoked the Trinity when healing wounds.128 Tempel Anneke, too, had healed with the words of the Trinity to assist her, calling out “in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit” over a potion of brook weed blood and chick blood: she was executed as a witch in Germany in 1663.129
These practices dispersed as Germans made their way west and then south along the old wagon road, into Appalachia, where their geographic isolation enabled some of these traditions, including divination, charms, conjuring, and healing, to thrive.130 In Pennsylvania, these magical practices were called “powwow,” or Brauche (or Braucherie) in Pennsylvania Dutch. There is evidence of its practice by the middle of the eighteenth century in Pennsylvania. Charm books, including Albertus Magnus: Egyptian Secrets, existed to guide practitioners. Allegedly authored by a Dominican friar and natural philosopher called Albertus Magnus (1200–1280), named a Catholic saint in 1931, this work contains a variety of spells and recipes. The book first appeared in German in Pennsylvania in 1842; an English edition appeared thirty-three years later.131 Powwowers (who exist to this day, according to folklorists) seem to function as good witches: they can lift hexes, for example, and heal physical maladies with the appropriate use of charms and ritual incantations. In the Holy Roman Empire in the seventeenth century, all of this activity would have been defined as witchcraft. But in Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century, these rituals became folkloric practice.
Africans and Their Descendants in North America
The largest non-British migrant population to travel to North America was Africans. As many as 481,000 Africans were forcibly transported to North America between 1619 and 1807 (the legal end of the slave trade).132 Most went to the British colonies of South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, and Georgia, but a small number—about 28,300—went to Louisiana, the French-controlled territory at the mouth of the Mississippi that was claimed by Spain from 1763–1783 and later purchased by the United States in 1803. Only a small number lived in New Mexico.133
As seems to have been true for Germans, Africans, too, continued to believe and practice important elements