The Romanusbüchlein: The Charm Booklet Behind Powwow

What the Romanusbüchlein is

Look at European magical literature from above and the big names come into view first: the Picatrix, the Keys of Solomon, the three books of Agrippa. Those are books for people who read Latin and had time on their hands.

The Romanusbüchlein belongs to a different layer. It is a blessing book — a collection of short charms, prayers and formulas you say aloud or write down when something has gone wrong. There is no system in it, no philosophy and no initiation. What it offers instead is an answer to very concrete questions: what do you do when the bleeding will not stop, what do you say when the fire takes hold, what do you nail up in the barn so the cow is not bewitched.

Folklorists call this genre Segensliteratur, blessing literature, and it is older than printing. Individual formulas traveled for centuries by word of mouth and in handwritten copies before anyone bound them between two covers. The Romanusbüchlein is one such collection, and it became the best known of its kind in the German-speaking world.

One point matters for everything that follows: the text is Christian through and through. The formulas invoke the Trinity, name the saints and end with Amen. The opposition between church and sorcery that an outsider expects is simply not present inside the book. The people who used it did not think of themselves as magicians. They thought of themselves as Christians who knew a good prayer.

The oldest dated printing: Glatz, 1788

The earliest edition that can be pinned to a date carries the imprint Glatz, 1788, printed by Franz Pompejus, royal town printer. Glatz — today Kłodzko in Lower Silesia, Poland — was a Catholic border town under Prussian administration, the kind of place where a small press could put out a booklet like this without making waves.

Picture the object correctly. Not a folio. A pamphlet of a few printed sheets, cheaply set, often reprinted without any date, passed along, copied out by hand and added to. That is exactly why its history is so messy: there is no single Romanusbüchlein, only a family of versions that differ in length and in the order of the charms.

Older claims that date the text back to 1750 or earlier do not hold up. They rest on undated printings that cannot be placed securely by paper or typeface. What is certain is that the individual formulas are much older than the print. Some reach back to the Middle Ages, and a few motifs are older still.

What the title page promises

Title pages of the period were advertising, and this one is especially generous. It promises protection for people and livestock — against misfortune and sickness, against danger from fire and water, against theft, against wounds from weapons of every kind, and against all witchcraft inside and outside the house.

That list is the most precise description available of what eighteenth-century rural people were actually afraid of. Not a crisis of meaning. The farm fire that could ruin a family in a single night. The long haul through the woods with a loaded wagon. The cow that gave no milk overnight and put the winter supply at risk. The wound that festered because there were no antibiotics.

Read that way, the Romanusbüchlein is an inventory of the existential fears of a farming society — and it answers each of them with a sentence short enough to remember.

What is inside: blessings, banishing formulas, conjurations

Four kinds of text are mixed together in it.

Blessings in the narrow sense. Short charms against bleeding, burns, toothache, warts, fever and worms in livestock. They follow a fixed pattern: an address, a small story from sacred history, then the transfer of that story to the case at hand. The structure is old and found across half of Europe.

Protective and binding formulas. Against thieves, against weapons, against fire. The fire blessing is one of the best-known pieces, and in its neighborhood stands the SATOR square — the five-by-five word square known from Pompeii that was written on beams, bowls and slips of paper as fire protection for well over a thousand years.

Petitions to the saints. Meant to help against evil powers — and in a few pieces, to help find buried treasure.

Conjurations. This is where it gets delicate. Some of the texts address spirits, and a few name the Devil. That is the point at which the church condemned booklets like this, even though the language otherwise stayed pious. Exactly this mix — prayer and compulsion in the same little book — is what makes the genre so interesting to historians.

Alongside the words come handling instructions: the slip is spoken three times, written while the moon wanes, laid under the threshold, nailed up in the barn, worn around the neck. The word alone is not enough; it needs an action. The same logic runs through the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, the other great charm book of the German-speaking world — and the one it is most often confused with.

Where the name comes from — and why that stays open

Why "Romanus"? There is no secure answer, and the gap should not be papered over with a pretty story.

Two suggestions are usually made. One traces the title to a person who appears in the text — a Romanus to whom the booklet was attributed or dedicated. The other reads it as a nod to the Roman Catholic origin of the blessing formulas, which really do lean heavily on liturgical benedictions.

Both remain guesses, and both are typical of the genre. Booklets like this rarely carried an honest author's name. A title that sounded authoritative sold better and protected the printer at the same time.

The crossing to America: Hohman and The Long Lost Friend

The Romanusbüchlein made its real career not in Europe but in Pennsylvania.

Johann Georg Hohman arrived in Philadelphia in 1802 with his wife and son as redemptioners — immigrants who paid off their passage with years of indentured labor — and settled in the German-speaking community around Reading, in Berks County. In 1820 he published a booklet there titled Der lange verborgene Freund, "The Long Hidden Friend": a collection of prayers, household remedies and blessings for people and animals.

As early as 1904 the folklorist Carleton F. Brown, writing in the Journal of American Folklore, traced a large share of Hohman's charms to the Romanusbüchlein, and the historian Owen Davies has since set out the dependence in detail. Hohman was not an inventor. He was a compiler who reassembled what immigrants had carried over for a new society — and landed a bestseller that has never gone out of print.

English translations followed from the 1840s and 1850s, and the book became known as The Long Lost Friend. The title under which many Americans met it, Pow-Wows; or, Long Lost Friend, belongs to later nineteenth-century printings. It did not come from Hohman, and it did not come from the German tradition: it borrowed a word from an Algonquian language that has nothing to do with these formulas. That is a piece of appropriation worth naming plainly rather than passing off as folklore.

The book's most notorious American moment came in 1928, in York County, when a man convinced he had been hexed went with two others to the farm of a local powwower, Nelson Rehmeyer, to take a lock of his hair and burn his copy of The Long Lost Friend. Rehmeyer was killed. The trial made "hex" a national headline and pushed powwow underground for a generation. The full story, and why it is so often wrongly pinned on the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, is told in our piece on that book. Anyone who fears they are under a curse today will find a far calmer route in our honest checklist.

Braucherei: what still lives on in Pennsylvania

In parts of Pennsylvania Dutch Country the practice continues. It is called Braucherei or powwowing, and the people who do it almost always understand themselves as devout Christians, not as witches. They work with charms from Hohman's collection, with the laying on of hands, sometimes with a string or a written slip, often within the life of their own congregation. The folklorists David W. Kriebel and Patrick J. Donmoyer have documented living practitioners in Berks, Lancaster and Lebanon counties well into the twenty-first century.

Powwow sits in the same landscape as the painted barn stars of the region. Whether those hex signs were ever protective is contested — many families always said they were decoration "chust for nice" — but the charm books were never in doubt about their purpose.

In the German-speaking countries the line is thinner, but it has not broken. Charming away warts, stopping blood, "speaking" a burn: in rural Bavaria, Austria and Switzerland many families still know someone who can do this, or once could. It is usually passed on orally, often to a child of the opposite sex, frequently under the rule that no money may be taken for it.

That rule is remarkable. It draws a line the Romanusbüchlein itself does not know — and it is the reason the practice never fell into disrepute in many villages.

What we don't promise

We do not tell you that these formulas work. No study shows that a charm stops bleeding, averts a fire or closes a wound. What has been handed down is the practice, not its success.

We do not tell you they replace treatment. That is the most important line in this whole piece. Bleeding, burns, fever, infected wounds, sick animals: those belong with a doctor or a veterinarian, without ifs or buts — and in an emergency, 911. The people who used the Romanusbüchlein did not have that choice. You do.

We do not tell you this is ancient pre-Christian Germanic wisdom. The text is Christian, its forms are medieval European, its printing is early modern. Anyone selling it as pagan heritage is selling a nineteenth- and twentieth-century story, not the book.

And we do not recommend reciting the conjurations that address spirits or the Devil. Not because something would happen, but because historical sources are for reading, not re-enacting without knowing what you are getting into.

Practically: how to approach it

• Use an annotated edition. Adolf Spamer's historical and philological commentary, completed from his papers by Johanna Nickel and published in 1958, is still the foundation. Without commentary the formulas are mute: you cannot tell what is quotation, what is formula and what is a printer's error.
• Read the American side in English. Hohman's Long Lost Friend is in the public domain and widely reprinted; Daniel Harms's annotated edition (2012) marks which charms have European parallels.
• Put versions side by side. There is no single edition. Compare two printings and you see at once how these booklets grew: by omission, addition and copying with mistakes.
• Ask in your own family. This is the advice that yields the most and is taken least. If your family has Pennsylvania German, Swiss or Alsatian roots, ask grandparents and great-aunts while you can — for charms, for conditions, for the name of the person they learned them from.
• Separate reading from doing. A historical blessing book is a source, not a recipe booklet. If you want to do something yourself, do it deliberately and in your own words, not in someone else's whose context you do not know. Keeping your own book is the honest modern version.
• Keep the medical route open. Always. A charm closes no wound, and no slip under the threshold replaces a diagnosis.

Frequently asked questions

What exactly is the Romanusbüchlein?

A small printed blessing booklet from the German-speaking world with protective, healing and binding formulas for people and livestock. The earliest dated edition appeared in 1788 in Glatz (today Kłodzko, Poland). It is not a learned grimoire but everyday literature — short charms to be said, written down or carried when trouble came.

Where does the name Romanus come from?

That is not settled. Two explanations are offered: a person named Romanus who appears in the text and to whom the booklet was attributed, or a nod to the Roman Catholic origin of the formulas, which lean heavily on liturgical blessings. Both remain conjecture.

Is the Romanusbüchlein a Christian book or a magic book?

Both, and that is what makes it interesting. The language is Christian throughout — Trinity, saints, Amen — yet it also contains conjurations that address spirits and, in a few pieces, the Devil. Its users saw no contradiction; the split between prayer and magic is a label applied from outside.

What does it have to do with powwow and The Long Lost Friend?

Johann Georg Hohman, who emigrated to Pennsylvania in 1802, published Der lange verborgene Freund at Reading in 1820. Folklorists from Carleton Brown (1904) to Owen Davies have shown that much of it comes straight from the Romanusbüchlein. The "Pow-Wows" title was added in later nineteenth-century English printings and comes neither from Hohman nor from the German tradition.

Is the SATOR square in the Romanusbüchlein?

The word square SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS belongs to the standard stock of this blessing literature, where it appears as protection against fire, and Hohman prints it as a fire charm. Its trail runs back to Pompeii, which makes it one of the oldest continuously used protective signs in Europe.

Is powwow still practiced today?

Yes, in remnants. In parts of Pennsylvania Dutch Country it is called Braucherei or powwowing and is practiced within a Christian framework. In rural Germany, Austria and Switzerland, stopping blood and charming warts and burns are still known. It is passed on mostly by word of mouth, often with the rule that no money is taken.

Sources & further reading

• Adolf Spamer, Romanusbüchlein: Historisch-philologischer Kommentar zu einem deutschen Zauberbuch, completed from his papers by Johanna Nickel, Berlin 1958 (in German) — the standard scholarly treatment.
• Earliest dated edition: Glatz, 1788, printed by Franz Pompejus.
• Carleton F. Brown, "The Long Hidden Friend," Journal of American Folklore 17 (1904).
• Owen Davies, Grimoires: A History of Magic Books, Oxford University Press, 2009.
• Johann Georg Hohman, Der lange verborgene Freund, Reading, Pennsylvania, 1820; later English printings as The Long Lost Friend and Pow-Wows; or, Long Lost Friend. Annotated edition: Daniel Harms (ed.), The Long-Lost Friend: A 19th Century American Grimoire, 2012.
• David W. Kriebel, Powwowing Among the Pennsylvania Dutch, Penn State University Press, 2007; Patrick J. Donmoyer, Powwowing in Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center, Kutztown University, 2017.

This piece places a historical text in context. It contains no instructions and makes no promise of effect; the practices described are tradition and are not scientifically established. Questions about an order: 28@templeofdesire.com.