Long Lost Friend: Johann Georg Hohman

The Long Lost Friend, published in German as “Der Lange Verborgene Freund,” is a folk magick manual compiled and published in 1820 by Johann Georg Hohman, a German immigrant living in Reading, Pennsylvania. It is the foundational written text of Pennsylvania Dutch folk practice and one of the most significant American folk magick books of any tradition, running through more than a hundred editions and printings by the twentieth century. Hohman compiled what had circulated as oral tradition among German-speaking settlers: charms for healing, protection, luck, and daily practical difficulties, almost all of them expressed in a Christian framework of biblical names, psalm verses, and appeals to the Trinity.

The book was intended for ordinary people facing ordinary problems. Its charms address bleeding wounds, toothache, burns, warding off witchcraft, protecting animals from harm, gaining favour in legal proceedings, and stopping fire from spreading. Hohman did not present himself as an occultist or ceremonial magician; he positioned himself as a compiler of useful inherited knowledge.

History and origins

Johann Georg Hohman (1770-1846) was born in the German states and emigrated to Pennsylvania around 1802. He settled in Berks County, home to a large German-speaking immigrant population that maintained its own religious, cultural, and folk traditions well into the nineteenth century. The community carried with them a body of healing and protective practice rooted in German and Swiss folk medicine, the Lutheran and Reformed Protestant traditions, and remnants of pre-Christian folk belief.

Hohman drew on multiple written sources as well as the oral tradition he encountered. Scholars have identified borrowings from earlier German texts including Albert the Great”s “Albertus Magnus” (a different popular folk manual), various printed charm books, and devotional texts, but a significant portion of the charms appear to be the oral tradition of his community set down in print for the first time.

The English translation of 1846 made the text accessible to a wider American audience, and the book spread beyond Pennsylvania German communities into Southern Appalachian folk practice, African American communities, and eventually the broader American folk magick market. By the early twentieth century it was being sold by Hoodoo supply houses alongside rootwork materials.

In practice

The charms in the Long Lost Friend are brief, specific, and formulaic. A typical charm names the problem, invokes a divine name or biblical authority, states the desired outcome as a fact, and concludes with a sealing phrase such as “In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen.” The repetition structure (often three times, in keeping with both folk tradition and Trinitarian theology) appears throughout.

An example of the logic: the charm for stopping bleeding instructs the practitioner to say “Blood, stop thy flowing; not for my sake, but for God”s sake. Blood, stop thy flowing.” The words are addressed directly to the blood, treating it as a force that can hear and obey. This direct address is characteristic of the charm tradition across European folk practice.

Most charms do not require any material components beyond the spoken formula; a minority call for simple household materials, specific timing, or the making of a small amulet. This simplicity is part of what made the text so widely used: it required nothing a farmhouse would not have.

Legacy

The Long Lost Friend occupies an unusual place in American religious history because it sits at the intersection of Protestant Christianity and folk magic, two categories that mainstream culture treats as opposed. For Hohman and his community, they were not opposed: the power of the charms came from God, mediated through biblical names and the practitioner”s faith. This theological grounding allowed the book to circulate openly in communities that would have rejected a text presenting itself as pagan or occult.

Contemporary practitioners of Pow-Wow (Braucherei) regard the Long Lost Friend as a reference rather than a complete manual. The living tradition includes training, oral transmission, and a relationship with God (as understood in the tradition) that the printed text cannot convey on its own. Scholars of American religious history use it as a primary source for understanding the interaction of immigrant folk tradition with New World conditions. For modern folk magick practitioners outside the Pennsylvania German context, it provides insight into the logic and structure of charm-based practice that can inform their own work.

In myth and popular culture

The Long Lost Friend occupies a distinctive position in American religious history as a text that belonged simultaneously to a living faith tradition and to the commercial folk magic market. Its wide distribution through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often sold door-to-door or through small publishers catering to rural communities, made it one of the most widely distributed religious-magical texts in American history, achieving a distribution comparable to certain devotional almanacs.

The text’s place in the history of Pow-Wow (Braucherei) practice has been the subject of increasing scholarly attention since the late twentieth century. Folklorists including Don Yoder documented the practice and the role of the text in Pennsylvania German communities in the twentieth century, and Patrick Donmoyer’s scholarly edition of the text (published through the Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center at Kutztown University) has made careful historical analysis available alongside the charms themselves. This scholarly attention has helped preserve and contextualize the tradition for contemporary practitioners and researchers.

Appalachian folk magic, which is a distinct but related tradition to Pennsylvania Dutch practice, incorporated elements of Hohman’s text as it spread southward through immigrant communities. The cross-fertilization of Pennsylvania German, Scots-Irish, and African American folk traditions in the Appalachian region produced a rich folk healing and magical heritage in which the Long Lost Friend was one of several key textual sources alongside the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses and various devotional almanacs.

In the contemporary folk magic revival, the Long Lost Friend has attracted renewed interest among practitioners of traditional witchcraft, American folk magic, and rootwork who seek access to pre-modern charm traditions. Its availability in modern reprint makes it one of the more accessible primary sources in the field.

Myths and facts

Several common beliefs about the Long Lost Friend deserve examination.

• The text is sometimes described as a pagan grimoire in popular occult literature. It is not: Hohman was a devout Protestant Christian, and virtually every charm in the book invokes explicitly Christian divine names, biblical authority, or Trinitarian theology. The folk tradition it documents is Christian magic, not pagan or ceremonial magic.
• Some practitioners assume that the charms work automatically when read aloud. In the living tradition of Braucherei, the charms operate within a framework of genuine faith, trained spiritual authority, and ongoing practitioner-patient relationship. Reading a printed charm without this context is working with a text removed from the system that sustained it.
• Hohman is sometimes described as having created or invented the charms he published. The available scholarship indicates he compiled and printed what circulated as oral and manuscript tradition in his German-speaking community; he was a compiler rather than an originator.
• The common claim that the text was suppressed or banned is not well documented. It circulated widely and legally throughout the nineteenth century; the idea that it was a forbidden or secret text may reflect the more general popular notion that folk magic texts are inherently underground, which was not the case with this particular book.
• The Long Lost Friend is sometimes treated as the complete guide to Pow-Wow practice. Practitioners within the Braucherei tradition are clear that the living tradition includes much that the text does not contain, particularly the transmission of spiritual authority and the relational elements that make the practice effective.