Hexenmeister

A Hexenmeister is a German-language folk magician who specialises in the knowledge and working of hexes — both their creation and, more centrally to the social role, their removal and reversal. The title is both a description and a form of community recognition: the Hexenmeister is the person neighbours consult when illness, bad luck, or crop failure points to supernatural interference, and who has the knowledge and authority to diagnose and address it.

The role is ancient in its functional form, though the specific term “Hexenmeister” as a compound has been documented from the early modern period onward. The Hexenmeister stands within the broad European tradition of the cunning person — the village expert on the invisible causes of visible problems — but carries distinctly German character in its texts, methods, and cultural assumptions.

The work

The Hexenmeister’s practice centred on spoken and written charms, sympathetic magic, and a working knowledge of the properties of herbs, metals, and symbolic objects. Diagnosing a hex was a primary skill: determining whether a client’s misfortune was natural or supernaturally induced, and if the latter, identifying something of its nature or source. This diagnostic work relied on divination, often by reading the client’s condition against the Hexenmeister’s knowledge of what different types of hexes looked like in their effects.

Counter-hex work might involve physically reversing the harmful action (boiling the client’s urine with pins to send the hex back, burying a charm to intercept evil at the threshold), reciting verbal charms that commanded the hex to break, or producing a written talisman for the client to carry. The spoken charm was central to German folk magic and often drew on Christian frameworks — invoking the Trinity, saints, or Biblical passages — combined with older pre-Christian elements. This blend was practical rather than theologically self-conscious.

Protective charm-making was equally important. Hexenmeisters produced written documents called “Zettel” or charm-papers, sometimes verses or symbols drawn from the tradition of the grimoire, intended to protect homes, barns, children, and animals. These were placed in thresholds, sewn into clothing, or hung in buildings.

The Hexenmeister also performed healing work, using verbal charms for wounds, burns, toothache, erysipelas, and other common conditions. Some practitioners were skilled herbalists as well, and the line between magical and empirical medicine was not drawn in the tradition’s own understanding — both were available knowledge, and both were deployed.

History and tradition

The Hexenmeister tradition is rooted in centuries of German folk practice documented through court records, ecclesiastical complaints, printed charm books, and scholarly study. The earliest German cunning folk appear in records from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the tradition continued robustly into the twentieth century in rural areas.

The most important textual tradition associated with the Hexenmeister is the “Sechste und siebente Buch Mosis” (Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses), a grimoire that circulated widely in German-speaking regions from the eighteenth century and shaped practice across the tradition. John George Hohman’s “Der lange verborgene Freund” (The Long Lost Friend, 1820) represents the tradition’s transplantation into Pennsylvania Dutch culture and preserves many of the same charm structures.

Scholarly attention to German folk magic has increased considerably. Historians including Richard Kieckhefer have documented the deep roots of the charming tradition, and folklorists working in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries preserved oral and manuscript material from practicing Hexenmeisters and their communities.

The tradition spread with German emigration, most notably to Pennsylvania but also to parts of the American Midwest, South America, and Russia. These diaspora communities developed their own local variations while maintaining recognizable continuity with the German original.

Walking this path

Working as a Hexenmeister today means engaging seriously with the German folk-magic tradition on its own terms. The primary texts are accessible in translation — Hohman’s Long Lost Friend has several good English editions, and the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses has been published in translation — and contemporary scholarship provides context for understanding what these texts meant in practice.

The tradition is not initiatory in a formal sense. Historical Hexenmeisters learned through family inheritance, apprenticeship, self-study, or some combination. What qualified a person for the role was knowledge, demonstrated ability, and community recognition. These conditions can still be met.

The Hexenmeister role overlaps naturally with other folk-magic paths. Pennsylvania Dutch practitioners may find the Braucher or Pow-wow framework equally relevant, and many hold both identities. Those working in German-rooted traditions more broadly may find the Hexenmeister name useful for the counter-magic dimension of their practice. Most people in the folk-magic traditions hold several roles simultaneously, and the boundaries between them are deliberately permeable.

In myth and popular culture

German folk belief in the Hexenmeister and in the hexes they countered is richly documented in the folklore collections of the nineteenth century. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, who compiled their Kinder- und Hausmärchen beginning in 1812, drew on a world of folk belief in which magical harm and its reversal were taken seriously as everyday concerns. The wise old woman or cunning man who knows how to break a spell is a stock figure in many of the tales, functionally identical to the Hexenmeister even when the term is not used. The Grimm brothers were also scholars of Germanic mythology and folklore in the academic sense, and Jacob Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie (1835) is among the most important early attempts to systematically document the magical beliefs of German-speaking peoples, including the tradition of hex-breaking specialists.

In American history the Pennsylvania Dutch tradition produced one of the most famous real-world figures associated with Hexenmeister-adjacent practice: John George Hohman, the compiler of Der lange verborgene Freund (The Long Lost Friend, 1820). Hohman is not himself a dramatic figure, but his book became the central text of Pennsylvania Pow-wow practice and has remained in print continuously, making it one of the most durably influential folk-magic publications in American history. The tradition he documented surfaces in a darker register in John Blymire, a York, Pennsylvania, Pow-wow practitioner who in 1928 killed Nelson Rehmeyer, another local practitioner, believing Rehmeyer had hexed him. The case, known as the York Witch Trial, attracted national press attention and illustrated how seriously folk belief in hexes and their specialists persisted well into the twentieth century.

In fiction the ambiguous figure of the hex-master, skilled in both offensive and defensive magic, appears in several guises. Patrick Süskind’s novel Das Parfum (1985), though primarily a psychological thriller, creates a protagonist whose relationship to invisible forces and their manipulation evokes the folk-magic understanding of the Hexenmeister in a secular register. The American horror television series Grimm (2011-2017) draws on Germanic folk-creature mythology and features characters called Hexenbiester, loosely adapted from the Hexenmeister tradition, though the show uses the figure as a supernatural being rather than as the human community specialist the historical tradition describes.