Faith – In God
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| This image came from Mary Drum’s Bible given to her by her husband, Nathan A. Drum on Christmas 1895.[1] |
In our previous
Faith-related posts, we looked at the Drums and their choices of theological
systems through which to worship God, German Reformed or Methodist. It is
somewhat curious to note that, to my knowledge, and I may be wrong about this,
only those of “us” who lived in Conyngham chose the Lutheran system. I am
actually only aware of George W. Drum being Lutheran [for further discussion on this point see note 2 below].
He is listed as a Lutheran in the Valley Vigilant tribute published in
1913.[3]
I have even less information for the other “Conyngham Drums”. As for the rest
of “us”, I don’t believe any of the Drums of the past aligned with any theological
system other than Reformed or Methodist in order to practice “our” religion.
Faith, however, is something different. It comes in many forms. Faith, religious
faith, that is, does not always have to have the walls of a structure, such as
a church, to exist. It does not even require the parameters and protocols set
down by a specific theology. Faith is something that is a much deeper part of
the human experience.
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| This is the hat box that holds the odd collection of receipts, newspaper clippings, recipes, account books, and so forth collected over time that I am often referring to. “Reio” is a brand of cigar and that cigar box holds a pocket watch, bankbook, and a few other, similar, items. |
Hidden among the statements, bills, deeds, receipts,
letters, newspaper clippings, and so forth saved in a hat box over the years by
various Drums and their extended-family members, a collection that goes as far
back as 1800, was one document that made little sense to most who looked at it
in these “modern” times. However, upon closer examination, this little document
turned out to be perhaps the most intriguing and telling of them all - a testament of sorts to faith!
It is an 8” x 10” piece of lined paper folded in half.
Embossed in the upper left-hand corner, beside the fold, hardly visible, is
what appears to be the U.S. Capitol in the 1850’s, although I have no idea what
this has to do with it, if anything at all! Two passages are written on the
page in quill or metal dip-pen. It is not signed. A receipt found in this same
“collection” is written on similar lined paper, minus the embossed image and
much lighter in color. Here is, first, the receipt.
The receipt is dated June 12, 1862 and written to Thomas
Santee by (what looks like) Conrad Uplinger. Although the handwriting is
similar on both documents, there is no way of knowing if they were both written
by the same hand. Is the fact that they are similar, however, a way of dating
the Powwow document?
Here is the Powwow. The
passages seem to be written in a German dialect as follows.
Powow for Swinny
German
Swinny eck schware dech
aus. aus dam mark in den
knochan. aus dan knochan
ins flaesch. aus dam flaesch
ins blud. aus dam blud in
dea hand. aus dar hand in
dea hohr. aus dan hohr
seban und sebandsech glafder
deaf in den ard.
Powow for a wound
Unsar Har Easus Chrestus
hat fela wundan. sol necht
haetarn. sol necht schwaran.
sol dan Haeland hileu bes auf dan
grund.
Using language translation technology available in today’s world
(Google Translate, etc.), I tried to translate these passages. Unfortunately,
those technologies failed me! Unable to translate them on my own, I contacted a
university professor of German and asked her if she would translate the
passages for me. She too found them to be challenging! She, in turn, sent them
on to a colleague who ALSO had trouble fully translating them but came closer
than either of us had gotten. She was the first to identify the passages as
spiritual healing devices! She felt that they were “cures” perhaps written for
an individual named Swinny German, “Swinny” probably being a nickname or term
of endearment and “German”, a common last name in eastern Pennsylvania, being
the person’s last name. The question then became, “Who was Swinny German?”
A “cure”! So, these passages are prayers one recites, or
someone says for you, that will cure or heal a person, or, as at least one of
these turned out to be for, an animal. The prayer, alone, doesn’t do the trick,
however. The prayer is just one step, one element, in a process that usually
involves gestures, actions (such as burying a lock of hair), procedures (such
as repeating the prayer three times), timed according to moon phases or similar
natural occurrences, and so forth. It is a tradition that is centuries old
called Powwowing,
or, in the language of the Pennsylvania Germans, Braucherei[4].
The process combines religious elements with ritual elements to produce a
desired result such as healing or providing protection.[5]
It is a very secretive practice whose traditions are
usually passed orally rather than in writing.[6]
I believe this may partly be due to its sometimes being seen NOT as the work of
God but as that of the Devil. With ignorance comes fear and with fear comes
violence so it is often best to keep such things to oneself. This feeling can
be seen in a story one life-long Drums resident, Linda Fuehrer Yanac, shared
with me of her being powwowed as a child. Her story is somewhat unusual because
it does not include reciting prayers or some of the other ritual elements that
are usually part of powwow experiences.
A typical powwow experience unfolds something like the
following, described in the book Powwowing in Pennsylvania: Braucherei and
the Ritual of Everyday Life by Patrick J. Donmoyer. [7]
Under the light of the full moon, my great-grandfather took his knife
and cut a potato in half. The cross-section shone in the moonlight, as he
whispered a prayer in Pennsylvania Dutch, and began to rub a wart on my
grandmother’s hand with the potato. He repeated this three times, before
putting the halves back together, and burying them under the downspout at the
eaves of the farm house. My grandmother was just a little girl, but she
recalled that within a few days, her wart had vanished.
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| Linda Fuehrer Yanac |
I was six or seven years old at the time. I got a wart on my little
finger of my right hand, last joint, on the top, just before the nail. And it
was annoying because there was a lump. So, I showed it to my mother (Carrie
Fuehrer) and she said we would have to go see old Mr. Boock. He lived in
Sugarloaf, just across the line with Butler Township, on Foothills Drive. My
mother said “I don’t know that I agree with this stuff, it’s the work of the
Devil, but it works.” So, we went to his house and went in. Mr. Boock looked at
my finger and then went and got a potato. He cut the potato in half, took my
hand, and rubbed the wart with the potato. As he did this he was saying to me,
“As I’m rubbing this potato, you have to believe. I’m going to bury this potato
and when it rots in the ground the wart will be gone. You have to believe this.
Do you believe it?” Well I was just a little girl! When an older person tells
you something and you’re just a little girl, well, you believe it! So, I said,
“yes, I believe.” And that was it. On the way home, my mother sternly told me,
“Don’t you tell anybody I took you there or what we did.” And it worked!
In a month the wart was gone!
During a conversation I had on July 9, 2018 with Linda’s
mother, Carrie Fuehrer, then 91 years old[9],
Mrs. Fuehrer said she remembered the incident and confirmed she still believed
this work to be “that of the Devil.” According to Mrs. Fuehrer, Mr. Boock was
not the spiritual healer, that he was “filling in” on this occasion. His mother
was the one who usually performed these Healings. This may account for why the
session was not conducted in the usual traditional manner.
I was stunned such devices, “healing Powwow prayers”,
would be found among papers collected by my ancestors. Nothing like this was
ever discussed, that I can remember, when I was growing up. This “Powwow” thing
was all new to me! To my knowledge, I was never “Powwowed”; the word was never
used. Yet, as I learned more about this tradition, I realized how much of this
tradition was a part of my life. My dad did plant certain things only at
certain times of the year. One was to follow a specific procedure for drinking
water in order to stop a case of hiccups (seven gulps repeated three times). A
letter “from God” was found among the collection of Drums’ papers that
prescribed being copied and carried on your person as a protection from harm.
.
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| Mom’s Horseshoe, prongs up. Note the sleigh Bells hung over the door as well |
I remember a long discussion that verged on being
“heated”, over how a horseshoe should be hung over a door. My father and
grandmother argued it needed to be hung with the prongs pointing down so the
“luck would pour out over everyone who entered or left” via that door. My mom,
whose father was of German descent, but whose very superstitious mother was of Hungarian
descent, argued it needed to be hung prongs up “so the luck does not pour out
and be lost”! Of course, as usually goes with moms, Mom won and the shoe has hung
prongs up ever since, there yet today. Every time Ella looked at it she’d shake
her head and say, “No wonder we don’t have any luck.” Dad just chuckled.
My mom wrote a book about her mom’s life and her own
childhood and life. In discussing my dad after they were married, she doesn’t
mention horseshoes, but she does mention his making sauerkraut. Her notes included,
“The old people would always say sauerkraut can be
made any time of year, under any Zodiac Sign, except not the fish or
the waterman. Also, it has to be made in the sign of the moon turned up.” I
thought it was a joke when I first read it and she may have been skeptical,
herself. However, now I sense it had a foundation in the Pennsylvania German
Powwow traditions!
Wanting to learn more about my “Powow for Swinny German”
document, I contacted Patrick Donmoyer at the Pennsylvania German Cultural Center of
Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. He corrected several errors; such
as it was not for a person named “Swinny German”; and filled in the gaps. In a
note he sent to me on January 13, 2017, he said,
I am very familiar with the material that is written here …The cure
that you have at the top of the page is for “sweeny”, which is an atrophy of
the shoulder, usually in draft horses, causing them to be unable to work. This
was believed to be a spiritual entity that lived deep within the marrow of the
animal, and your manuscript (commands it) to come “out of the marrow and into
the bone, out of the bone and into the flesh, out of the flesh and into the
blood, out of the blood and into the skin, out of the skin and into the hair,
out of the hair and into the earth, 77 fathoms deep.” This progression is
actually a variation of one of the earliest known verbal blessings used for
healing horses, dating back as early as the 10th century, entitled
“Merseberger incantation.” Over time, this incantation changed and was adapted
to a Christian culture and used widely throughout Europe. Presumably, the 18th
century immigrants from central Europe that came to Pennsylvania brought a
variation with them that was widely circulated in Pennsylvania.
The second one is also familiar to me, and spelling in this document
indicates that these powwow prayers were passed through oral tradition before
being written down. It is also possible that the writer did not speak or read
any German, which is why the instructions have the word “German” as a subtitle
for the previous entry on sweeny (spelled Swinny in the document). The second
prayer is based on the old idea that the wounds of Christ are invoked for
healing. The prayer essentially says, “Our Lord Jesus Christ had many wounds.
They shall not fester, they shall not putrefy. They shall (depart) from our
savior into the ground.” …The word “Haetern” is spelled in other documents
“eitern” – which means to fester, to ulcerate, to suppurate. This word may have
been challenging to the other translators you contacted.
Thanks again for sharing your powwow manuscript with us – it’s a gem!
The only questions left now are how old the document
really is, and which member of the ancestry acquired it (or wrote it,
perhaps?)? The collection of papers it was found in came from various family‑tree
sources – Drum’s, Santee’s, Balliett’s, Schaffer’s – we cannot be sure which
one contributed this document. It is, however, a testament to a faith in God
that is far deeper than even that which one finds in church. It is a faith so
deep, it helps to explain how these people were able to leave their homeland,
overcome the odds, prosper, and carry us forward into the world we know today.
For our next post, we go back in time again to have a
look at the Drums at war! On June 3, 2019, return to the Drums of Drums, PA to
begin the war discussion with: Revolutionary
to Civil, Its WAR!
[1]
Citation for Mary Drum’s Bible:
Williams, Prof. S. W., The Pronouncing Edition of
the Holy Bible Containing the Authorized and Revised Versions of the Old and
New Testaments, arranged in Parallel Columns, Giving the Correct Pronunciation
of Every Proper Name Contained in the Bible. (Phila.: A.J. Holman and Co.,
LTD, 1895)
[2]
[3]
“Conyngham’s Grand Old Man Dead, Honorable George W. Drum is no more – was the
town’s oldest native citizen” Valley Vigilant, November 14, 1913. P 23
[4] pronunciation
of the word is "BROW-khe-RYE" with a primary stress on BROW and a
secondary stress on RYE. The "khe" is a phoneme that does not exist
in most English dialects (it is most often heard in parts of Scotland). This is
a guttural sound formed in the back of your mouth, top of your throat, that is
similar to the sound that is made by trying to clear your throat.
[5] Donmoyer, Patrick J., Powwowing in Pennsylvania:
Braucherei and the Ritual of Everyday Life (Kutztown, PA: The Pennsylvania
German Cultural Heritage Center, Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, 2018) p
23.
[6] Donmoyer,
p 14
[7] Donmoyer,
p 13
[8]
Linda Fuehrer Yanac interview conducted April 9, 2018.
[9]
Carrie E. Fuehrer passed away on January 13, 2019, having lived 92 years, most
of which were lived in Drums.
