John George Hohman's Pow Wows: An American Grimoire - Now Available!

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John George Hohman's "Pow Wows" is one of the best occult texts I've edited. Dating to the 1820s, it was spawned by the Pennsylvania Dutch folk traditions of the era, and may be variously seen as Americana, German-derived occultism, a grimoire, or a snake oil combination of herbal and prayer book.

Within this edition I retained the publishers' inclusions (which Hohman did not write) because they were present in the first edition, but removed the long and largely pointless running index, which for some odd reason was at the end of the work when it ought to have been included as a condensed table of contents.

The material covers herbal medicine, folk healing, prayers and invocations, a few magickal formulae, the construction of a couple of simplistic talismans (on paper) and protective spells, as well as hex breaking.

100 pages.

Hohman's Pow Wows (or; Long Lost Friend)

Now that the Universal Fortune Teller of Mrs. Bridget is complete, it's time for a new edited work; and thankfully this time it's in semi-modern English and comes from the United States.

Hohman's "Pow Wows" has nothing at all to do with Mesoamerican ritualism; which is funny given the connotations of the title- instead, it's a fusion system between German ritualism (influenced, as I will explain, by French ritualism) and Americana, a Pennsylvania Dutch tradition from the dawn of the 1800s.

The work itself is about the same length as, and contains some material similar to, the Petit Albert of 1700s era French renown- in my estimation the French cycle has influenced the content of this work, based on its eerie level of similarity- although it is within the realm of possibility that the similarities are due to traditions which were simply popular enough to have spread around Europe; after all, there's no certainty that all content in the Petit Albert originated in France (indeed, it mentions Hungary and other regions explicitly for a few of its passages.) It's broken into similar sections and covers similar maladies such as the bite of mad dogs (rabies of course) and headaches, hysteria, and other conditions.

One part herbal, one part prayer/incantation booklet, and one part folkish tradition, this rivals the Petit Albert for "most in depth ritual system" I have ever edited. It is likely that I will list this with the grimoires, since that is essentially what it is, even if it is also technically a work of folk magick.

I expect that it will be around 110 to 120 pages when completed, and it's quite a nice work.