This is Ozarks at Large. I’m Jack Travis. Justin Minor is a cultural anthropologist and a seventh-generation Ozark native. He volunteers at the Fort Smith National Historic Site and recently gave a talk about Ozark folk magic at the Fort Smith Museum of History. Ozarks at Large’s Grace Penry and I invited him back to the Carver Center for Public Radio for a discussion about superstitions and folk practices.
Justin Minor: I learned most of what I know from author Vance Randolph and got exposed to Randolph’s work a few years back when I began at Fort Smith and I started looking into our more local history. I’ve always been kind of history-minded, but I’ve always been interested in it kind of broader, say, in a national, broader overview.
But when I started volunteering down at the Fort, I was like, okay, I’ve got to bring it here. I’ve got to localize this and start learning about this. As soon as you start trying to learn about the history of the Ozark Mountains, the River Valley, he’s one of the first guys you’re going to run into because he was, I mean, he’s really the only kind of ethnographer that we had in this area.
When I say ethnographer, in cultural anthropology that’s basically someone who, in that time frame, the proper idea was to go live within the culture, and then you experience the culture, and then you can write about the culture. And it’s rife with its own set of problems when you have people going to Africa or wherever else.
But for Randolph, he was really perfectly situated because he was an outsider, so he could have an outsider’s perspective. But he married into Ozark families, and he lived here for 30, 40, 50—I don’t know—30 or 40 years off and on. And he got to know everyone, and he got accepted somewhat as an insider. So he was kind of perfectly situated to record what life was like in the Ozarks in the ’30s and ’40s. But that’s where it kind of started—was with that.
Travis: What do you like about it? It’s called Ozark Superstitions, right?
Minor: The original printing was, and then it was reprinted, I think, in ’64, which is the copy I have, which is Ozark Magic and Folklore. I believe that’s the second printing name, but yes.
Travis: What do you like about that? But what do you not like about it? What do you wish that he had maybe spent some more time on?
Minor: Man, that’s a tough question because he was thorough. Randolph was thorough. He had, apparently, Rolodexes of just little things that he had—he heard this over here in this holler, and he heard this from this family, and he had a comprehensive amount of information. So when you go through it, it’s kind of mind-bending how much information he recorded.
If he had focused maybe more on—well, you know, it would have been fascinating to me had he realized that the particular brand, so to speak, of what we called, or he called, a power doctor in the Ozarks was actually from Pennsylvania Dutch Powwow.
Had he got that link—because he was a smart guy, he was a very intelligent man—had he gotten that link, I think we would have had a much better, maybe even recording of what was happening. Because had he had that framework to view it through as opposed to just, “oh, here are the things they’re doing and I’m writing it all down.” But had he been able to see, “oh, this actually comes from a tradition.” It would have been interesting to see if he had recorded more of it and had a better context for recording it.
Travis: You made that link, though?
Minor: Yes.
Travis: Tell me more about that. That was something that really struck me during our conversation. I really wanted to ask more about it. Can you just, I mean, just start from the beginning?
Minor: That one’s interesting, too, and this is all super dense material, so I’m going to try to keep it condensed. I know we only have so much time to talk, right?
Pennsylvania Powwow essentially comes to America with what they call the Pennsylvania Dutch. But William Penn’s colony, Pennsylvania, was the most religiously open. It was the most tolerant. As long as you essentially believed in the Christian God, you could worship in any way you wanted. Which is not fully tolerant, but still, for that time, it was very tolerant.
So a lot of folks from Europe focused on Pennsylvania because you had Moravians, the Amish, the Mennonites,
Travis: The Quakers, right?
Minor: the Quakers. That’s where a lot of that comes into America from Europe.
And so they call it Pennsylvania Dutch, but that’s not fully proper because they weren’t all German. It wasn’t really from the Netherlands—it’s not even fully German—but it’s a lot from Germany and Austria and Hungary. It’s a very broad range of people.
But essentially—because you almost have to say this to make it make sense- it starts in Europe, pre-Christian times, where people are basically worshiping with the seasons and the cycles, and everything works around the natural world and balance with the natural world. And there would have been incantations and there would have been concoctions of things that you pulled together, like, “oh, this medicine works out of this root.”
But then you reach the High Middle Ages, and suddenly the church is not so cool with people doing things that are not church things. And so we get to the witch panics of Europe, and you have the Scottish witch trials and the European witch trials.
So essentially what they did was, they didn’t quit doing their lifeways that they had done for generations. They just took the top off of it and covered it in a coating of Christianity. Where you have a lot of the words and incantations come from, they’ll be marked with, you know, “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” or “the three highest names in the Bible.”
So what they did is they put a nice coating of Christianity over the top but kept practicing what they were practicing. And you get this amalgam blend.
I don’t like the word pagan because that was something that the Christian world placed onto them, and it inherently makes it sound like, “oh, they worship the devil,” which they didn’t. They had no concept of ultimate evil. It was a continuum—balance with nature. There is no ultimate evil being.
When Christianity assigned it to them as, “oh, you worship the devil” —because that’s the ultimate evil in that belief system that had taken over Europe. And they were like, “oh can’t do that, can’t be workshopping the devil.” They had to basically put that veneer over it of, we’ll do it the Christian way. We’re going to put the names of God in here.And so they essentially morphed the two together, and it becomes its own brand.
When it makes it into the U.S. that’s sort of what we’re working with. It would almost have to—I would almost have to explain a whole incantation to you. But one, for example, might be for a burn, and this is big in Pennsylvania powwow. The burn would be—you would say, “Two angels came down, one named Fire, one named Frost. Out goes fire, in comes frost.” And you blow on that burn as you say the last word, “frost.” But then you put in there, “In the name of the three highest names in the Bible,” or something like that.
So it’s the same thing, but you’ve put Christianity into it. And so the church was more okay with it. That’s what Dutch powwow kind of is. It’s a very broad mix. And that’s one of the things with folk magic—it’s anything and everything, and it’s up to the practitioner. You can add stuff, you can take away stuff. Even into the modern day, magical practitioners are like, “yeah, here’s a framework, and you can follow the framework, but do what you want with it.”
It’s more about you than the thing that you’re doing. The ritual is important. but it’s not prescribed. You don’t have to do every step—you can change the steps if you want. You can add a different thing. If you don't like this stone, you can add that stone. If you don't like this route, you can add that route. So it's a little bit amorphous, if that makes sense. It's like I said, it's a very particular brand, the Pennsylvania Powwow. And I know I run long. It's so hard to explain it all in a short amount of time.
It’s also not proper to call it powwow, though we kind of have to. Because it’s the only way anyone knows it. But powwow was actually a derogatory term, by likening it to the Indigenous peoples of America. We have no real link that there’s any Indigenous medicine linked into Pennsylvania Dutch Powwow. People have said that, but scholars that look at it can’t find anything that’s there.
Plus the folks that lived in that region by the time the Germans are there and anyone of European descent in this time frame, they're pretty much already gone. There's not really anyone left to teach those traditional indigenous ways with the land for that cultural- what's the word? I just went blank. Cultural transmission. You'll get acculturation where the things blend. Cultural exchange. There's not a whole lot of people left to even have that exchange.
So it was the establishment’s way—because even though the government of Pennsylvania was cool with it, you still had Catholics, you still had Protestants, you still had church authority that wielded, a lot of times, more power in a community than the broader government did. Because they're right there, near and present.
So you had to hide this stuff just a little bit under the surface and keep them happy. And so you end up with this group of folks that go, oh, those are the powwowers. And what it was, was a derogatory remark saying, they’re like the savage Indigenous people who don’t know God.
So to say powwow—it was literally an epithet. It was a derogatory remark. And we still use it today because no one knows it any other way.
How do you really describe it? Otherwise, but I think it's important to point out it's not proper terminology because it would just be like if someone used my ethnicity or yours as a slur. But that's again, my usual long winded way of explaining.
Pennsylvania Dutch Powwow is an amalgam of really it’s shamanistic beliefs that are practiced all over the world. It’s about being in balance with nature. It’s about using nature for yourself.
But when we get to that point in history where Christianity says, “You guys can’t do that anymore, you’ve got to get in line with us,” they still practiced the practices, but suddenly we get an infusion of Christian beliefs within it, and that kind of becomes what becomes Dutch Powwow proper in Pennsylvania.
Penry: You’ve talked a lot about how magic in the Ozarks has been kind of pulled from a lot of other traditions. Did you find that there’s anything specifically unique to the way magic is practiced in the Ozarks? Or any way in which people adapted to the landscape here specifically?
Minor: You know, I don’t know if I saw anything that I noticed that comes out as uniquely Ozark, because what we could say is that it did become an amalgam of all of these things.
Like when you're in the Northeast before it makes it to here the, say, the Powwow tradition specifically that stayed very tightly within the families and the communities that knew it and practiced it, you could that was a very secretive tradition because of how much trouble you could run into with the local, say, church authorities or the religious authorities. And so it's very quiet.
You only could share it with three people before you lost the charm. That was one of the things that's believed within it. And it had to go across sexes. If you were a male and you knew it, you had to teach it to a female, which is super fascinating. Because it ensured that no one had any ultimate power. No one gender had ultimate power, like there was an equal number always of people that were practitioners. It could be male or female and it had to go. When you passed it, it had to be to someone of the opposite sex. It was very insulated as what it was there. When it makes it here.
This is really interesting. Now that you say that you're making me think about this, it probably is in the Ozarks. It is that it's the amalgam of so many things. Because one thing I did when you look through Randolph’s book, he’s got it broken into chapters. There’s mountain medicine, there’s power doctors, there’s witchcraft proper—which we think of as the bad witch, the malicious witch.
He has all these different chapters. And one thing I noticed was in the superstitions chapter—or, things that come across as household superstition—which is still magic, by the way. Like you throw salt over your left shoulder if you spill it, right? That’s a physical ritual in the real world that’s supposed to affect a supernatural outcome. That’s still magic.
Eating black-eyed peas on New Year’s is still a ritual that you’re hoping will bring you some kind of supernatural favor throughout the year. So even though we think of them as very simple superstitions, there are magical components to them.
Those kinds of superstitions, so to speak, were very Scots-Irish. All of them go straight back into Scottish beliefs where people in Scotland today still practice lots of those. “Don’t step out of bed on the left foot first.” “Don't go out the same door you enter a house.” That one's a little more obscure, but there are things that seem superstitious. Very Scots-Irish.
The power doctor, specifically, Pennsylvania Dutch. That's what it is. It is powwow magic. The power doctor chapter—specifically Pennsylvania Dutch. That’s what it is. It is powwow magic. The power doctor chapter is powwow magic. I found 12 word-for-word straight out of an 1820 grimoire written in Pennsylvania by a German immigrant named John George Hohman.
It was what we call a grimoire today, and it’s kind of a book of what the church authorities would call forbidden knowledge. It’s like, okay, that’s not Bible stuff, so you can’t have it.
It becomes a very secretive thing, And so it becomes a very secretive thing. Families wouldn't even talk about owning a copy. You could buy them at the store because it's America, right? We were free even then. And you had freedom of press. You could buy it, but to have it could find you ostracized from your community in a lot of trouble.
And so it was a very secretive thing, but it was a very specific way of practicing, and it was very held within families and communities. By the time it makes it to us, I guess, it’s still secretive. Randolph—even he didn’t make this link, I think because they were so secretive about what exactly they were doing.
But it’s enough that folks—it started to bleed into the population enough that Randolph finds out about it, enough of it to be able to record it. For us to be able to make the link today and go, “oh, look, this is what they were doing.” It's just no one had ever yet noticed that this book was essentially this chapter of Vance Randolph's work.
And then the stuff that comes from the Lowcountry of South Carolina, from the Gullah Geechee people—like the black-eyed peas. Also, like here in Arkansas, a lot of people—I was surprised how many had known this—I asked them, raise hands at the program, how many people have ever seen a ceiling of a porch painted blue? And a lot of people raised their hands.
Travis: My mom’s is.
Minor: Yeah, there you go. The reason it’s painted blue is in African spirituality, spirits—specifically bad spirits—are not supposed to be able to cross bodies of water. So you paint the ceiling of your porch blue to confuse the spirits and think they can’t come into your house.
That’s also where the cobalt blue bottle trees come from. Have you ever seen blue bottles on a tree in front of someone’s house? That’s the same idea. Comes from the same place.
Travis: Haints.
Minor: Yeah, they’re haints—haint blue, right? That’s where those things come from.
So I think all of those things came together in the Ozarks to form what, in my mind, is all very separate because I see it from that anthropology point of view.
It’s like, “oh, well, this was this, and this was this, and this was this.” But I had missed stepping back and going, but everyone practiced all of them. So it became its own belief system that has all of these components as a part of it, and they get intermeshed. So that may be, you know, long, roundabout way. The answer to your question of nothing particularly new came out of it. Except for that it all came together.
Travis: That was cultural anthropologist Justin Minor. You can hear more from Minor on his podcast Wayward Stories. Just search Wayward Stories wherever you get your podcasts.
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