Untitled - Awaken Video

Chapter 7. At the Well of Urð 181
practice this art-form swear by its effects, as do the religious folk with their prayers,
hypnotists and their clients by mesmerism, positive thinkers by their affirmations
and Neurolinguistic Programmers by NLP. Whatever the reality of magic is, many
people are obviously comforted by it, and a comfortable life is what most really seek.
The tradition of creating hex-signs is ancient and has continued into this century
relatively unbroken in conservative areas like Pennsylvania and some of the other,
surrounding states in the northeastern United States where there is a large population
of people with Germanic ancestry. Good Hexemeeschder, as the makers of
hex-signs are called in Pennsylvania Dutch are called, are few and far between in
this day and age although Reconstructionists can be found fairly easily.
Lee Gandee was a practicing Hexemeeschder in rural West Virginia and authored
the book called Strange Experience 13 . In this autobiography, sadly no longer in
print, he explains in a typical Germanic fashion that the purpose behind the creation
of a hex-sign was the same as that behind saying a prayer, so that the Powers
outside the scope of man could hear and intervene on the individual’s behalf. In a
chapter entitled “The Strangest Prayers are Painted,” he explains the construction
of the Germanic hex-sign which includes the painted portion of the hex, the “painted
prayer,” but also spoken and written prayers.
Progressing backwards in time, in 1819, John George Hohman wrote Der Verborgene
Freund or Pow-wows or the Long, Lost Friend, which is a manual still in
print and still in use in the eastern portion of the United States. Although this small
book contains no Pennsylvania type hex-signs as described 14 by Gandee in Strange
Experience, the construction of the charms have the same three-fold format: drawn
(not painted), spoken and written. Of course, the charms were originally written
in German with a Christian slant, but many of the techniques utilized such as the
times for the administration of medicines or the “use of limbs growing from the
eastward side of the tree, cut before the sun’s rise” have direct parallels in the
Anglo-Saxon leechbook known as the Lacnunga written around 1000 CE. 15 There
are many aspects of the Germanic Heathen tradition which have suffered gaps in
time, but the creation and use of Germanic charms has come through an unbroken
line starting far back in the Heathen Age although most of the charms as they have
been documented are colored by a very thin veneer of Christianity.
In 1989, Stephen Flowers (a.k.a. Edred Thorsson) translated The Galdrabók,
an Icelandic manuscript written between 1550 and 1650 CE, from Icelandic into
13 This book is sadly out of print but was originally published by Reward Books, Englewood
Cliffs, NJ, in 1971.
14 Hohman, John Geo. Der Verborgene Freund or Pow-wows or the Long, Lost Friend (Fulton
Religious Supply Co.; Brooklyn, NY) not dated.
15 See Chap. 3, the discussion of the Acre-bot, regarding the history of the manuscript called
the ”Lacnunga.”