Wisconsin Folklore

29 Faith and Magic

29 Faith and Magic Magico-religious practices were once extremely widespread among Wisconsin's European ethnic peoples, nor have they subsided entirely. Such Catholic communities as Dickeyville, Forestville, Holy Hill, Loretto, Necedah, Rudolph, St. Joseph's Ridge, and Sinsinawa Mound, for example, include remarkable shrines and grottos, most of which are associated by the faithful with ongoing miraculous cures. (See Lisa Stone and Jim Zanzi, Sacred Spaces and Other Places: A Guide to Grottos and Sculptural Environments in the Upper Midwest[Chicago: The School of the Art Institute of Chicago Press, 1993]; and "Religious Folk Traditions," in Anne Pryor's unpublished Wisconsin Sesquicentennial Folklife Survey report, 1996, 10-26.) Before the spread of doctors, veterinarians, and scientiRc education into rural areas, former old-country peasants and their offspring frequently relied on a combination of home remedies, prayer, and sorcery to heal themselves and their livestock . Sometimes their curative measures counteracted the malignant efforts of a neighbor. In 1985 I interviewed Rosemary Korger Menard regarding her Bohemian grandparents, the Radas, who lived in rural Tilden, north of Chippewa Falls. Around 1900 old Mrs. Rubenzer, a "Magyar gypsy," was known locally as die alte hex (the old witch). According to family tradition, she would hex a Rada cow while standing on a hill, then offer Grandfather Rada a low price for his sick animal. Rather than sell, he paid Mrs. Rubenzer to cure the cow. She would talk to it soothingly, then pet it and the cow would be Rne. The Radas always suspected she rubbed the cow's muzzle with some concoction. (Tape-recorded interview with Rosemary Korger Menard at the home of her sister, Agatha Watson, Rice Lake, May 11, 1985.) The trio of accounts reprinted here, all from German Americans, extend from the Rnal decades of the nineteenth century to the 1930s. Leone Fischer Griesemer's "Hexing" concerns the experiences of her parents, Otto and Ella Mittelstadt Fischer, in the heavily German Mayville area of Dodge County. Mrs. Griesemer's mother (1872-1963) was also a Rne singer; she contributed more German songs than anyone else to the recordings of Wisconsin folk music made for the Library of Congress by Helene Stratman-Thomas in the 1940s. The Fischer family's reminiscences about the "black books" of Moses parallel those of Wisconsin Norwegians as reported by Thor Helgeson (see chapter 15, "Ghost Stories," pp. 149, 152; see also "The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses," in Thomas R. Brendle and William S. Troxell, Pennsylvania German Folk Tales, Legends, Once-upon-a-Time Stories, Maxims, and Sayings [Norristown, Pa.: Pennsylvania German Folklore Society, vol. L, 1944]). Alice Ottow and Bill Brandt, whose respective accounts follow Leone Fischer Griesemer's, were both students at the University of Wisconsin in the early 1950s. Besides the books of Moses and Christian prayers, their essays invoke the common magical practice of "transference" from the afflicted to some external object, and they also concern widespread folk practices of "wart doctoring" and bloodstopping (see Wayland D. Hand, Magical Medicine: The Folkloric Component of Medicine in the Folk Belief, Custom, and Ritual of the Peoples of Europe and America 323 Part Four. Beliefs and Customs [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980]; and Richard M. Dorson, Bloodstoppers and Bearwalkers [Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1952], 150-65). "Hexing" by Leone F. Griesemer is reprinted from Mama and Papa: A Personal Account of the Lives ofTwo German Immigrant Families in the Rural Wisconsin of 1869-1963 (self-published, 1988), 51-53. "Sorcery" by Alice Ottow is reprinted from a student paper written for an anthropology course at the University of Wisconsin, January 15, 1952; Badger Folklore Society Papers, box 2, folder N-S in the Archives of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. "Faith Healing Can and Does Work" by Bill Brandt is reprinted from a student paper written for an anthropology course at the University of Wisconsin, January 15, 1952; Badger Folklore Society Papers, box 2, folder C-J in the Archives of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. Hexing Leone F. Griesemer "Hexing" was one of the dreaded witch practices and very real to the early settlers, feared by young and old alike. It was believed to be those who owned the Seventh Book of Moses (the five accepted books are Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) could perform the acts or miracles attributed to Moses. This Seventh Book reputedly contained the secrets of Moses' miraculous powers of defense against the enemies of the Hebrew nation. Mayville's...