Why the Doctor Sits

The tradition of Powwow is plain and simple. All that’s usually required for a working is a few words uttered with precision, perhaps a Bible, the sign of the cross, and the patient in a chair. The room isn’t necessarily decorated in a specific way, there is no recommended soundtrack, incense, or costume. The patient sits in the chair, the doctor says the charm, and the patient is sent home with faith and prayer, the elements that make a Powwow operation special.

What is the place then of meditation in the work of the Powwow doctor? If the words we use are already written, and God does all of the healing, does it matter what goes on inside of the powwower while they work, or at other times? I think it matters a great deal, and it might not be obvious why.

What the doctor is

Robert puts it nicely in one sentence in The Powwow Book of Divination:

A few lines later he names which part of us it is that does the work. It is not the hands or the voice, it is the mind:

Read that carefully. The power comes down. It starts in Heaven, in God’s and ends on Earth, at the hands and the patient. The powwower is the point it passes through. Nothing in the operative part, what makes a healing or other operation work or “stick,” is something the doctor owns or stores up. Robert says this plainly when he teaches students. It is God who brings about the change being asked for, not the powwower. We do not add “energy” of our own into the work, we do not call anything besides the Holy Trinity, and we are not trying to feel any particular thing or way outside of what God provides directly. We do the work and leave it to God, without ego or credit.

Then why sit at all?

If the power is God’s and the words are fixed, the doctor seems to contribute nothing beyond showing up and speaking the charm. But a bridge can be blocked, and there are a few things that can block the bridge on our side.

• The desire for credit. A powwower thinking look what I can do has put themselves in the middle of something that is not theirs, between the patient and God’s healing grace.
• The desire to “feel something”. Waiting for some sort of “sign” or “tingle” turns our attention inward, to our own experience, and away from God and the person in the chair. Robert tells of wondering, as a beginner, what being powwowed would feel like, expecting “some sort of ’tingle’ or ’energy’.” The answer, he writes, was that he “felt none of those things.” What the patient feels instead is quieter: “a sense of peace that your issue is now in God’s hands.”
• The scattered self. A powwower whose mind is elsewhere, on mundane details of life, on whether this will “work”, or on their own problems or a bad week, runs the risk of speaking the right words without being present in them.

None of these is a lack of power, or efficacy. Each one is the self getting in the way of the operation. Seen this way, the place of meditation in Powwow is not a way of getting more of anything. It is a daily practice that helps to get out of the way. Nothing about this is new. The Pennsylvania German stream has always put sincere prayer at the root of the work.

Karl Herr, in Hex and Spellwork (2002), gives one instruction before any charm. Anyone who wants to do this work should pray the Lord’s Prayer every morning and every night.¹ That was his father’s counsel to him as a boy, and the reason he gives is the heart of this series: it is how “the ability to pray sincerely to the Lord God is gradually developed.” The charms are applications of something, and that something is sincere prayer.

Go back further, to the hermits on the Wissahickon at the end of the 1600s, and you find Johannes Kelpius’s little book on inward prayer, printed in English in Philadelphia in 1761 as A Short, Easy, and Comprehensive Method of Prayer. Kelpius was not writing for scholars or monks. Inward prayer, he says, “suits all Persons, even the most simple and ignorant.” And he says what it is for: to bring us to the point where “we only will what God wills.” This last phrase is the condition Powwow asks of one who would presume to work as a doctor. A will that has been handed over to God’s will is a will that doesn’t block the bridge.

Three things the sitting does

When I say meditation in this series I mean something modest: a regular time set apart to be still before God, gather your attention, and perhaps pray. Why?

It quiets the self. Most of the work is subtraction: letting go of mundane concerns, of the wish to gratify the ego, of the need to “feel something” happen. Ten minutes of stillness each day is practice in setting yourself down, putting these things aside for the sake of our work. Then, when someone else is in the chair, setting yourself down is something you have done many times before, something you have practiced.

It gathers the attention. The words of a charm are not changed, and they are not mumbled. Robert, alone at home with a knee so bad he could barely stand, opened a book to an anti-swelling charm and, as he writes, “recited the charm like my life depended on it.” That is attention gathered into the words. A mind that has practiced coming back to one thing can be fully present for the recitation of a charm.

It teaches listening. Asked whether powwowers are psychic, Robert answers no. “That being said, we do hear the voice of God.” Hearing takes quiet. A powwower who never sits still has little chance of telling God’s guidance apart from their own noise.

Where to begin, today

Say the Lord’s Prayer every morning and every night, slowly, and mean each line. When you get to “Thy will be done,” stop for a breath and notice whether you mean it. That pause is where all the practice in this series begins.

May God bless the work of your hands, and the work of your mind.

✠ ✠ ✠
Arthur

Sources

• Robert Phoenix, The Powwow Book of Divination (2020), ch. 5, “The Powwow Stick,” pp. 70–73.
• Robert Phoenix, “What does Powwow ‘FEEL’ like?” (2023); “Are Powwows Psychic?” (2023); “Powwowing yourself” (2021); “The Sanctum Sanctorum” (2019); Tools.
• John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, vol. 2, Mentor, Message, and Miracles (Doubleday, 1994), on Jesus and John the Baptist.
• Karl Herr, Hex and Spellwork: The Magical Practices of the Pennsylvania Dutch (Weiser, 2002).
• Johannes Kelpius (attr.), A Short, Easy, and Comprehensive Method of Prayer (Philadelphia, 1761); modern edition: Kirby Don Richards, A Method of Prayer: A Mystical Pamphlet from Colonial America.