Summary
Jens and Frigga talk with Rob Schreiwer about Urglaawe, the Pennsylvania Dutch version of Heathenry.
Recorded in the Yule period, a few days before New Year’s Eve 2024.
The Wyrd Thing Podcast Epidode 27: Urglaawe
00:00:10
Jens: Hello! Welcome to the Wyrd Thing podcast, episode 27. I’m your host Jens. My co-host today is Frigga.
00:00:17
Frigga: Hello.
00:00:18
Jens: And our special guest today is Robert Lusch Schreiwer. Hi, Rob.
00:00:23
Rob: Hello. I’m the weird thing of the day.
00:00:26
Jens: Yeah. Rob is very well known for his activities in The Troth. He was several years in the heathen community. But today we’re going to talk about a more personal topic to you, which is Urglawe. Urglaawe. I think.
00:00:41
Rob: And the second time you got it right.
00:00:45
Jens: Yeah. Urglaawe. Okay. And I think we can jump right in and I’ll ask you: What is Urglaawe?
00:00:55
Rob: One of our newspapers describe Urglaawe as the sound a peasant’s throat makes when you stab it with the spear, and the expressions you’re both making are exactly what I saw when I saw a newspaper saying that. But then they went on to say it also is Pennsylvania Dutch for the primal or early religion. And my elevator speech is that Urglaawe is a modern iteration of the ancient Germanic religion, as seen through the lens of the Pennsylvania Dutch culture. That means we take things that are in our culture. We find that the old superstitions, myths, legends, stories that are still alive within our culture and they’re actually far more than I thought, because we have two traditions, Braucherei and Hexerei, which are healing and magical practices that have these bodies of oral lore and charms and chants that provide a lot of information to us that really hasn’t been written down much until this generation.
00:01:50
Jens: Thank you. I think I need to step in a little bit because you could go on unstopped and I’ll try to structure this a little bit.
00:01:58
Frigga: Yeah. And before you move on, please explain why this Pennsylvania Dutch to a Dutch.
00:02:06
Rob: Pennsylvania Dutch. That term has confused people for, you know, hundreds of years. And you’ll see all sorts of descriptions for it. Like they’ll say that that the English heard the word Deutsch and thought it was Dutch. And so they got confused. They weren’t that stupid. Plus, our our ancestors also knew where they came from. And it’s not a corruption of anything, but it is that the English word Dutch changed meaning. The word Dutch in English used to have a much broader meaning, and included all the Germanic peoples from the shores of the Netherlands down to the Alps and, you know, even in Austria. So Pennsylvania Dutch is actually retaining that older meaning, meaning that these settlers who came from the Germanic lands to ports in Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York, and, uh, New Orleans, primarily with other places as well, between 1683 and the beginning of the War of 1812. So we are people from the German lands, but we’re not just from Germany. There was also many French Huguenots also got absorbed into our population, as did Hessian soldiers and people from the Netherlands who are also trying to just, you know, move over to the continent to try to make a different living. We are an amalgamation of many different inputs, and we became our own distinct ethnic group and language.
00:03:22
Jens: So we have the Dutch Frigga, the Deitsch Rob and the Deutsch Jens today here.
00:03:28
Frigga: We keep it simple.
00:03:31
Jens: Yeah. So the Pennsylvania Dutch came from a range of areas in Central Europe mainly kind of German speaking.
00:03:42
Rob: Yeah, German, Germanic speaking. The largest settlement area was from, as we call it, the the Pälz, the Palatinate. I don’t know how you guys say exactly in German, but, uh, but then Switzerland also had a large input. You know, many of my ancestors were Swiss. And it even into Silesia (Schlesien). They provided this the Spring Goddess. The different religious groups came from different places. The Moravians came from both Bohemia and Moravia and they were the German population that came there. They were one of the earliest settlement groups here. They were responsible for recording the Lenape language first. We’ve been here for a long time. They have a very different experience from the English and from the textbooks that, uh, many people are kind of surprised to find out that the white settlement wasn’t totally monolithic. It wasn’t the same place in every colony, and it wasn’t the same place even within each colony. Wasn’t this wasn’t the same essence.
00:04:37
Jens: You mentioned two important words in your first introduction, and I think it’s helpful if you explain a bit more about that. So what‘s Braucherei for a start?
00:04:47
Rob: I’ll actually explain Braucherei and Hexerei together. Braucherei as many people refer to it as powwow in English, which is not accurate for starters. Depending on the origin, many people say that. Oh well, they took, the the English took the word powwow from what the Native Americans did because they thought that what the Pennsylvania Dutch were doing was similar. Again, the English weren’t that stupid. Well, it’s more likely is that or at least as likely actually, say, not necessarily, more likely is that they took the name for what they were doing from the Pennsylvania Dutch people speaking English, saying that somebody had the power, the power. First off, powwow is a Narragansett word, Narragansett from New England, not from here. So that that’s a little bit of a stretch, but that’s our traditional healing practice. It’s quite evidently pagan with a lot of Christian overlays to make it more acceptable. Of course, it wasn’t really until this century that people began to try to make it be a Christian practice and saying that, oh, well, you know, you’re taking a Christian practice. It’s much like other traditions that have had to go underground. They, you know, they call you saints or Jesus or, you know, whatever to do healing that used to be done in the Gods and Goddesses names. I mean, the the chants are very similar to the Merseburg charms in their format. And even most Christian Brauchers will say that it’s probably either a legacy or related line to the Merseburg charms. And, you know, these things have been around since time in memorial, and not just in our culture. They’ve been around in many cultures. Once people got here to Pennsylvania with the religious freedom, they didn’t have churches like watching what they were doing and people reporting on them and all sorts of things like that, the practice began to take off. And so the Brauchers or Braucherins, they became the healers for the village. They became like the doctors for the using herbal medicines. And, you know, all the ancient practices that had been kept alive, just it was just part of what the who they were from Europe. And now it was just in a different context here. Now Hexerei is a is related to it. I’ve heard people try to simplify it by saying, well, Braucherei is white magic, Hexerei is black magic. It’s it’s really not that. Part of the problem there is that Hexerei has been defined by its enemies. It’s been defined by people who hate it. So of course they’re going to be they’re going to be throwing all sorts of insults toward, oh, it’s an evil practice. You know, you’re people, they only scam people. And the primary difference is that Braucherei is like outward toward the community, you know, towards, you know, growth and advancement of the community. We say it’s, uh, outward and upward, while Hexerei is more the deep dive within. And to learn more about yourself and to become the best person you can be. But they can each do what the other. The practices are very similar in their function. So we’re actually striving to define Hexerei the way Hexerei sees itself, rather than through the eyes of of its enemies, particularly Christian zealots and practitioners of Braucherei who hate paganism. You know, my mentor was syncretic. She would identify as Catholic, but she recognized the, the heathen elements within it and helped us to get started with putting it within our context fully.
00:07:53
Frigga: So it is in Dutch. We call it Hexerei. Witchcraft. In English.
00:08:00
Rob: It’s not like the the hex, the witchcraft that Christianity defined it. It’s more like the old, like the, the pre-Christian people just doing what they making use of the land around them, making use of things around them to heal. And can they curse? Absolutely. Unfortunately, the whole concept of this absolute good and absolute evil, many people have shaped Braucherei and Hexerei into those boxes when really it’s all shades of gray. And we do that as a species to our own detriment.
00:08:29
Jens: So as a summary, Urglaawe is a modern pagan religion which is reconstructed from these different roots you found in Pennsylvania, which largely came over from Central Europe. Is that right?
00:08:43
Rob: I want to avoid the term reconstructed because reconstruction implies something. First off, that really can’t be accomplished. You know, I mean, once, as soon as we’re learning all this stuff over the computer, we’re already not learning it the way that it was learning, you know, hundreds of years ago. But it’s the new organization of very old concepts or things that have been alive that nobody’s ever connected all the dots to. And see how this happens now, because back away like a thousand years ago, this is what people were believing was happening. Like this little superstition. Oh, you know who when you’re saying it’s raining, it’s snowing. The old man is, you know, it’s raining is pouring. The old man who’s the old man? Like when you start taking these little, especially children’s rhymes, counting out rhymes. Those things are can be treasure troves, especially if they’re really old. Because oftentimes you remember which which of our historians. It was said that when cultures collide and one culture is being defeated by the other one, what used to be a widespread belief often remains in children’s rhymes, nursery rhymes and games. And that’s how a lot of this stuff did survive on. So can we ever actually reconstruct what it was? No, but we can take what role it’s playing in our lives now, or how we understand where it fits into our culture. Here’s an example. The simple children’s game of tag. You know, somebody is it. Okay, the person who has to chase the other ones around, tag them. The word for the it is the Butz or which is the Pennsylvania cognitive English word puca, which is the spirit. This, you know, this potentially malevolent spirit. So there’s like this little game going on, but it’s actually the lesson is staying away from the malevolent spirit. Things live on. Old ways die hard. They just die very hard. They get subsumed by the culture and put into context that in which they can survive. Otherwise we won’t know about them. The Norse have their Eddas, and there’s other books that describe heathenry stuff. We don’t have a whole lot of that because of how early many of our people were converted. But we we do have stories that kind of bear some similar threads to those things. And so you can kind of see some things that lived on. But a lot of these things are superstition and Pennsylvania country even now you don’t transfer cattle on Wednesdays. It’s considered bad luck. But Thursday is the best day to move cattle. And it’s like there’s all these different ritual days for when to drive cattle, when to harvest. One of our historians, Edwin Fogel, had described those cattle days and their connections to the old gods.
00:11:13
Jens: Okay, so it’s not reconstructed. It’s more rebuilt from the building blocks you found there and reassembled as a modern pagan religion.
00:11:23
Rob: With an element of deconstruction, where you can see the clear Christian overlays and you just can kind of pull those back. The funny thing is, like, there’s other than the very badly broken rune system, which we can’t, which I’m sure was probably no, no more than 100 years old. Anyway, other than that, there hasn’t been much reconstruction anyway. And now it’s it’s a living thing. Speaking of animism, Urglaawe is its own thing. It’s on its own trajectory now, and so it’s growing and absorbing from our lives, experiences now, which I think is really important to the growth of heathenry, because a lot of times we tend to focus on what was. And the stories of now are the future legends for this, for the generations to come. And I’m not sure we’re really recording what we’re all doing and what’s happening necessarily. Like, I think that that’s that’s really important. Time didn’t stop and stay frozen back then. You know, I actually believe that the deities continue to interact with us, even if we weren’t interacting with them, because I think some of them actually, you know, were hoping this day would come some time where we would wake up and begin to see that they were still there. And that’s my personal belief. But, you know.
00:12:36
Jens: Speaking of deities, could you tell us a bit about some deities in Urglaawe?
00:12:42
Rob: Usually I start with Holle in this case. but I’m going to start with Berchta instead. Because their observance is the next one up on our calendar here. But I will say that Berchta and Holle, at least as Europeans perceive them, I believe they are perceived as one goddess, different aspects of one goddess, or different names and one goddess. But in our lore, they actually there’s one spot where they’re actually referred to as sisters. And so we see them as sisters. And to a degree, it actually doesn’t really matter. You know, the label, it’s we’re still interacting with them as two distinct goddesses, even if they happen to be the same one. Some of our understandings here are probably going to be a little bit different from over there again, because there’s this 300 year gap. And even though Berchta wasn’t widely known throughout our culture, there were aspects of her that were and one of which is December 31st, uh, 12th Night of Yule or we mark upon normally as New Year’s Eve. Over in Europe, you have that meal that she prescribes, a herring and gruel or one sort of fish and some sort of grain. And we have that here. But the most common form of it is actually oysters and crackers. And for instance, I went this morning to go buy the oysters for that meal this coming week. And when I was there at the stand, the woman was commenting about how all the Amish were coming to buy their oysters for this meal, too. This is like a widespread thing and all evidence indicates that it is either related to this. You know, the fact that people have been doing this for centuries over in Europe and not necessarily knowing where it originated from or either evolved from that, or it’s like a parallel kind of growth, because I can’t find any other real source of why our ethnic group is kind of died off in the in a bit in some of the non-sectarian culture, but it’s still pretty alive. A few years ago, I actually did a informal survey on various Facebook groups saying, you know, on New Year’s Eve, what do you do in your household? And of oysters and crackers? Oysters. It was kept, kept coming up. So I would ask, well, why do people do that? I said, that’s just what we’ve always done. So what we do and like we’re going to be having Berchtaslaaf or the Berchtas progression at my house and everybody has it at their own house, because we try not to have too many people driving on on New Year’s, you know, just because, you know, after midnight people are driving home and some of those people might be let‘s say, have less than their full faculties. So but I will have people here at the house. So we eat only that prescribed meal on that night. But it’s really not that hard of a fast because it begins at sunset and ends at sunrise. It’s not a hard fast, but if you don’t like fish, it’s kind of gross. We found some ways to prepare the herring, and there was a traditional Pennsylvanian oyster stew. So we prepare that while we’re having the discussion of the Berchtaslaaf ritual and what it means. Berchta in our culture has the same kind of sense of order around her that it has she has elsewhere. But in our culture, it’s not just the order of the house or the tidiness of the house, it’s also the orderliness of the mind. So many people with mental health challenges appeal to her, and that actually comes from Hexerei. So she’s very active in that transformation at the end of year. So she has a time association in our lore. She’s also the keeper of the souls that have gone through the mill already and are awaiting rebirth. She’s like pre transformation and post transformation. But here in this world, she’s the end of one cycle when it comes to time. But on the other side of the world tree, she’s post transformation and bringing the newer souls in for transition for birth. I’m hoping that made sense.
00:16:34
Jens: You see me completely fascinated here and in my personal worldview, they belong to different regions. So Berchta, to my knowledge, is revered in southern Germany and the alpine regions, whereas Holle is more North Germany and especially the area in Hessen. So it’s different regions. And because Berchta to me is southern Germany, the oysters are a complete surprise. I think that must have merged in there somewhere on the way to Pennsylvania.
00:17:07
Rob: There are oysters in the boat and say, I actually looked that up and that oysters have been trafficked across from, you know, from Switzerland, and they’ve been consumed there. So surprise.
00:17:17
Jens: Okay, that’s not the kind of oysters I’m thinking of. So not marine oysters, but freshwater. Yeah.
00:17:22
Rob: These are freshwater. Yeah.
00:17:24
Jens: Okay. I don’t just don’t think of oysters as freshwater, but yeah, freshwater clams.
00:17:29
Rob: There are freshwater oysters. And the thing is, though, we’re landlocked, too. I mean, Pennsylvania has coastline on Lake Erie. Technically, Philadelphia is a coastal city, but it’s not right along the ocean. It’s along the bay first. But now, keep in mind, though, we are an amalgamated people. We have people, different streams of influence coming in from many of the German lands. And so our lore picks up stuff from the other regions and it’s it becomes our experience and so are we right? Who knows? I mean, we don’t know whether any of us is right about anything. We don’t even know if the ancients were right about stuff. We have what we have and we, you know, move forward and evolve. And to a degree, it almost doesn’t matter to me so much whether we see Holle and Berchta as regional goddesses. What it matters to me is that we’re honoring them and we’re building relationships with them, and they’re becoming stronger. Now as for Holle, um, you know, I’ve been to Frau-Holle-Teich, in Pennsylvania Dutch that’d be Fro-Holle-Deech. And it had a very similar feel to the area that’s associated with Holle here which is Hexenkopf Rock up in Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania, where there’s all these stories about on April 30th, all these witch things happen and women in white. And so that’s our sacred spot here. And that’s been going on since colonial times. So a lot of the lore got transferred, got, you know, things got were seen here, a witness that were similar. A lot of people believe that the gods and goddesses came with us, along with the land spirits in people’s furniture and dowry chest that they brought with them, which was really not early arrivals. Early arrivals pretty much came with nothing. I try not to romanticize it all too much. We have, and I think it’s wonderful that we have it. And it allows for it allows for us to grow and to learn. Our lore comes first for Urglaawe, but German and Dutch lore comes second. So if if there’s something that you have that we don’t that makes this missing, we’ll use your, you know, the information from those regions to try to fill things in if we can. But for the most part, you know, we have a fair amount. So. But like Nehalennia, for instance, we don’t really have too much discrete lore on that. But there are people who believe that there was a sea goddess who, you know, got the boats out of from Rotterdam and to get the migration underway. Although most people say there was a lot of people believe that the, I should say a lot of Urglaawe over not necessarily people believe that our migration happened for a reason. That was to get some of the populations who an area that was removed from the the power conflicts among these different religious entities in Europe and get us over here to somewhere that was safe. The way history turns. It could be who knows, I don’t know, but it’s what I’m really enjoying, though, is seeing the connections developing again among the people from both continents, and more interactions and just learning more because there’s so much more to learn. And there’s you guys are making so much progress. Our country is beginning to decline. I feel. And I love this country, but it has a lot of issues that aren’t being addressed. So, you know, maybe it‘s your time to help us. That or something coming up. This is not an Urglaawe thing. It’s just my own opinion. I think it’s really kind of beautiful that all these connections are reforming among people everywhere. And that and then we’re seeing that the rise of inclusivity in, you know, in our religion on multiple continents. I just hope that it doesn’t get thwarted by, um, by the political issues over here.
00:21:05
Jens: I would like to make another remark about Holle. So a hypothesis about Frau Holle in Germany from some people, is that Frau Holle was started being revered when Frija was no longer allowed to be revered. So it seems there was the byname of Frija as Frijia Hulda, Frija the Gracious. And when Frija was forbidden by the church, people revered to the byname instead, and that became Frau Holle. It’s not proven, it’s a hypothesis, but it kind of fits into what you said about the religion going underground. And if that’s true, it’s kind of several circles of this where she’s emerging now.
00:21:49
Rob: The funny thing there, though, is most of us actually perceive Frowe as, you know, for what we call Freya, as a younger goddess and Holle, like, um, that holds one of the matriarchs. But that’s a perception that we have no real, like, firm proof of or anything. I will say that there’s a tendency to try to place a lot of the goddesses all into one being. Where we don’t seem to have that same thing going with the gods. Like nobody ever says that, you know, Thor is an aspect of Odin. I treat them as I experience them. I experience them as individuals. So most of us are hard polytheists. And I do imagine that Freya and Frowe are probably the same goddess from two different cultural perspectives, but do you approach them the same? You know, I, I don’t really approach Norse Freya the same way as I approach Pennsylvania Dutch Frowe. It’s, um, just like our Wudan and Odin have very different perceived personality traits. So a lot of times it really comes down to the culture that you’re in and how you view the deities relationship with that culture or with you as an individual. We’ve been here in this country, you know, a long time. So most of us know where our ancestors are. For like ten generations back, we were 10 to 13, maybe more. I think I’m 14th generation, so that also makes it a little easier to go to the ancestors rather than going directly to the gods, sometimes for intercession, for help. That’s something I think that most Europeans can benefit from also.
00:23:22
Frigga: That’s often what I explain to people if they see the gods as high above and far away, very wise. And they, they find it difficult so to approach them or to pray to them on a daily basis. Then I say from go to the ancestors, they are way closer.
00:23:40
Rob: Yeah. They’re the ones who have the most at stake in your success, especially if we are our forebears. Yeah. We don’t believe that we’re necessarily born in the same bloodlines, because we could be born in any bloodline. But ultimately, if we are, if part of our soul comes back into another life, we have a stake in making sure this world is in as good a shape as it can possibly be. If for no other reason than the selfish desire to have our future lives more pleasant than our current ones.
00:24:08
Frigga: Did I understand you correctly that you said that also the land spirits came with your ancestors?
00:24:15
Rob: Yes. So there’s a belief, and there’s a book called Once Upon a Hex by Dennis Boyer. He was my Braucherei mentor, so he’s my Braucherei grandfather. And he had a passage from me from a professor at. I can’t remember which university in Germany, but I’ll send it to you. What he says is that the Germans lost a lot during all that religious strife, because the land, many of the land spirits went with our people over here. And this was, you know, this was a professor talking, not necessarily a heathen and saying that that many of the old ways came over here while Europe was being torn apart by these various, they weren’t religious wars, they were wars of power in the name of religion, of course. So yeah, they’re a belief that that they came over in dowry chest, that they came in furniture, they came in seed packs so that the land spirits came with us. Plus there were already spirits here from, you know, that were native to here.
00:25:10
Frigga: I was, okay: How did the land spirits connect with the land spirits where you are now?
00:25:18
Rob: You know, the funny thing is about land spirits is that there’s many different times. Like one of these days, I want to sit down and try to catalog all the different land spirits as perceived among all the Germanic peoples, because there’s a whole bunch of them. I remember when I was doing interviews of Braucherei and Hexerei practitioners are these two women. They lived in the same house, and they got into this rather heated argument about the differences between a barn elf and a house elf, really kind of heated. I was like, okay, I don’t know if anybody’s ever actually settled that matter, but there’s all these different little types and some of them are multi continental. You know, just because humans got separated doesn’t mean that when Pangaea was there, some of these tribes weren’t there already. It’s very confusing.
00:26:01
Frigga: It’s fascinating. I mean, land spirits until now was really fun. They belong to the land.
00:26:07
Rob: Yeah, but the land is ever changing. And one of the things about this region, it was, oh, you know, it’s so flat here, what you call mountains, we call hills. But, you know, the Appalachian Mountains, which were actually east of the Appalachian Mountains. So the Appalachian Mountains are like one of the oldest mountain chains in the world. And so the spirits here, when they’re awakened, they’re very old. Some of them are like, you know, some of them really don’t want to be disturbed. And others, of course, are kind of excited to find things happening. Because I love high mountains. I love to like, look at the mountains. I love looking at the Alps. I love looking at the Rockies. But it wasn’t until I was a heathen that I really began to appreciate the centuries of erosion that have shaped what you know what we live in here. I mean, like the Susquehanna River, they say, is the oldest major river in the world. Well, there’s the New Bern River down in North Carolina, but that’s not major of a river in terms of its use. But that’s allegedly older. Actually, I’m sure it’s older, but the Susquehanna has this really powerful energy. It’s it’s not a very deep river. It’s very wide. And you can pick up on those ancient spirits. And they’re not the same spirits as I perceive from some of the younger rivers and the Juniata River which flows into it. That spirit is very, very, very, very strong. People can pick up on it just driving along it. Animistic. Yeah, we we definitely have those spirits going on.
00:27:34
Jens: What’s the relationship of Urglaawe and the Pennsylvania Dutch to the First Nations in that area?
00:27:41
Rob: Susquehanna. The tribe that live there were called the Susquehanna. The river was derived from their name. They were an Iroquoian tribe or related to the Iroquois Confederacy of the Haudenosaunee. I believe it’s, I would say, and in one of their own, I believe. But they were not part of that Confederacy. In fact, they’ve had quite a few wars with that Confederacy, the Susquehanna. They were pretty much wiped out. They had odd relations with the Pennsylvania Dutch. There was a lot going on between Pennsylvania and Maryland in the colonial era, which, um, I have I have this information in PowerPoint, so I’m only going to repeat what I can remember off the top of my head here. There were land disputes because the British screwed up the Maryland and Pennsylvania charters. And actually the Maryland charter was granted land to the 40th parallel, which is beyond Philadelphia north. They screwed up Maryland charter. Pennsylvania requested a correction of the charter, and they screwed it up the other way and gave Pennsylvania land in Maryland. So there was this territory that was being disputed between the two and much of that territory, right to the west of that was Susquehennoc land. One of the reasons that so many Pennsylvania Dutch came into Baltimore was because the Maryland colony was trying to fill that area with their settlers, while others were coming in to Philadelphia, and Pennsylvania was trying to settle that area. And this resulted in a conflict, conflict called Kristaps War. The reason it’s important, though, is because some of the settlers who came in there We’re not living in either Pennsylvania or Maryland. They were living on Susquehanna land. With the Susquehanna permission, the few surviving Susquehanna. And when they left home with uh, and joined the Cayuga, who are Iroquois Confederacy and others. When I think enjoined another Tuscarora or somebody else, but they left the land to the settlers, not to the States. So you had a good lawyer. You might be able to make a case that there should be an independent Pennsylvania Dutch country in two counties in south and south central Pennsylvania. But unfortunately, that information is very hard to piece together because the Susquehanna don’t exist anymore as an identity. Now, the Lenape or Lenape are a different story. The Lenape were a very important tribe that people don’t necessarily hear about as much, but their territory included areas that are both now modern day New York City and Philadelphia. Manhattan was Lenape land, and Philadelphia was Lenape. William William Penn settled a strip of Pennsylvania, and it was actually fairly traded. When William Penn died, the Sachem of the Lenape praised him for his fair dealing. So there’s like one section of Pennsylvania that there’s no dispute on. But then after that, William Penn sons were not quite. Actually, they were pretty awful. They swindled Lenape out of huge chunks of land. But another thing that also happened was that there was a war while William Penn was still alive, between the Lenape and the Susquehanna, and the Susquehanna gained some of the Lenape territory. And then in the 1700s, well after William Penn died, when the Susquehanna were leaving, they tried to negotiate that the Iroquois Confederacy negotiated a sale of that land that that had been taken from the Lenape by the Susquehanna to Pennsylvania. But again, the Susquehanna were not part of the Iroquois Confederacy, so they Iroquois Confederacy didn’t actually have the right to that land. The Lenape think that land should go back to us, but it ended up getting sold into Pennsylvania instead. And that was one of the reasons that the Lenape joined the French in the French and Indian War, or your Seven Years War, and having lost that war, that’s what put the Lenape on the path to being removed to other areas. And then here in Ontario, in Oklahoma. But there are still some here, the Lenape nation of Pennsylvania, who are struggling to get recognition. Many of them are, you know, part Pennsylvania Dutch. Also, again, because our two peoples live side by side oftentimes and even experienced a few massacres together as victims. So it’s not uncommon to find Lenape and Pennsylvania Dutch heritage together. Here in Pennsylvania, they have their treaty of renewed friendship, which both Urglaawe and I, myself personally, a bunch of our members personally have signed to. So we do support their efforts to try to get recognition, and they managed to survive here by masking and pretending not to be Native American, or at least being able to get by, which has drawn them the ire from some of the other Native American tribes saying that they’re not Native American enough. It’s understandable to a degree, but that’s something that we can’t settle. But I do support them, and I think that there’s some there’s certainly some territories here that they really should have because they’re sacred sites to them.
00:32:19
Jens: So are there spiritual connections between Urglaawe and the Lenape or still exchange on that grounds in any way?
00:32:28
Rob: Well, see, most of them are Christian now. They have their lore. They know what their old religion was. But the Lenape nation of Pennsylvania tries not to do anything public, you know, their personal practices, religious based, because that’s just a, um, can of worms that they would not be able to control. We had asked them if they would like to do an opening ritual at our pagan Pride day, but they declined. And at first people thought it was because, oh, well, they don’t like, you know, pagans. I was like, no, they just have a general policy about not putting their pride right in the middle of a religious, potential religious conflict, even with their own religion or their own native religion. However, there are things, stories, lore within Brauchery especially that probably that, that we may have that they don’t because the mother of Braucherei at least once they arrived here. The first person to organize guild here was one we call the Baricke Mariche, Mountain Mary, who was in Berks County back hundreds of years ago, and she was living in the old valley where the Lenape and the Pennsylvania Dutch were living side by side, and she had interacted with a Lenape medicine woman. This is our story, but it seems to have enough backing that it probably did happen, that they were teaching each other the herbal lore of of their respective cultures. We have a name for her. It’s either Doe in the mist or Grey Doe, and we still have to run that one past the Lenape to see whether or not they know anything about this, because she provided lore that we still use today in Braucherei for how to use the native plants for healing. So there’s that. There’s other places that people use that are Lenape sites. There’s a sacred oak. It’s like Overset. It’s like estimated to be at least 700 years old. That was supposed to be representing a peace treaty between the Lenape and the Shawnee, and that oak has this ring of rocks around it, where the warriors, the spirits of the warriors, sit and guard the tree. That site should really be in Lenape hands, but it’s privately owned. But they protect it, and they only allow people to come to see it twice a year because they used to get so many visitors that would be coming through their property at all hours. And also our lunar calendar. I think some of the names of our months are probably influenced by Lenape because, uh, there are different moon signs. It’s like a lunar zodiac and you’re you’re born under, depending on which new moon was the last one before you were born? Uh, since the vernal equinox, or the spring equinox of that year, it has all these traits associated with it, which I think is, uh, an amalgamation of European understandings of, like, horoscopes kind of things and Native American time measurement. So, yeah, there’s a lot of myths and stories about folklore, about Native American spirits that, you know, roam the countryside. And it’s always hard to tell what’s legitimate, though. I’m hesitant to share any stories that aren’t from our own culture because I don’t want to be passing information along. It turns out that it was just something that, you know, that somebody made up just to make it sound fascinating. But our relationships with the Native Americans have always been different from the on the whole, I should say, I’m sure that there were a lot of jerks who were Pennsylvania Dutch, too. You know, Lenape language was first written down by the Pennsylvania Dutch, by the Moravians. Some of the place names here in Pennsylvania, or anglicized forms not from the Lenape, but from the Lenape to the German, and then from the German to the English. I think it was really nice if we could put them back in their their actual proper Lenape forms. I don’t know whether or not, historically, people have looked back upon the people who dwelled on the land before so much. But I think that our consciousness is growing more. We have to recognize the things that happened here, whether we did them or not, and try to right some wrongs.
00:36:11
Jens: You mentioned before that Braucherei uses herbal medicine. And I’m wondering, did you bring plants from Europe? Did you learn about the local native plants with medical value? What do you use in that? Is that native plants? Is it both?
00:36:29
Rob: Both. The seed packs were one of the things that they said the land spirits came over and sometimes they were bringing live plants across that, you know, some of the tales of that travel across the Atlantic Ocean are pretty bad. I mean, like some of the surviving tales of what people were enduring on those ships cause, you know, we’re not talking luxury liners there. People brought whatever they could, and a lot of them couldn’t bring much. And this is important to note. We were the first people to arrive here in large numbers as refugees. We were not colonized. We were not coming from a state that had power here. We were coming as refugees under the British crown because William Penn and the German liaison Franz Daniel Pastorius, that they were giving us a place to go because life sucked in Europe for our ancestors. For those who had the religious things, it was that was one thing. But even if you were Lutheran in a Lutheran zone or Catholic in a Catholic zone, you know the 30 Years War did a lot of damage that, you know, 40 years later was still a mess. So, yeah, we were refugees. The first people were living in caves along the Delaware River while Germantown was being a matter of fact, they were so rowdy that the British had to cement them in. So that’s actually one of my favorites, because, you know, like everybody always says, oh, the Pennsylvania Dutch were such pious people. They were, um, we’re just like everybody else. So those caves which are currently under Interstate 95 for the most part, although some of the root cellars on a small street called Hancock Street might be part of that system. Just imagine, I don’t know if I could live in a cave. There was a lot of desperation going on. And again, like I said this, there’s a reason that many of us feel a kinship with the Dutch because they’re the ones who housed us while we waited to get out of there. People used to feel pretty good about the British until that whole nasty Revolutionary War thing with with all those taxes that our government is now doing to us. History plays a role in everything. Europeans seem to know your history. Americans generally don’t, because knowing your history doesn’t make you a good, obedient employee. Instead, it makes you recognize that we’re fighting the same fights that have been fought before. And we don’t, we can’t say where we’re going if we don’t know where we’ve been. And it’s very important for us not to make some of the same mistakes that were made in the past. Educating our own people and our own history is very important. You know, Urglaawe has a large element of telling people, hey, this is how we got this is where we were. This is why understanding the relationships with the Native Americans, with the descendants of the slaves, why all this stuff is so important. It does matter. Trauma can be intergenerational. And I didn’t even meet my first Catholic until I was in third grade. Okay, which may not sound like much, but since there’s a lot of Catholics around here, a lot of people from the Anabaptist communities still kind of looks suspiciously at the Catholics because the Catholic Church, because of all that happened hundreds of years ago, always die hard. The good ones and the bad ones. So history is very important.
00:39:23
Frigga: I agree.That’s likewise over here.
00:39:27
Jens: And 30 Years War. So 1618 to 1648 is quite important to some history teachers in Germany is way before that. But it decimated the population in Germany by a third. And that’s a lot, because usually the population was increasing during human history in most times. But these 30 years did so much damage. Also, if you do ancestry research in Germany, kind of the dead end usually. So you get to the 17th century, probably on many lines, and then it’s so many it’s lost in there.
00:40:03
Rob: Yeah. And there was a lot of migration of people moving from one region to the other. Many have ended up coming here. I’m very comfortable in my life. You know, for the most part, and I just can’t imagine what it was like to be that uncomfortable that you had to pick up and leave everything that you’ve known go, you know, by land up to the Netherlands, where you’ve probably never been and, you know, to a strange country. And then just waiting there again. They were getting assistance from the locals, or they were getting hired by the locals and then coming over here and like having no established cities. We have a tendency to romanticize it because they were successful. I don’t think in the moment it was necessarily something that they were cherishing. I think would be more surviving and and where they did. Otherwise. I won’t be here with having this interview.
00:40:52
Jens: There is another complex I would like to switch to. I don’t get a nice way there, so I just do the rough one. Could you tell us about the groundhog and the importance of the groundhog?
00:41:02
Rob: On February 2nd every year there’s all these lodges that have these big Groundhog Day dinners, and you’re supposed to only speak Pennsylvania Dutch at these events. And if for every English word that you say you’re supposed to like, throw a penalty into a bin of money to some people, just start off throwing $20 bills in at those lodges. They roll out these giant groundhogs like giant papier maché groundhogs like Crown on their head. And the groundhog makes all these predictions about what’s going to happen in the coming year. It’s not just about the weather. Sometimes it’s kind of stupid, like, you know which movie stars are going to be, you know? But the part that survived in the wider lore was the weather, because people were primarily agriculture. Also, the biggest question that we would have would be when can we plant? So the groundhog is seen as the otherworldly messenger. Um, if you take the world tree and lay it on its side, and you have the branches being openings to the different realms, the groundhog burrows represent the um, the world burrow rather than world tree. So the ground hog goes from one one portal to the next and gets information and then brings it back to this realm. It’s kind of like, uh, Ratatösk on the, nordic world tree. I actually do know people who go out on February 2nd to see what groundhogs are doing. They know where groundhog burrows are and they see if they’re around or not or if they’re still in. But groundhogs aren’t the only animals whose behaviors are observed. Foxes and bears are also, uh, foxes are usually even more so before winter. The groundhog thing, it’s a living tradition where people actually do go and observe these animals behaviors, but they don’t just get from it the weather, they also get from it. What’s the condition of the animal population here? Like, are the groundhogs thin? Do they actually look and they actually evaluate whether there’s ample food, whether there’s ample and whether their disease is going on. So there are people who are take this groundhogs work pretty seriously. I live in suburbia here, so I don’t know. I have a groundhog living under my shed in my backyard. It’s already popping out, so that’s another one of those things that has survived into the modern era, in a kind of a different form from what it was before. But the whole otherworldly messenger part is definitely not standard Christian, I’ll tell you that. So, um, that’s an example of one of those things where we could take something that’s in our folklore and actually trace this tradition’s back.
00:43:31
Jens: So you trace the traditions back, and at the same time, you adapt it to the new country, because we don’t have groundhogs in Germany here.
00:43:39
Rob: We do have badgers in Pennsylvania, but only in the far southwestern corner, which was not settled until well after we were already here. And so, yeah, we use the groundhog. And quite honestly, I’d rather deal with a groundhog than a badger, but the groundhog can be pretty vicious too. But yeah, it’s an example of one of those things where so there’s something in our lore that doesn’t fit with the Christian paradigm, especially when there’s a stand out there, sometimes it’s like, hey, we got to kind of figure this out. Even though it’s taking place on Candlemas. It’s still one of the cross borders. Once you see that the Braucherei lore says that burrow represents, you know, the holes that represent the world tree in a different format. So it’s like, okay, well, that is definitely not Christian. They have heaven, hell and earth and maybe purgatory and limbo as separate worlds if you’re Catholic. But our law actually has a disputed nine. Nine realms was the most common number by far, but we had as high as 20 in some regions of Pennsylvania had reported 20 realms, but some of them are also like sections like, you know, our northern leaves has a particular section where they keep the people who are the souls that are frozen. So I mean, like they list that as a separate world. Non standardized mythology is always fun.
00:44:49
Jens: There is another connection of Urglaawe to the animal kingdom, which very much fascinates me. And that’s the Distelfink. What can you tell us about the Distelfink?
00:44:59
Rob: I see, I can tell you I see based on one to like. Like I feel like I have, like 30 representations of them here.
00:45:06
Jens: It’s not a videocast, just oral.
00:45:09
Rob: The Distelfink. It’s a bird that represents the Pennsylvania Dutch people. It appears on artwork everywhere in the past and in the present. It’s the goldfinch, whether originally European, but now American, but also with influences from a bird called the painted bunting, which this looks more like a painted bunting than it does like either an American or a European goldfinch. There are numerous reasons behind it. Like, you know, one of the big ones is hope and good fortune. It represents the soul of the people, particularly because again, thistle finches, Distelfinks, they survive on the things that are usually not wanted. We don’t want thistles growing in our farms, but they’re happy to have them. So the ability to survive with little. But these birds are also on European artwork. But I think the meaning kind of changed once they came here and survived on nothing, and made use of the scraps around them to order to be able to survive while they built homes and got things started. I’m sure you’ll find 100,000 different interpretations of what the Distelfink means, which is okay, because it probably does mean different things to different people. But yet when people see that, they think of our culture, that’s what stands out. You know, luck related to the lore. If you see a goldfinch on your wedding day, that’s supposed to be like, you know, a big be a big sign that that’s going to be very successful marriage, especially if you see the female, because the males stand out much more because of their color. And in our lore about how how the world got color, also how we got how the earth started spinning and how we got the, uh, cardinal directions. It was a Distelfink that painting the world, the world in gray, shades of gray until the goddesses established color. That’s the myth that I got through the interviews with Hexerei practitioners. There were a few different versions of it, but they were all kind of similar. So yeah, that’s the symbol of our people. I got one behind me. That one probably has colors closer to the European, but it’s also its neck is much longer. That’s more like a bird of Paradise. But the bird of Paradise and the Distelfink are often conflated or, um, interchanged.
00:47:14
Jens: What I love about this is how it keeps the memory from the old continent, but transforms it to the new environment and brings it all together.
00:47:22
Rob: People look for familiarity, especially when you’re coming somewhere like, I’m sure you’ve traveled somewhere and you didn’t know where you were. You’re looking for something that you can lock on to. Something that can give you a sense of where you’re going, you know? Now, these days we have GPS and everything. Like when I was in Costa Rica for Frith Forge, the GPS wasn’t working right. It kept directing us in circles. And it was actually very frustrating. I mean, we actually started naming the stray dogs as we, you know, because we started seeing them over and over again. Oh, look, they’re Sparky, you know, so we know we’ve been here before. It took us literally two hours to go like a 15 mile trip because we didn’t. It just kept sending us down roads that ended. Imagine that times every day of your life, people looking for familiarity. And when they find something, then they can grow things around it.
00:48:10
Jens: Thanks a lot. We’ve learned a terrible lot about Urglaawe. I’m sure you could fill several more hours with talking about it, but what I take from this is that the people took some of their lore and some of their traditions over the Atlantic Ocean with them, but also adapted to the new environment by observing the nature, as you told us, by speaking to the people who’ve been there before them.
00:48:37
Rob: Yeah, more so than a lot of other colonial era groups that will say that is true.
00:48:41
Jens: I think that almost like a blueprint to me, how we can develop heathenry in general in a very much changing environment, but also reconnect to all the areas where we are. So I’m extremely grateful for this, for this lesson here.
00:48:58
Rob: Thank you. I’m very grateful that you guys made the time for me.
00:49:01
Jens: Frigga, any more questions from you?
00:49:03
Frigga: Not on this moment.
00:49:05
Jens: Not at this moment. He talked you down?
00:49:08
Frigga: Yes.
00:49:10
Rob: She laughs at what I say sometimes, so I appreciate that. She gets my sense of humor.
00:49:18
Jens: Yes. She’s Dutch, she’s actual Dutch.
00:49:24
Rob: All three of our groups, again are supposed to. They’re not always necessarily appreciated for our humor, but.
00:49:33
Jens: A topic we have slightly touched in between, but I think we should mention that as well: How inclusive is Urglaawe?
00:49:42
Rob: Well, first off, you know, Urglaawe was founded by a gay man, so it’s it’s, um, that that you’re right there. That’s part of the inclusivity. But we have members and from all backgrounds because again, it’s for us. It’s not about blood. It’s not about DNA. It’s about common values that we share. Some heathen groups believe that you have to earn Frith. Like they don’t owe you any Frith until you’ve earned it from the society or the other way around. We believe that all humans begin with a certain layer of Frith just because we’re all human. I mean, I’ll say that, you know, certainly not everybody is ready to be heathen. There’s a lot of white people who should not be heathen, and I’m not until they get a mind shift change that actually allows them to see beyond that. You don’t know what I’m talking about. It’s (unintelligible), you know, we have people of all backgrounds and different ethnicities. You know, a lot of people come to Urglaawe because of their heritage. Pennsylvania’s culture is what provides Urglaawe with its lore, its information. A lot of Asatru people are not actually of any Scandinavian descent either. What matters to me is everybody who’s here has has ancestors or forebears, and so we honor all of them, because without them, none of us would be here. And this would be a really short interview. So they were LGBTQ across that board. Race and ethnicity don’t matter. What really matters is the ability to work with people and interact with people. And but yeah, that’s that’s the biggest part is shared values. And Urglaawe allows people to have different like different beliefs. I mean, some of our, some Urglaawe leaders are actually two traditions. We just asked them not to cross the traditions, like if if they’re if they also have like a pagan organization or something, they’re welcome to do that. But just keep the Urglaawe stuff Urglaawe, because it’s coming from a culture that is kind of threatened. So Urglaawe has a standard, but then everybody can do what they want at home. I actually have even though I, you know, the primary founder of Urglaawe, I actually have a couple things that of my belief system that are outside of the, the standard. And that’s, that’s okay. If I bring it up. I always say this is my own belief. the official Urglaawe perspective is this. But we have to allow for sovereignty of conscience and, you know, sovereignty of self. And that’s a critical part. So people can do what they want in their private practice at home. But when we’re all together, we do the same thing and we present the same face to the world as Urglaawe. But then they can say, well, in my house, you know, I put a picture of Jesus on my altar because my grandmother found it is her picture or whatever. The biggest proof that we are inclusive is the fact that we allow native English speakers in.
00:52:23
Frigga: I like that.
00:52:26
Rob: Half the leadership, you know, looks at me sternly when I say that.
00:52:30
Jens: Okay. Thank you. I think that works more or less as final words for the episode.
00:52:39
Rob: So thank you very much for the opportunity because this is again, this is one of these things that helps link our different traditions and find similarities and celebrate diversity. So I appreciate the opportunity.
00:52:50
Frigga: I enjoyed listening to you. Like the pre-chat it. It makes me think, but I have to process it.
00:52:57
Jens: Rob, thanks a lot. I thank to all our listeners to listen to this episode about Urglaawe. I learned incredibly lot and enjoyed it very much. Thanks to Frigga and Rob. You can find us on the reduced social media of Instagram and Facebook and on our website: Thewyrdthing.Com. I Hope you enjoyed this episode as much as we did. Goodbye.