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Appalachian and Ozark Granny Magic included specialized practices usually taught early in life. Within Granny Magic, there are four primary types of practitioners: granny doctors, goomer doctors, seers, and water witches. The only times mountain people use the word “witch” with respect or acceptance is when they refer to dowsing for water. Otherwise, a strong regional stigma insisted that witches were evil people in league with the devil, fixed on ruining the life of good, God-fearing Christians.
None of these four types of workers possessed powers themselves. Their abilities were bestowed upon them through the grace of God and they acted as channels for God’s power. Much like the root, the herb, the branch, or any other item used in folk medicine, healers in the Scotch-Irish traditions considered themselves natural tools to enact God’s will on earth. None of these practices were gender-specific, although one gender often dominated the field due to convenience of circumstances rather than any imposed societal restrictions.
Often working in unity, these practitioners exerted their influence in mundane matters of the community, such as crop planning, planting, and harvesting, as well as animal care and healing of both people and animals. They worked the weather, gave advice, and provided support to those within the village.
A person who apprenticed with an experienced healer was usually one who showed proclivity toward a certain talent or inherited it through family lines. Healers chose their apprentices based on considerations such as an expressed passion for or interest in a practice at a young age, the endorsement of a seer who saw that it was the person’s path to apprentice to a vocation, or because the elder sensed that a descendant was the appropriate successor to take up the mantle. There were usually multiple practitioners in any of the four fields, due to necessity as much as tradition.
Granny Women, Healers,
Yarb Doctors, and Root Doctors
Although Granny Magic is a term we now use to describe the folk magic born in the Appalachian and Ozark areas, the actual people who developed and practiced it did not. They considered what they did to be divine, not magical.
They did, however, use the word “Granny” to describe the granny women who were healers and midwives. “Yarb doctor” (derived from “herb doctor”) and “root doctor” (adopting the Hoodoo nomenclature) were also interchangeable titles identifying the same type of practitioner: someone who heals the body by way of folk medicine, using God-given ingredients such as herbs, roots, flowers, and other natural resources.
Although some men acted as healers, women dominated the field, as is reflected by the titles of “granny doctor” or “granny women.” A male was a yarb doctor or a root doctor and was addressed with the title of “Doctor” followed by the surname, such as “Doctor Hardin” as we do today, or “Doc Hardin” in the familiar. A woman could also be a yarb doctor or root doctor, but most often, the “granny” delineation was reserved for female healers, followed by the healer’s surname, such as “Granny Jenkins.” An illness or injury might have someone saying “Best go get Dr. Davis,” or “Go find Granny Stillwater.”
Females dominated the field because of the connection of healing to midwifery and child care. With no physicians in these mountain villages, the ability of the granny women to effectively manage illness and injury was paramount to the survival of individuals and the village itself. The blended cultures of the Native American, the Scotch-Irish, and the Hoodoo rootworkers allowed the healing practices of all three cultures to grow and increase in effectiveness. By working together, all three traditions evolved and thrived.
Granny women, yarb doctors, and root doctors made poultices, concoctions, decoctions, tinctures, salves, and a full pharmacopeia of natural treatments. Their primary scope of treatment was the physical body with its full range of potential injuries and ailments, as well as natural conditions such as childbirth and menopausal symptoms.
One granny doctor with whom most Americans, particularly those of the Baby Boomer age, are familiar, is Daisy Moses, who is more commonly remembered as Granny Clampett on the Filmways television show The Beverly Hillbillies. Although portrayed by the show’s writers and actor Irene Ryan as a campy caricature of a granny doctor, “Doctor Granny,” as she was called, is not that far off from the historical reality. Her use of moonshine, tinctures, potions, and “hillbilly” superstition is only a mildly exaggerated version of what a typical granny doctor might have been in the 1700–1800s. Of course, all parody carries within it some level of truth, and this example is not too far off the mark.
Granny Clampett frequently expounded on the virtues of her “spring tonic.” It was commonly believed that the rigors of winter took its toll on the body and weakened the system, so when spring finally came, a tonic was necessary to bring the body back to life once more.
When someone took to their sickbed and worsened or when a baby was coming, Granny would drop everything and tend to those who needed her care. If the condition was not too serious, the patient might go to the healer themselves, knowing she had shelves of tonics, herbs, roots, and other cures to manage any health crisis that developed.
Goomer Doctors, Conjure Doctors,
and Power Doctors
Unlike the granny doctors with their use of natural substances for physical healing, goomer doctors, conjure doctors, and power doctors worked in chants, charms, spells, amulets, breath, touch, and incantations. The titles shifted through regional variances, but all identified the same kind of healer. Using the power of psalms or other scriptures, their job was to cure maladies of all kinds through what we would identify as “straight out magic,” although they would never themselves define it as such.
Stopping the flow of blood, curing warts, or drawing the fire out of a burn or fever (“drawin’ out the farr”) were all within the purview of the goomer doctor, healing with their charms, chants, scripture recitation, and incantations alongside the granny woman with her poultices and tinctures. In addition to scripture and other chanted treatments, tools of the power doctors included charms, amulets, exorcisms, conjures, jacks, and jujus, all of which relied fully upon the power of faith within the victim and the family of the victim.
Goomer is a word that means “bewitch,” and one of a goomer doctor’s primary functions was to reverse curses, hexes, and witchcraft worked against a person who was symptomatic of a crossing. Sometimes these workers were called “witch masters” or “witch doctors” and their repertoire included spells to kill suspected witches.
Power doctors worked primarily from a protective and defensive position. If a person felt they were crossed by someone else, they sought out the power doctor, conjure doctor, or goomer doctor to “uncross” them through incantations and charms.
As much as the power doctors worked to keep their clients safe, there is plenty of evidence to demonstrate that they were not averse to a proactive and offensive approach. In its edition published on June 19, 1939, Life magazine ran a photo of an elderly woman working with a wax poppet, with the caption, “Ozark ‘witch-woman’ makes a doll of dirt and beeswax, names it after her enemy. She drives nails into the doll’s body to ‘hurt’ corresponding parts of enemy’s body.”
In the same issue of Life, historian Vance Randolph published photographs depicting a reproduction of a “witch altar” he allegedly saw “done by a girl who was witchin’ the girl who stole her man. A real human skull was placed on top of a Bible, and before it were placed two dolls—one to represent her husband and the other to represent the girl. The poppet used to represent the girl had four big nails driven into it’s [sic] back.”
In an extensive set of memoirs and letters called the “Paul Eliot Green Papers,” the author quotes a magical work from a power doctor in Tennessee who instructs, “Wet a rag in the blood of your enemy and put it behind a rock in the chimney. When it rots, your enemy will die.”
Goomer doctors taught their craft generationally, as did the granny doctors; however, goomer doctors taught only relatives of the opposite gender. This practice meant that there were more male goomer doctors than yarb doctors, since the need for a male student occurred every other generation. This tradition of teaching the opposite gender, which appears universal across most of the isolated communities, traces back to the Irish cunning-folk of Ulster and into the Scottish clan practices.
Other conditions that are not so consistent include the belief that a charm can be taught to each person only once or its power will drain away. Another says that a teacher may instruct an apprentice no more than three times for each charm, and after that the individual may no longer use the charm, as it is clearly not intended for them.
Many popular nursery rhymes come from the chants goomer doctors used to manipulate the weather or to ward off evil. A favorite is “Rain, rain, go away. Come again another day,” which is an English weather charm that followed into Appalachian practice.
Neither granny doctors nor the goomer doctors charged their patients for the care they provided. Patients and their families might offer gifts or services in exchange to show their appreciation, but payment was not required. Healing the people in these communities was expected of those blessed by God with the ability to do so. In deference to their natural or learned talents, villagers held both goomer doctors and granny doctors in great esteem as holy people, much as the witch doctor and the shaman in other traditions garnered respect as holy leaders.
Many talented healers performed the duties of both goomer doctor and granny doctor, treating with herbs and magical charms at the same time, much like the two-headed doctor in Hoodoo.
Seers
Although their skills proved useful in diagnosis, seers were not specifically healers, but more of prognosticators who read omens and signs provided by natural occurrences. They sought guidance from oracles and through divination to influence and inform decisions made by individuals or by the community.
The role of seers fell primarily to women, passed on from mother to daughter with “the sight,” “second sight,” “the knowing,” or “the gift.” They read tea leaves and animal entrails; watched the migration and other behavior of animals; observed the stars, clouds, and other astronomical or meteorological events; and monitored what we would call “superstitions,” such as a broom falling to the floor or the itching of a body part with no apparent cause.
Interpreting the dreams of others and relating their own prophetic dreams provided insight into what a seer perceived as wisdom or messages from God. In cases of dire need, a seer would take a mild narcotic to induce lucid dreaming and bring on visions.
The seers scryed not only in bowls of water but also in dirt, by reading the patterns created in the loose soil by air movement. Seers would use a stick to etch out a rough circle in the loose dirt, then call in the winds and watch as the air moved the dirt into readable forms which the seer would then interpret.
Flame and coal scrying for visioning was yet another way God spoke to these revelators. Although mirrors are used for scrying now, in the 1700s and 1800s, they were quite expensive and few homes owned them. The same is true for specialty scrying items such as crystal balls, so ordinary items took the place of these now traditional tools.
Water Witches and Witch Wigglers
Although water witching implies dowsing for water, in actual practice, these talented and vital community members dowsed for many purposes other than deciding where to sink a well. Their specialized techniques enabled them to find specific metals in the earth or locate missing objects. I remember my grandfather “water witching” to find where to dig for coal in his mine. “Witch wigglers” refers to the “wiggle” at the end of the stick(s) when water is close by.
Appalachian and Ozark people took the art of dowsing quite seriously and used water witches when digging a well, building a house, laying their garden, finding lost items, or even positioning a grave, to locate the ideal placement.
Water witching is the only Appalachian folk magic practice dominated by males, but as with the other gender role assignments of this area, women were not forbidden from practicing water witchery. The practice fell quite naturally to men since they were the ones sinking the wells, digging the graves, and laying in the gardens.
Dowsing rods follow the ley lines of energy running unseen along the earth’s surface, and in this fashion, could also locate holy areas and sacred spaces. The closer that the target of the dowsing, such as water, energy, or metal, lay to the surface of the earth, the stronger the pull on the dowsing rod and the faster the dowser could read the results.
Although some historians insist a dowsing rod is a straight stick and not forked as so often shown, nearly all authentic photos I located in exhaustive research for this book showed a forked stick either turned inward or outward from the dowser. Most agree that the dowsing rod could be up to three feet long and came from the wood of a flowering tree such as dogwood, apple, or peach.
My grandfather owned two types of dowsing apparatuses. The first was a traditional forked rod made from dogwood. The second was a set of two hand-forged, thin metal rods, each in an L shape, that looked like large, skinny allen wrenches. He held the smaller end of one of the metal L shapes in each hand with the longer ends extending outward, resting between his thumbs and forefingers. As he got closer to the target, the longer ends would start to sway back and forth until they eventually met in the middle.
The wooden dowsing rod he used with a branch of each of the forked ends lightly held between his thumb and forefinger. He would pace the area he surveyed with the dowsing rod, and eventually the single end of the rod would turn downward, which told him where to dig. My grandfather, “Pa Mitchell,” died when I was five years old, so these memories come from a very young and long-ago perspective.
Water witchers also used simple pendulums of metal, sometimes a fishing weight or a stone tied to the end of a natural string. The weight would swing back and forth and follow either the ley line or the path of the flowing groundwater below.