Talk:John George Hohman

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This is the beginning of a discussion page for the wiki entry on John George Hohman. The whole slant of this article is misleading. Hohman was not an occultist or a magician so much as a compiler and a printer of songs, ballads, and folk remedies, which he sold to the German populations in Pennsylvania and frontier Maryland. Nothing that we have of his connects him to the tradition of ceremonial magic with its reliance on magic circles, sigils, bindings and unbindings of spirits, lists of angels and devils and other paraphenalia that we find in the Solomonic or Faustian traditions (see Butler)--(an earlier version of this page calls the Long Lost Friend a grimoire.) Hohman did add material to the book, but much of it (as well as other of his works) is reprinted from European sources. In short, a more accurate picture of Hohman would be that he was a businessman with a product which apparently sold well enough to keep bread on the family table. Yoder is absolutely one of the best sources for information on Hohman and what he did. I'd suggest that we step back and look at this information from a historic and folkloric point of view. Thank you.