Braucherei is practised by Pennsylvania Germans and is understood by its practitioners as Christian. The Brauchers are church members. The charms invoke the Trinity, draw on biblical verses, and are used for complaints that a community treats as ordinary: burns, bleeding, erysipelas, sprains, warts, colic in children and in livestock. A practitioner is consulted in the way a neighbour with a particular competence is consulted, and payment is traditionally refused or left to the recipient.
The English name has caused persistent confusion. Powwow is borrowed from an Algonquian word, and its attachment to a Pennsylvania German practice is a piece of nineteenth century American English rather than any indication of Native American content. Nothing in the tradition's language, its sources or its self-understanding is Algonquian. The borrowing tells us about how English-speaking neighbours categorised what they saw, and about the period's habit of using an Indigenous word for anything that looked like unofficial religion.
Transmission is by person, not by book, and it is commonly reported that a charm must be passed between a man and a woman rather than to someone of the same sex as the giver, which puts a structural limit on how quickly the knowledge can spread. That the printed collections exist alongside this does not make the books the source; practitioners have consistently distinguished between a charm one has been given and a charm one has read.