Transcription
Krissy: Hello, my name is Krissy Dittmar-Traver, and I am the owner of The Wandering Mystic on Main Street in Middleburgh, New York. The Wandering Mystic is a metaphysical boutique and Reiki studio. It is a space where people can come together to experience community and unconditional love. The intention behind The Wandering Mystic was to use my spiritual gifts that I have Inherited from my family lineage and use those to empower other people to walk their own spiritual paths, however that may look.
So, my family history in Schoharie County goes way back. I’m going to focus on the Dittmar side of my family. This is my paternal family. My grandfather, Andrew, I was his shadow growing up. I lived on our family farm. That my great grandfather would purchase when he moved here from Bavaria. So, my great-grandfather moved John, he moved to here from the Bavarian in 1880 as a person who was really searching for freedom. When he would be asked about why he moved to America, he would tell people to live free. So, a little history behind what was happening in Bavaria at that time is the area was ravaged by the Napoleonic Wars and the subsequent collapse of the Holy Roman Empire. Bavaría had recovered itself by the Reformation of the German Empire in the 1800s, but they did so by lifting themselves up. It was an area of blue-collar workers, we would call them today, farmers and community members.
During the, what Germany would refer to as the Kulterkampf, I think I said that correctly, as a seven-year period between 1871 and 1878 where there would be a political conflict between the German Catholic Church and the Kingdom of Prussia, which Bavaria, my family, where my family is from, was part of. So, Prussia was a Lutheran area. And a Protestant area. So, the issue that came from this unionization of Germany is that it gave a Catholic ruling governor, a governing entity, it gave them control of a Protestant Area. And the Catholics did not like the Protestants, and they would use those laws to control the economy and basically devastate Bavaria again.
So, by the 1880s, you would see this mass exodus of Germans from that area, specifically to America. And the reason was our First Amendment, the freedom of religion. See, as evangelicals, we believed that our relationship with God was a direct one. We didn’t need the Catholic church or a church to stand between us and God. We also believe that the healing powers that they write about, that Jesus Christ held was something that we could possess ourselves.
Why this is so important today is as a mystic, in modern age, a lot of these healing modalities and things that I teach are very much what my ancestors believed as well. Evangelical recently has a negative connotation associated with extremely religious and conservative people. It’s also associated with the rise of Christian nationalism, which is very, very much furthest from the truth. When you go back and look at what my family was running from. Today we find ourselves in an age where we are fighting amongst ourselves on how we should live when our country was founded by people who were trying to live free, to live in a state where they weren’t being controlled by an authority, whether it be political, economical or spiritual.