# Letters from Heaven

**Himmelsbrief**

**Known today as.** Letters, copied by hand from one another, said to have been written by God or by Christ himself, promising protection to whoever kept them.

Kind: Amulet

## What was it used for?

Kept in the house, or worn on the body against weapons and thunder; one German soldier carried a letter his mother-in-law wrote for him all through the First World War.

## What does modern science say?

Now kept in museums and folklore archives; the Church never sanctioned them.

## What lore surrounds it?

In the German lands such letters were copied by hand and handed down in households well into the twentieth century, and the wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries spread the practice; each copy had to be written at one sitting, its mistakes left uncorrected.

## What did the older authorities say?

**The Catholic Encyclopedia.** The Catholic Encyclopedia counts among amulets “strips of paper, or parchment bearing enigmatic phrases, blessings, and maledictions,” used “as a safeguard against mishap or danger, or witchcraft, and invoked as a guarantee of success in enterprises.” It notes that “the reliance placed upon amulets, like other forms of superstition, grew out of popular ignorance and fear,” that “from the beginning the Church was on the alert to detect the first signs of this abuse and set her face sternly against it,” and that the Council of Laodicea decided “that those who wear amulets are to be excommunicated.”

## Sources

- *The Catholic Encyclopedia* (New York, 1907–1914), “Amulets, Use and Abuse of.” newadvent.org/cathen/01443b.htm
- Müller, T. (n.d.). ‘Just as Christ stood pacified in the olive garden, all weapons shall be pacified.’ How Marie Geffers made her son-in-law invulnerable. *Artefact of the Month* 21, Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, University of Hamburg.

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*Letters from Heaven.* In *Materia Medica*, edited by B. C. P. Statema. Version 1, revised 2026-10-03. The Thinking Press. https://thethinkingpress.org/materia-medica/letters-from-heaven

Historical description, not medical advice.