The Amish Druid Liberation Front arose out of a heretical
Amish cult in the late 1960s centered around a young Amish powwow
artist who left the faith to go and live on East 13th Street in
New York City's East Village. The heir of a long hereditary
tradition of "powwow" or "brauching" knowledge
and practice, Amos Stoltzfus honed his traditional Amish gifts
and arts of healing and farmyard magic and transmuted them into a
new Way of the Urban Shaman. By detailed and intensive
experimentation with meditation, Amish Yoga and Tantric Mennonite techniques, Stoltzfus evolved
a mystical urban Amish practice which involved ritual dances down Avenue
B and all night vigils in Tompkins Square Park.
Supporting himself by repairing bicycles in a Mennonite bike
shop, Amos Stoltzfus kept to himself for more than twenty years,
shuffling up and down Avenue B, perching aloft the jungle gyms in
the park, communing with the disembodied spirit of the Slum
Goddess of the Lower East Side. Finally, one crisp October day in
the last year of the twentieth century, he proclaimed himself the
Second Coming of 
Mr. Natural and, removing all his clothes, began dancing down
Avenue B, beating on a homemade tambourine. Villagers stopped to
stare. Little boys jeered. One homeless dharma bum removed all his
clothes and began an exaggerated shuffle in the middle of Avenue
B. Traffic came to a halt. Amos danced in a circle, rattling his
tambourine and chanting "Das ist tief Dunger, Ach, Das ist
tief Dunger!" Another bum stripped, then another, and
another, and slowly the ragtag group of insane ne'er-do-wells coalesced,
then began shuffling in formation down the Avenue. And as they danced,
a drummer began drumming, and other drummers in the park took up the
beat, until by the time the bedraggled procession wound into
Tompkins Square Park, the park was a mass of seething, naked
humanity, quaking, jerking, chanting "Das ist tief Dunger,
Ach, Das ist tief Dunger."
Within the hour, an elite squad of the New York Tasmanian Pig
Fever
arrived in vans, sirens squalling and billy clubs at the
ready. Wearing gas masks to filter out the rancid homeless odor,
and not wishing to pollute their vans with the squalid degenerates,
the TPF waded into the crowd, bloodying heads and forcing the dancers
back toward the East River, where the ecstatics jumped or were
pushed, "real holy laughter in the river," out of their
minds. Amos Stoltzfus, bobbing in the chilly river, gasping for
air, cried out "Wiedertaufer! Wiedertaufer!" until a garbage
scow knocked him senseless and he went down for the third time.
Back home in Holmes County, Ohio, his family, who had been
under the impression that Amos had taken up with the Beachy Amish
and was working to convert the heathen in the big city, sent his
brothers out in several horse-drawn buggies to retrieve the body.
When they arrived in the East Village, they were greeted in the
streets by a band of Anarcho-Druids, who hailed them as some sort
of deities. The Anarcho-Druids related to the astonished
Stoltzfus brothers the events surrounding Amos' death. Moreover,
they described how Amos had been sighted in various locations
around New York City several days after his death -- on the
Brooklyn Bridge, on the Upper West Side, in Central Park, at Columbia
University. Several of the Anarcho-Druid band remembered having seen
Amos shuffle down the Avenue in the twenty years preceding his
death, and they told his brothers that they were now imitating
his walk, and that this rhythmic gait produced a trance state in
which many of the Druids had been given visions of the Slum
Goddess of the Lower East Side.
The Anarcho-Druids begged the Stoltzfus brothers to stay with
them in the East Village,
