Iroquois Supernatural: Talking Animals and Medicine People

by Michael Bastine

  He saw smoke in the distance and headed toward it. Soon he saw a stream and cleared fields. He heard a dog barking and knew he was near a village. He got closer and tried to hover. Surely it was his own village. He tried to perch on the peak of the roof of his family’s longhouse, but he landed too hard, and the magic headpiece toppled into the smoke hole. Immediately, he took back his own form, and plunged feet first through the opening after the hat.

  He clung with his elbows to the edges of the hole in the roof, his legs dangling. The dogs went crazy, leaping for his ankles, and his cousins jumped up reaching for war clubs. Before he let go, he tried to yell out who he was, but he landed in the cold ashes and came up covered in them. Only his sister’s shouting kept him from being clobbered. The mood was only lightened by his sick brother, laughing from his bed for the first time in weeks. The owl cap, though, had been stomped into uselessness, and the dogs were having a tug-of-war with what was left. It was a while before anyone got to sleep.

  The next day the young man called his brother’s friends together and told them the whole story. It was not as hard as you might think to convince them. Many of them had their own suspicions about the illness. They went to the chief with a plan.

  An elite group of warriors stayed ready in their homes for several nights. On the first twilight that people were spotted leaving the village, the warriors assembled. The sick man’s brother led them on a stealthy trek through the trails to the clearing in which his adventure had started. There the witches were gathered.

  Still in their human forms, the witches were easy to identify. They were also distracted, listening to their officers and sages engaged in many a fine speech. Six Nations witches, it seems, love rhetoric, like all other Iroquois. Each warrior was able to creep up close to a witch undetected. The sick man’s brother took a place close to the orphan girl who’d helped him before.

  The leader of the witches stood by the fire. “Enough of these reports,” he called. “To business. Where’s our new young friend, Owl Boy? We’ll have to settle for him soon. He may be able to recognize some of us.” There was a murmur of assent among the group, already mixed with a few half-animal sounds.

  “But first I have to tell you something serious. If we were all to die today, not one of us would go to the Evil One who is our patron. Not one of us has done enough evil deeds. The Good-Minded Spirit would take us to him. Let’s vow, each of us, to leave here tonight and curse and murder at least one person apiece. Let’s start with that boy who has our fine owl hat.”

  At that second, the lad they spoke of jumped up. “You don’t mean me, do you?” He took the hand of the orphan girl who’d helped him and hauled her out of the glow of the fire. Every witch took a breath to snarl or roar. Furry faces wrinkled, and fangs bared.

  But before any of them could move, each warrior leaped from the darkness beside his appointed target and struck. Every witch fell dead. The men went back to their homes, heroes, having saved the local villages more suffering than they would ever know.

  The Witch of Otisco Lake

  (Onondaga, Traditional)

  A vain, pretty woman was the belle of the village. All the young men courted her, all but one fine hunter who didn’t pay her much attention. After a while, this was the only one she wanted, but he either minded his own business in life or went about with young women who were more grounded.

  The pretty woman used a charm to bewitch him. It worked so well that he wanted to be with her all the time. Once the shoe was on the other foot, she put him off just as she had all the other young men. In a few weeks he was so thin, weak, and sick that his friends started to worry about him.

  A couple of them took him to Otisco Lake, hoping to get him away from his worries. Still he roamed, wandering in the moonlight, moaning for the woman who had witched him.

  One day, his friends took him on a lake cruise in a patched canoe. In the middle of the lake, it started leaking. The sufferer was too weak to paddle with the others, but he bailed water as fast as he could with a gourd dipper. In the middle of the lake the boat went under. The strong fellows took turns helping their witch-struck friend get back to shore, but he was unconscious when they reached land and lived only hours longer.

  His best friend gave the death whoop when the small party neared the village. The people gathered, and among them was the witch, who gave a loud cry, ran to the body, knelt in tears, and confessed what she had done. The procession moved silently past her.

  MARY JEMISON ON WITCHCRAFT

  (Genesee Valley, Late Eighteenth Century)

  The autobiography of Mary Jemison is a window into the Iroquois character. In its pages we meet people of deep virtue, true to the death to their own codes. We see harsh lives, nationalistic conflict, desperate brutality, and superhuman courage. We see people in times of change. We learn plenty about their supernatural belief.

  The Seneca people Jemison knew may have shed their faith in some of the more exotic folkloric beings like the Giant Mosquito and the Legs. They had a little less doubt about the Great Flying Heads, sensing that they might just be getting rare. They hadn’t lost a shred of their faith in witchcraft.

  Jemison’s Seneca believed that, next to their own Evil-Minded One, the world’s many witches were its greatest scourge. To them it seemed their duty to do whatever they could to destroy this dangerous source of evil.

  A number of people presumed to be walking on the dark side got along fine within the community—as long as they didn’t go too far. Those accused of witchcraft were tried like those accused of anything else, and the Iroquois had an admirable legal system. There was no parole or forgiveness, though, for those convicted of practicing an art as dangerous as the dark one. The only chance was to make tracks, as many did on first hearing they were suspected. Others were hauled to trial before they could get away.

  In her time with the Seneca in the Genesee Valley, Jemison could hardly recall a year in which she did not hear of at least one execution for witchcraft. She cites an incident in which a Native American man with lust in his heart pursued a woman near Little Beard’s Town along the Genesee River. A strong lass, she fought him off and made her escape. The man—boy, perhaps, we should say—went back to his village and reported that he’d seen fire in the woman’s mouth and that she must have been a witch. The woman was arrested, and Jemison witnessed her execution. Another time, Jemison saw a supposed witch killed and tossed into the Genesee River.

  Some reservation folk tell us that Jemison herself was suspected of being a witch and that several times she ran from her home and hid out in the woods till things subsided. This she never mentioned in her book. We asked a pair of our Seneca friends what they thought about the odds that the White Woman of the Genesee was into the otkon.

  “Maybe she just had some of the wrong friends,” Jean Taradena suggested.

  Pam Bowen shrugged. “She might have been trying a little too hard to be Indian.”

  THE HEART OF A BLACK BIRD

  There’s another way to deal with being witched: fight back with the same medicine. But even in small communities, it can be hard to identify an occult tormentor. Arthur C. Parker in his book The Code of Handsome Lake describes a deliciously sinister ceremony for finding a witch.

  Get a living bird, black in color. A crow might be best, but a black hen will do. Take it into the woods at midnight and make a small, slow fire. Split the bird’s body, take out its heart, and hang it by its arteries over the fire. Roast it slowly and wait. Whoever did the witching to you will know about your ceremony soon enough and get to the spot immediately. The witch will have no power over you and will tell you why he or she is witching you, or anything else you want to know.

  But suppose whoever’s witching you is too far away to get there in person? This is when things get really interesting. Your witch will put in an appearance in an astral form and roost in the leaves of a tree above you. At other times you may not even see this apparition of your witch; all you’ll hear will be
a voice from somewhere overhead. You’ll find out who it is, though, and why he or she is witching you. The answers may surprise you. The questioning is especially critical here because so much of the time you may not be the true target. You may not even know the witch. He or she may really be targeting someone who loves you and will be hurt by any pain you suffer.

  Once you have your witch, there’s nothing but dawn between you and the answers you want. There shouldn’t be any need to kill the witch, either. Come to think of it, you have a pretty powerful enforcer in your back pocket, and a time may come when you will need one. Just hang on to that scorched heart, keep it safe somewhere, and this character will do your bidding. If you really mean business, though, let the heart burn all the way through. The witch will be found dead in the morning of a malady the Iroquois call burnt heart.

  There has to be more to this than Parker described. No doubt there’s a conference with an elder, probably a medicine person, who will prescribe the exact steps, even the ideal night for the ceremony. There might be other moves and ingredients. But based on the way the Church of Rome rations its exorcisms, you don’t want to overuse this powerful ritual. Keep it for that rainy day.

  WITCH BONES

  Many of the old Iroquois witches worked their spells through a little object called a witch bone that they placed in the body of the victim. It was often a tiny, double-pointed, needlelike splinter with a hole in the middle. Sometimes a single hair from the head of the witch would be threaded through and around. This magic trinket could be bone or wood, and other objects, even living ones like tiny worms, have been reported. Stories about objects like these being drawn from witched people are common.

  There’s not much agreement on how a witch bone gets into the body of a sufferer. Most of these witch totems sound small enough to be planted in food or drink. But customarily, witches “blow” these things wherever they want at the end of a ceremony. From the sounds of it, once the job is done right, the object just ends up where it’s supposed to. From there—usually in the guts of the victim—it does its damage, ruining happiness, health, even life.

  If you get hit by this kind of traditional curse, burning the hidden, charmed object will heal you. The difficulty is finding it and hauling it out. For that, you need the help of a traditional healer. The ceremonies are often uncomfortable and take a lot of time. Once you find one of these witch bones, though, you’re in a position of power. Burning it can hurt the witch, killing him or her within hours. You can also throw it in almost any direction, even from inside a building, with a word of guidance, such as “Now go, and fly into her heart!” The fiendish object will become a guided missile, finding the witch the same way it found you.

  But as with the bird heart ceremony, the medicine people don’t always burn these things. Why bother? You don’t need revenge, do you, if the curse failed? You have a weapon against whoever sent it. You can get whatever you want out of the witch from then on. Twentieth-century Tuscarora medicine man Mad Bear, we hear, had quite a collection of these charms.

  A WITCH’S BAG

  As we mentioned earlier, witchcraft may be no more than a diversion of orenda for selfish and hurtful purposes. It changes its name when so used. The otkon can be concentrated—incarnated, if you will—into objects. Put the right bunch of them together, each with its own power, and the concatenation can work up a mojo that’s greater than the sum of its parts. Iroquois witches often mixed up these recipes, which were partly traditional and partly intuitive.

  These witch bundles come in small, medium, and large, from a charm that might be a single energized object to a necklace bag, a satchel, or even a whole cauldron. A number of these witch-kettles have been found buried about upstate New York, including a fearful one in Buffalo surrounded by a ring of skeletons and filled with human skulls. Undoubtedly a bunch of the grim things are still out there, all over Iroquois territory. They only turn up by accident, when people dig. For those who happen to live above one unknowingly—enjoy.

  The Erie lakeshore folk always thought the old woman was a witch, and no one entered her house for a long time after her death. The first who dared was a white man, and no slouch when it came to the spooky. Irving, New York, historian and antiquarian Everett Burmaster (1890–1965) found a bag in the house and listed its contents in his memoirs.

  The bag, like the three witches’ cauldron in Macbeth (“fillet of a fenny snake,” “eye of newt and toe of frog”), had ingredients that were macabre but mundane and easily acquired: tiny weapons, dolls, animal hearts, thread, dried snake blood, a bottle of “eye oil,” various powders, hair in many shades, nail clippings, wet blood, a small sharp bone, various greasy substances, a dried human finger, and the skins of snakes, a black calf, and a big dog.

  The miniature weapons were probably totems made to the supernaturally powerful Little People, “the Iroquois fairies,” in hopes of enlisting their energy into rituals. The pelts and skins could have been used with the aim of shape-shifting. Most of the other stuff has analogies to magical practices all over the world.

  From his earliest days of experience with the Iroquois, our late East Aurora friend Bill Bowen (1940–2009) found them superstitious. If you were threatened or harassed by an angry Iroquois male and the situation got extreme, all you needed to do was clasp a hand over a spot on your chest about the level of an imaginary locket and look him in the eye. “That’s OK,” you might say. “I’ll just go get my bag, and we’ll take care of everything.” Presuming that you might have a witch working for you—or that you might be one yourself—your harasser would almost instantly recoil. It was a radical move, though. Bowen saw the trick in action in his youth in the 1950s on the Tonawanda Reservation.

  Two Seneca men were arguing at a meeting, and one tugged the imaginary bag. The other marched out as if he’d seen a ghost. An undercurrent of grumbling broke the peace, and before long a near-riot started. A couple of friends dragged the air bag man out the door. “Are you crazy?” one of them said. In a culture that still dreaded magic, this gesture was the nuclear bomb of arguing, just a step short of pulling a gun. It could be dangerous in many directions, including to the man who made the threat.

  THE WITCH JOHN JEMISON

  In 1897, a Cayuga woman told white ethnologist William Beauchamp a strange story. During Mary Jemison’s days in the Genesee Valley, a curious pounding was heard coming from inside a nearby hill. Folk drew near just as a giant, one-horned serpent dug its way out like a hatchling. It retreated when it saw them, but came back later and was soon tame. Jemison tapped the horn with an awl. Out flowed blood, and she filled a cup with it and served it like Guinness to her children. Maybe this explains how one of her brood, John Jemison, became a witch.

  Just after the War of 1812, a Seneca hero called Young King fell into a heated argument with the government blacksmith at Buffalo. A blow from a scythe cost Young King an arm and outraged the Seneca. While the Great Hill folk took the matter to court, John Jemison appointed himself the national executioner and stalked off for Buffalo.

  Somewhere on his way along old Route 5, John was spotted by the white writer Orsamus Turner. To the author of the Pioneer History of the Holland Purchase, John looked like “ the Angel of Death”: face painted red and black, horse-hair fetishes on each arm, war club in one hand and tomahawk in another. People kept the smith out of sight until John quit looking for him. It was clear to all that Mary’s son by her second husband, the lethal Chief Hiokatoo, was no one to mess with. He may also have been a witch. There were signs of it early on.

  One of Rochester’s first white settlers, Ebenezer “Indian” Allan (1752–1813), spotted something unsettling in John when he met him as a boy, and Allan—former member of the Crown’s Revolutionary terrorist outfit Butler’s Rangers and a frontier scumbucket of the first order—should have known. Some strange incident happened in John’s boyhood, something witnessed only by his younger half brother Thomas. Their mother either never knew what it was or didn’t include it i
n the autobiography she dictated to Doctor James Seaver. But brother Thomas always called John a witch, and the rumor stuck.

  John Jemison was a renowned healer who made long nocturnal forays into the Genesee woods gathering his ingredients. The site of his medicine garden may be a grove in the northwest area of today’s village of Mount Morris, just yards from the top of Letchworth State Park. While no one but brother Thomas ever called him out as a witch, accusations of witchcraft were mighty serious in that society. Even a wisecrack could have led to a trial and a potential death penalty. Their mother believed this was the cause of the hatred between these two.

  Witch or not, John was a seer. He dreamed that he killed his brother Thomas and forfeited his own life. He told this to an old sage called the Black Chief, who advised him to watch his temper. The dream turned out to be prophetic.

  On the first of July 1811, Thomas came to his mother’s house and encountered brother John. A quarrel commenced. John grabbed Thomas by the hair, dragged him out, killed him with a tomahawk, and fled to Caneadea, New York. His mother found Thomas on her doorstep. It was a bitter loss to the community. Though he enjoyed a drink, the fifty-two-year-old Thomas was a model Seneca. The council weighed the matter but decided that this was just a fight, a simple brawl that got out of hand.