Michael and I don’t know much about witchcraft, either, by the way. He’s just telling you what he’s heard. And I’m just telling you what I’ve read. This chapter details stories and incidents about the dark art in Iroquois country.
TWO KINDS OF WITCHES
There is a hierarchy among Iroquois witches. Anyone working a spell out of a handbook and hoping for a new job or a new lover might be called a witch. But there’s a big difference between this and a seasoned witch working a spell out of malice or for hire.
There may also be categories among Iroquois witches. Arthur C. Parker tells us that they come in two styles, distinguished by their methods.
With some witches, the power is innate. They can blight with a thought—they need not even voice it—or by casting a cold eye. The only tool of the trade they need is the occasional bit of tobacco, a generic offering. Natural witches like these are the original black magicians, using the power of “malefic mental suggestion,” which seems to be mostly psychic. They may be helped by training, but they need only practice. They can take the forms of animals, even ancient monsters like the niagwahe, the demon bear.
The second and more modern style of witch works his or her will through objects and spells, a general style of magic found all over the world and often classified as sorcery. Though we have never heard this word used on the reservation—they call it all “witched” or “medicine”—this is what sorcery is: magic done with spells and implements. It’s like baking: get the ingredients and follow a recipe. This is what most of us would do if we tried black magic.
An Iroquois version of this type of cursing was to introduce something small into the body of a victim by supernatural means. The object was often a worm or a splinter from a deer bone, but sometimes it was more intricate, like a wooden needle, pointed on either end and with a hair from the witch threaded through the eye and wrapped around it. A wasting death was certain unless these cursed things were found and withdrawn. Another technique was planting a charm—the dreaded otkon—by the target’s house.
SPOTTING A WITCH
Traditional witches can do their deviltry safely and effectively as long as they stay hidden. Sometimes just finding and confronting a witch is enough to back him or her off. Does that surprise you? Let it not.
You see, some witches aren’t really evil. Some have been driven to their practice by poverty, despair, or even jealousy. Some of them haven’t even thought through what they are doing. Practicing magic is a guilty little power game. Discovering them, calling them out, and getting them to realize what they’ve done to others can make them break into tears and give it all up. One might presume that these are entry-level witches.
And many witches are shy individuals, neither personally nor socially powerful. Most of them are afraid of their victims, which is probably the reason they choose witchcraft; it’s a way to strike from hiding and at long range. Simply showing up on the witch’s front door—armed and raving—is often enough to make the witch back off.
Witches are thought to travel as witch lights (ga’hai), which probably ought to be considered their astral bodies. Sometimes their faces are even visible inside these fuzzy light spheres. You can’t hurt witches in this form, often called the witch’s torch, but they come back to their natural bodies sooner or later. Of course, if you see one of these witch lights leaving or entering your neighbor’s chimney, the case is made that someone who lives in that house is a witch. That’s an ad for otkon the way a neon Bud Lite sign proclaims a bar. Such a witch has to be a rookie, or an old one, absent-minded enough to be careless or too powerful to care.
Another light is inside the witch. They say when Iroquois witches are outdoors at night, a red light shines through their mouths and nostrils as they breathe, as if forge fires burn inside them and their lungs work like bellows. This “internal luminosity” is reported of shamans and power people worldwide. The only way to recognize an Iroquois witch by sight is to see this fire glowing through them. (“When you see one coming down a road,” said the Seneca Cephas Hill, “you get the effect of a flashlight being turned on and off.”) The sight is particularly atmospheric on frosty nights on those wooded trails between villages in the Alleghenies, the Finger Lakes, and the Mohawk Valley.
One of the distinctive powers of the Iroquois witch (like the Celtic druid) was shape-shifting: the ability to become another being, usually a bird or mammal, and still think like a human. (This, of course, is connected to shamanism, a type of religious expression once found all over the world.) Not all metamorphosis is witchcraft, nor are all witches shape-shifters. Still, the Iroquois have many stories of witches becoming animals. Though some can do this with the aid of the right charm, most witches who shape-shift are the old kind of witch with innate powers.
Not only are these witches well disguised, but they travel quickly in their animal forms. Sometimes they do things directly to hurt their human enemies, but so much of the time they just spy and do their real business later. If you know what to look for, you can often spot them. They don’t act like normal animals. Their movements are
