The other type of witch doctor—or at least someone who will occasionally work as one—is simple: This is your witch, an occult practitioner you recruit against other witches who may have attacked you. In a metaphysical sense, you “find a dog who’ll eat a dog.” He or she cures you by outcursing the curse, usually turning it on its senders.
A bit has changed since Parker’s time. Our late contemporary Ted Williams acknowledged three categories of healing medicine:
Simple medicines that are purely physical cures. Good examples are herbs such as wild cherry bark for calming a sore throat or slippery elm for drawing out boils, slivers, or infections.
Medicines that take preparation. These medicines are often concoctions of herbs and other ingredients, which have to be carefully gathered and measured, sometimes according to cycles of the year or moon. They are aimed at curing chronic conditions and diseases, such as gallstones, pleurisy, and arthritis, not just sicknesses and wounds.
Medicines “that hide.” These are spiritual and anti-witch. This, Ted tells us, is the type of medicine that brought people to the east door of his family’s house, the sheltered side, to see his father, Eleazar the healer.
Mount Holyoke and Wellesley professor Annemarie Anrod Shimony made a penetrating study of twentieth-century Iroquois witchcraft. She found two categories of spiritual healers: those who diagnose ailments and those who diagnose and cure. Because many of today’s spirit healers take on some of the techniques of Western psychics, a lot of them give the appearance of fortune-tellers or tea-leaf readers. In fact, the term readers, a word Mad Bear used himself, is sometimes applied to all of them.
The English words used to describe the effects of magic have changed, too. Not many people talk anymore about witches, though they may surely think in terms of witchery. By the late twentieth century medicine had become so common a term for most redirections of the omnipresent psychic force orenda that reservation folk use it almost the way Spiritualists use the word spirit. In 2005, some healers/medicine people might say they “did some work” on behalf of this or that result. There seems to be the understanding that the force they use is one. “Good” or “bad” depends on its uses or its interpretation.
The healers we have today are usually solo operators, made, we figure, by some blend of natural talent—most likely psychic—and a period of training with at least one great healer. People with the potential to be healers often give some sign of it at an early age. Some have a natural gift, and some are made. The greatest, like athletes, are doubtless both.
Your first encounter with a healer can be a surprise. The rites may not seem elaborate. “Work” almost always begins with generic ceremonies and gifts of tobacco—a common offering to the spirits and the four quarters as a commencement to any worthy undertaking. Smudges of sage and cedar are customary for healing and purifying, following which might be moments of meditation and praying or chanting in one of the Iroquois languages. Other things these healers use may seem unlikely. Humble items, even ones made of plastic and mass-produced, could have their uses. The point seems to be to focus the intent of the practitioner and invoke the energy of generations of tradition behind it.
DIVINERS OF MYSTERIES
“Diviners of mysteries have always been prominent characters” among the Iroquois, according to Parker. The work of these spirit doctors could be as specific as finding lost children or possessions and solving crimes, or it could be as diffuse as telling fortunes and interpreting dreams. It could be as simple as deciding on the proper ceremony and medicine society for the patient’s complaint. It could be as dire as naming the supernatural assailant behind a spell causing a sickness.
Handsome Lake Uncovers the Truth
In the early 1800s, during the hunting season, a father and son from Cattaraugus came to Cornplanter village in Allegany while Prophet Handsome Lake was on hand. After a short stay, they took off into the woods.
The young man came back alone with their horse and cart. “My dad is lost,” he said. “I spent a week looking for him. I walked and searched and signaled with gunshots hoping to find him.”
Members of the community sensed that things were more than they seemed. They went to the local diviner, who said, “I think this guy killed his dad.” Handsome Lake was called in to the proceedings. The visionary told them to get a knife, a bullet, and a tomahawk and put them on a blanket before the suspect. “If there’s anything to this,” the prophet said, “one of them will move without being touched.”
They set things up as Handsome Lake directed and brought the son in. Others talked, and the objects were still. The minute the suspect spoke, the bullet moved. This not only told the prophet that the father had been shot by the son but somehow revealed to him the hiding place of the body. He could even describe the spot.
A Taint of the Supernatural
One night in the early twentieth century, three men came to the home of a healer on the Cattaraugus Reservation. One carried a spade and another a lantern. The third was a Tonawanda Reservation witch doctor.
A Cattaraugus family had been plagued with bad luck. Strange ailments had taken several children, and the affair had the taint of the supernatural. The Cattaraugus healer had been asked to do something about it, and he’d called on a specialist from Tonawanda.
The four walked into the swampy woods. Now and then, the Tonawanda man stopped, took a forked stick out of his bag, and held it like a dowsing rod, one arm of the Y in each hand. He pointed it in various directions, studied it briefly, and then tucked it away. Once the rod took on a subtle gleam. They went the way it indicated, trying to keep it trained on its target as they negotiated the paths
