The spade bearer set to. At the sound of metal hitting stone, the witch doctor took over. The lantern revealed a cubical box made of thick slabs from the creek bottom. “It’s there,” the witch doctor whispered. He put some white powder on top of the rough container and covered it with earth again.
The party went back to the house of the suffering family and dug a hole atthe corner of the woodshed. Into it the witch doctor put a five-gallon crock with a large piece of silk weighted at the corners, covering it like a drumhead. He made a small fire, threw medicine powder into it, and chanted, commanding the witch bundle to come from its box through the air into this container. In just a while, a ball of fire hurled itself across the night sky and arced down toward them. They dove for cover, all but the witch doctor, who saw it pass through the silk without burning it.
Inside, they found a bundle of rags soaked with blood, and in them a sharp bone, bloody red: the otnäyont, the blood bone, the cursed totem that had been drinking the blood of children. The witch doctor made off with it, and there were no more mystery ailments. The last sick child got well.
These witch bones can be laid in an area to curse it, and they’ll siphon the heart-blood of children until seen to in the traditional way. No wonder the Iroquois hated witches. At least it wasn’t a bomblet in the shape of a toy. Hell waits, too, for the deviser of that one.
HERBS AND HEALINGS
Prophet Handsome Lake had a lot to say about the occult practices of his people, including the healers. Herbal healers weren’t just magical gardeners who plucked what they wanted in the woods. They gathered herbs with the attitude of Iroquois hunters taking game: reverence. And the power of the plant was more than physical.
“It’s wrong to take a plant without first talking to it,” said Handsome Lake in his code. “Offer tobacco, and tell the plant in gentle words what you want of it. Then pluck it from the roots.” This was probably a way of both empowering the herb and involving it in its intended function from the moment it left the earth.
When the old Seneca healers came to a site to gather medicinal herbs, they often built small fires. Into the embers they cast tobacco at intervals, chanting prayers. They called on the spirits of the medicines, reminded them of the suffering people, and told them which of their powers were needed. The gatherer had a routine chant:
They say that you are ready to heal. Now I claim you for medicine. Let me use your healing powers to purge and cleanse and cure. I won’t destroy you when I take you, but instead I’ll plant your seed so you can grow and thrive. Herb-spirits, I take you with purpose, to make you agents of healing. It was said that all the world might come to you. Here I am. I thank you for your powers. I thank the Creator for the gift of you.
After the last puff of tobacco smoke, the herb gatherer dug the plant from the roots. He broke off the seed stalks, though, dropped the pods into the hole, and gently covered them over with fertile leaf mold. He never left this ceremony without announcing: “The plant will come again, and I have not destroyed life but helped increase it. So the plant is willing to lend me of its virtue.”
For Handsome Lake, it wasn’t right to take payment for healing with an herb. The patient should offer only tobacco in the name of spirits greater than the healer.
More to It Than That?
Once a year around the anniversary of Appomattox, some Civil War veterans used to get together for a few days and rough it near the Evans farm off Blakeley Road in the Erie County town of Aurora. As long as they lived, they did this, camping and recalling old friends and historic battles. Doubtless another companion—Sir John Barleycorn—was with them in abundance. A small natural spring was nearby.
The late historian Herb Evans (1905–2005) who hailed from the town of Wales, New York, spent time at these gatherings as a boy, and he got an earful. He also saw a few things that impressed him.
One of these vets had a skin condition due to his stay in a prison camp, and it got worse as he aged. He grumbled about it within earshot of the others, one of whom was an old Seneca who knew something about that spring on Evans’s property. “Chief Carpenter,” as he was nicknamed, told the sufferer to get into it and bathe in the water. He also told him to drink a bit every few hours. It soon cured him. The spring had a lot of sulfur in it, but there must have been more to it than that.
Turning a Spell Around
Artist-author Jesse Cornplanter (1889–1957) was the last lineal descendant of the Revolutionary-era war chief Cornplanter. Soon after he came back from World War I, a family on another reservation developed some hard feelings for him. He got sick, lost weight, and couldn’t eat. White doctors hadn’t been much help. In recollection, he chuckled, “I could almost taste strawberries,” an Iroquois way to say, “pushing up daisies.” Strawberries line the road to the Iroquois heaven.
One of the elders of the Tonawanda Reservation informed him that he had been witched. On four straight mornings, the old fellow gave him an emetic of touchwood fungus and twelve quarts of water to drink. Jesse Cornplanter threw up countless times into a hole the old man dug in the ground. The healer told him to stay out of sight of anyone before coming to see him
