POWER PEOPLE
The False Face healers must have possessed all the apparently psychokinetic powers observed in the adepts of other world societies. Shamans, mystics, yogis, and Zen masters may have had nothing on them. As recently as 1940, Iroquois False Face healers were seen handling hot ashes and coals, even rubbing them without effect on living human bodies.
In folklore, the False Faces are wizards when in trance and behind the mask. We don’t know many tales in which they came in to save the day from evil witches and sorcerers, engaging in outright duels, but it would be logical to think some of them have been told. The Faces are presumed to have the power, and it’s widely thought that, on their occasional stomp about the village, no occult evil workers will dare stick around. William Beauchamp believed that the Great Winter Feast was their usual time to march forth and purge the villages of their bad influences.
The Faces of Green Lake
West of Jamesville and southeast of Syracuse is the comma-shaped Green Lake, the traditional site of the Onondaga False Faces’ greatest mysteries. In historic times, an Onondaga hunter looked over the edge of a cliff and saw below him a dancing, chanting procession of Faces coming up from Green Lake. Each member of the group was laden with so many silver fish that it seemed a miracle, but he carried them like they were weightless. They were so merry with their catch that they were crowing their joy call. (“Hoh! Hoh-o-o-oh!” writes Beauchamp of it.) The hunter decided to hold his place and get a better look at these mystery men. Even behind his mound of shiny fish, the leader of the faces sensed him from a long way off and rerouted the march, in perfect stride, up the sheer face of a cliff and right into the rocky wall. The hunter heard their calls, seeming to come from within the mountain, for a long time after. They were reputed to have a meeting hall underground somewhere near there, so maybe that was the explanation.
The False Faces may show signs of themselves in their traditional places about the state, and most of us wouldn’t know what to make of them. We hear reports now and then about apparitions of ghostly, disembodied heads in even new buildings near or on top of sites associated with the False Face healers. One of them is in a Mount Morris, New York, hotel on the site of a grove once rumored to have been a gathering spot for the False Faces. They would be ghastly ghosts, even if you knew what they were.
TED WILLIAMS’S TALES OF THE FALSE FACES
Ted Williams’s book Big Medicine from Six Nations is, among other things, a motherlode of supernatural folklore. It is not, however a handbook, and certainly no text. In fact, Ted often told his stories to us a bit differently than they appeared in his books.
Ted was a member of the False Face Society, and he begins his section on the matter with the acknowledgment that the subject is taboo. He follows it quickly by giving us a good reason: Some of the masks are powerful, and thus dangerous.
The Skull’s Warning
In his boyhood on the Tuscarora Reservation, Ted had a young neighbor nicknamed Michael Angelo. This young fellow had a middle-sized dog that was afraid of nothing. Jeese-uh, as they called him, would attack anything he thought was menacing his young master, even a pack of larger dogs. But one night as the two of them came home down a winding, wooded trail, this intrepid dog got whiny and terrified, slinking between his owner’s knees. Young Michael put his hands down to comfort his dog and felt its hair standing up. By himself, he went on cautiously ahead and saw the likely source of the dog’s terror: a pale, glowing skull-like face, resting on a stump by the trail, facing in his direction. His dog had felt the critter’s radiance before he had even seen it. Michael Angelo decided not to get near it and took another route home.
The apparition of this ghostly head was taken as a warning from the False Faces for young Michael Angelo not to go the direction he was going. Before a fullday was out, one of his young friends unexpectedly died. It was interpreted that this fate could have been his had he not taken the sign.
To be the holder of a live medicine mask is an ominous responsibility. Not all the masks we see are live ones, though; some are virtual toys, made for no other purpose than to be sold. But they are not always easy to recognize. No less than Ted’s father, the famous healer Eleazar Williams, was once mistaken about a humble-looking mask.
Feed It or Else . . .
In Ted’s boyhood, none of the shops on the reservation sold a single item of Native American craftsmanship. The aunt of one of his neighbors decided to remedy the situation, setting up a trading post designed to prey on tourists. All went well with the northwestern totem poles and Great Plains–style eagle-feather headdresses. Things took a turn when the shop took in a medicine mask from a desperate member of one of the Six Nations. No one knew, but he had stolen it right out of the Onondaga Longhouse.
Black and not artfully made, the mask looked like an el cheapo False Face that couldn’t possibly be alive. But if there is one thing we know about these artifacts, it is that they don’t always look like what they are.
One after another, all the young people in the owner’s family died. Soon she lost her husband and then her own life. Then her mother was on her
