Possibly because of his success in the white world, Parker never felt accepted on the reservation. Still, when the death owl hooted by his door, he was Seneca enough to know what it meant. He went to the reservation and made his peace in the traditional fashion, then returned to his home on New Year’s Day and left this life at his people’s most sacred place. A lucky man, he was, to know it. Oh, reader: Where is yours?
RING OF HONOR
Sketchy legends of monsters, witch lights, and supernatural battles help us recognize New York’s ancient power places; they don’t touch the richness of the traditions the old societies maintained about them. Now and then we get a hint.
Sig Lonegren is a Vermont native who lives today in Glastonbury, England. Our paths crossed a lot in the 1980s when I taught English at the Gow School in South Wales, New York, and Sig was one of its most distinguished graduates and board members. A big, lighthearted, graying-blond man, even in a suit Sig would have the look of someone who was once a hippie. Sig is also an authority on diverse topics and has written world-renowned books on dowsing, labyrinths, and ancient mysteries.
Sig is a pretty good man to ask for insights about any paranormal subject, and as a longtime student and friend of Seneca wolf-mother Twylah Hurd Nitsch he knows plenty about Iroquois country. In November 2009, I asked him what he knew about ancient monuments in New York. “I was taken to one on the Cattaraugus Reservation,” he said. “I don’t think the archaeologists know this one.”
“What’s it like?”
“Very impressive. A big earth circle, maybe on the oval side. It had a couple of openings in it that could have been entrances.”
“Where is it?” I asked in the tone of asking the time. We made eye contact, and I forget who smiled first. He knew I had to ask; I didn’t think he would answer. Then he went serious.
“If I remembered how to find it, I couldn’t tell you,” he said. “But that was a long time ago. I honestly don’t remember. I do remember what I was told about it, though. The Seneca I was with said, ‘This is where we honored our handicapped.’ They honored people of different abilities because they presumed that they had extra gifts.”
I know he looked at me again, but I was gazing off into space. Ceremonies and monuments to the disabled! There are people in my society who resent them getting a few parking spaces.
“The Creator never takes something from any of us,” says Michael Bastine, “without giving something back. The Native peoples of the world have always believed that. We don’t look down on our handicapped. To us they are powerful, but in ways that aren’t easy to see. They were put here not only to enjoy their own lives, but as spiritual teachers to the rest of us. If we can only learn how to listen to them.”
8
The Supernatural Zoo
Pan, the goat-footed god, is not so funny when you encounter him.
F. W. HOLIDAY, THE GOBLIN UNIVERSE
THE CELTS AND THE IROQUOIS
The Iroquois imagination filled the upstate woods with psychic characters and a supernatural bestiary. Some were figures of religion. Some were more important than others. In coming to grips with Iroquois tradition, it might be useful to think of the Celts of Europe. There are parallels.
Both words, Celtic and Iroquois, represent a language group rather than an empire, a nation, or even a distinct ethnicity. The climates and physical environments of the two groups were roughly similar, and their people lived in small, often widely separated villages, not cities. Neither always played well with their linguistic cousins, and when unity came, it was often too late. Though centuries apart, both met with a crash higher-tech, urbanized cultures—for the Celts, it was the Romans—that wanted something of them. Both were storytellers, both were thought by the world to be the bearers of psychic gifts. Both supernaturalized their landscape. Both held traditions of Little People.
All speakers of Celtic languages from Austria to Ireland shared a handful of head gods, usually with similar names. All Celts had a solar deity, a father god, a horse goddess, and probably a fate queen (the dread Morrigan to the Irish).
Individual Celtic nations had their own gods, too, patrons of them and them alone. Very often these tribal gods were visualized as zoomorphs—able to take animal forms—likely related to the totems of the tribe, hence tribal identity.
But within the territory of each Celtic nation were scads of highly localized lesser divinities whom no one outside the immediate region could have known of. It’s been thought that they were associated with local landscape features.
The cultural, the national, and the local. . . . The supernatural system of the old Iroquois of New York was almost surely something like that.
All Confederacy nations shared a cultural mythology of religious/ creation-related figures. They had their Creator, often taken to be identical to their “Good-Minded Spirit.” Their thundering god and their mighty serpents were in perpetual opposition. They had their great New York water snakes, their World Turtle, and their Three Sisters (vegetation spirits of corn, beans, and squash). The pan-Iroquois culture-hero the Peacemaker is nearly deified. All this seems to have been high and sacred, not spooky.
There were shared figures of storytelling. All Iroquois nations had their Stone Giants, vampires, Flying Heads, and Little People. They were clearly supernatural but not fully divine, though some—like the Little People—turn up in ceremonies that are quite sacred.
Each of the nations had its own supernaturals. Only the Seneca have their creation hill. Just the Oneida revere their self-operating power stone.
Then there were the bogies that may have been associated with specific natural features and unknown outside the range of a single village. Longnose, the Legs, and High Hat could be such highly localized figures. If any of them made it into print 150 years ago,
