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The Witches’ Craft
If one can forget the twentieth-century preoccupation with black magic (which is a comparatively recent innovation), it becomes clear that the real witchcraft is more than likely to be yet another variation on the ways in which the old practices were perpetuated.
JANET AND COLIN BORD,
THE SECRET COUNTRY
IROQUOIS WITCHES
Like preindustrial people everywhere, the old Iroquois had an outlook on the world that might be called animistic. Spirits were thought to animate everything, including animals, plants, and earthly features. They could be the invisible causers of storms, floods, natural disasters, and plagues. But what powered the spirits?
Many world societies have words for the life force: mana, prana, pneuma, ch’i, kaa, manitou. The power of life, landscape, spirituality, and divinity for Iroquois society was often called something that sounded like orenda. There is debate about the prevalence of this exact word, but not the concept. To simplify things, let’s think of it like the Force in the Star Wars motif.
Orenda was a titanic, universal, inexhaustible power that could be channeled to do almost anything. It was also carried around as part of a being’s life package. By their nature, gods and supernatural critters had big batteries of orenda. One supernatural could spot it in another by sight, through any disguise. Humans could enhance their own orenda through virtue, training, and life experience. Chiefs, heroes, and shamans packed plenty of it. Someone who could master the use of orenda or gain the aid of spirits who wielded it could do almost anything.
But orenda—the Force—could be turned. It could be refocused into a weapon.
Otkon is a broad term for negative things, beings, energy, or forces. It was thought that otkon, the other side of orenda, could be launched like a fateful laser beam at human targets. It could be projected into objects like dolls or trinkets, turning them into psychically radioactive land mines that work to the grief of all who come near them. Who would do such a thing with orenda?
The old Iroquois had a powerful belief in witchcraft. They feared it, they hated it, and they quickly killed anyone convicted of practicing it. The witch—and any other wielder of otkon—was thought to hold the power to cause death, drought, sickness, blight, storms, and almost any other calamity that could befall people and the natural environment. Anyone—man, woman, child—could become a witch. Some could even turn themselves into animals. But is this all witches are? Supernatural evildoers? People who reroute orenda and use it selfishly? It could well be that some witches were more.
The difficulty of making sharp and current distinctions in matters of ancient supernaturalism is one of the themes of this book. We see that in many world cultures, some form of proscribed supernaturalism operated in the shadow of the mainstream, and that it was often vigorously persecuted. The handiest example may come to us from medieval and Renaissance Europe, where a Christianity struggling to solidify itself made witches out of herbal healers and the practitioners of older, pagan religions, as well as whatever “devil worshippers” might truly have been out there. Things aren’t even that clear-cut with the Iroquois.
The Iroquois had their own alternative god, sometimes called the Evil-Minded One. His name would have been different in each Iroquois language and virtually unpronounceable in this one. As we have said, he could be more of a Trickster than a demon. But in some of the tales we have, some Iroquois witches are portrayed as the Evil One’s devotees. Maybe so. We should not presume that a few people might not have given up asking the Good-Minded One for what they wanted and figured to give his rival a try. The first deed of every initiated witch of this type was to magically kill a treasured friend or family member.
In 1989 the anthropologist Annemarie Anrod Shimony (1928–1995) estimated that about a third of the residents of the Six Nations Reserve in Canada were “traditionalist Indians,” and that it was about this percentage who still believed in the power whites call witchcraft. While few contemporary Longhouse folk would ever think of working a curse in the traditional way, few would deny that others have the power to do it. In fact, witchcraft is alive and well, or at least the faith in something that answers to it. Only those who categorically deny the existence of psychic phenomena could say that the Iroquois are completely wrong. The Iroquois were not alone in their belief.
A faith in something we would classify as witchcraft has developed in so many unconnected parts of the world that we have to conclude there could be something interesting and original going on. Witchcraft of the European style—along with occultism of many types—came across the Atlantic with the first wave of immigrants to North America. Even in the nineteenth century, the territory once owned by the Iroquois was so proverbial for its alternative white cults and religious movements that the region drew nicknames like “the Spirit Way” and “the Burned-over District”—meaning that all spiritually flammable souls had been set alight. Some of the eclectic tenets of this period included Christian spin-offs like Evangelism and Adventism. Some other indigenous isms like Spiritualism and Mormonism looked a lot like witchcraft to some mainstream Christians.
Ethnic supernatural customs and traditions could be found among many New York families well into the twentieth century, and some whites may have known plenty about the Iroquois dark arts. In 1923, Seneca scholar Arthur C. Parker claimed to know a white doctor with a reputation for diagnosing and curing victims of witchery on the Tonawanda Reservation. Never forget that our own day has its trends that to many materialist thinkers look no less magical: feng shui, homeopathic healing, past-life regression, reiki, and psychic communication.
Though direct terms like magic and witch aren’t used on the
