IROQUOIS WITCHES

Since the first documents of the XVII and XVIII centuries on the life in the Iroquois villages, several references are found on the phenomenon of witchcraft, along with shamanism, the ceremonial healing rites and other beliefs and practices. The conception of witchcraft, diffused both among the Iroquois and their Algonquian neighbors, implies the persuasion that various kinds of pains, accidents and misfortunes, were provoked by spirits which had been conjured for evil purposes by malicious persons or individuals who had feelings of envy or resentment towards their victims. Such beliefs had a considerable expansion in the early colonization period, because they could supply a means to explain the diffusion of new infective diseases, brought by the newcomers, which had decimated the Native peoples. Furthermore, these beliefs were invoked also to account for a great deal of transformations and changes in the Native social and cultural systems, which had occurred under the pressure of economical, political and military forces coming from outside (Porterfield 1992). Though based on a set of beliefs and practices which belonged to the pre-colonial culture, the Native witchcraft conceptions were rapidly fused with ideas borrowed from Christianity and brought by missionaries and colonizers, producing a complex system which in many ways resemble that formed in European rural areas during the Middles Ages and early Modern Age.

 

A group of masked dancers of the False Faces Society, going from house to house, during the Midwinter Ceremony, to drive out illnesses and sorceries made by the witches

According to the materials recorded among the Iroquois in the late XIX century, the witches were regarded as capable to turn themselves into various animals, especially birds, turkeys or owls, thus being able to rapidly travel from one place to the other. To the Iroquois is also attributed the belief that the witches, both males and females, formed a sort of “secret society”, hidden to the majority of the people, which gathered secretly at night, according to a pattern which is found also in the European documents of the Middle Ages.  It was believed that the witches assembled during the night in some isolated place, in the woods, around a fireplace where a big kettle was put, into which the poison of snakes was poured. At the end of the meeting, which reminds to the conception of the “Sabbath” developed in medieval times, the participants went away taking the shape of animals: foxes, wolves, panthers, hawks and owls. A tale refers that a boy participated to one of such secret feasts, and he is given a cap made with an owl’s head. When he wore it he felt himself changed into a bird and capable to fly (Smith 1888; Beauchamp 1892).
Still at the beginnings of the new millennium, among the Iroquois it is diffused the belief that one of the distinctive characteristics of the witch is the capacity to change shape and to take on the aspect of another being, usually an animal. The strange lights which sometimes are seen in the woods are regarded as “witch lights”, the alternate forms that witches take in order to travel unseen. A contemporary witness from a Mohawk community has stated that the lights are accompanied sometimes by the sound of dozens of running human feet and people talking to each other, as an invisible host of spirits had crossed the open field (Bastine-Winfield 2011: p. 83). Such a conception reminds also of an ancient European tradition, that of the Wild Hunt, of the crowd of spirits of the dead which went across the woodlands and the fields during certain moments of the year.