THE GREAT HILL
(Seneca Country)
The south end of Canandaigua Lake is a region of paranormal mystery. Here a Seneca-Onondaga army was rumored to have defeated the Massawomeck, a fierce nation whose name means “great snake.” A big mica-flecked rock cut with unexplained symbols may commemorate the event. Algonquin settlement was here, as well as strange and ancient stonework, something that always fills people with awe. Giant lake-serpent sightings have been so prevalent since the whites moved in that lakeside innkeepers took their validity as a matter of course into the late nineteenth century. This lake is also a zone of sanctity. Somewhere here, a nation was formed.
THE SENECA NATIONAL CREATION TALE
The Seneca national creation tale begins with a pre-Iroquoian boy who made a pet of a queer worm found in a creek feeding Canandaigua Lake. At the start it was cute, and it had two heads in some of the tale’s sixty-something versions. It ate ravenously and grew so big that soon it was a monster that people were afraid not to feed. When the forests had run out of animals, the devil snake turned on its patrons. By the last night, it had encircled the community in their fort like a living henge and eaten every human but the boy who raised it—and a girl. The human pair huddled behind the palisades after sunset. Their reward was to be the serpent’s last Canandaigua brunch. The Holder of the Heavens had other ideas.
In a dream, he told the boy to fletch an arrow with the girl’s hair, then face the beast, draw bow, and take aim. A single stroke of this fatal charm took the monster down. Its death rolls cleared the hillside below of its trees. As it subsided into Canandaigua Lake, it disgorged the skulls of its victims. The two young survivors started the Seneca Nation.
The Seneca name for themselves, Nundawaono, means “People of the Great Hill.” There’s debate, though, about the exact site of the sacred mountain, and no wonder; the Seneca have repented many of their disclosures to the Europeans, not least of which might be their sacred stories.
It might be what’s commonly called Bare Hill, on the east side of Canandaigua Lake and five miles from the head. That’s what the Seneca told the early whites. It could also be South Hill, this one, too, thin of tree. It could even be Parrish Hill, where Arthur C. Parker made his home at the end of his life. Whichever mountain it is, if you head to Canandaigua Lake and look south, you will be sure to see it.
Much that we know about Parker’s ancestors comes from his work. In the 1930s, Parker and his wife spent summers in a farmhouse on Parrish Hill near Naples, high over the valley legendary as the birthplace of the Senecas. This home became their residence when they retired. Parker was sure this was the hill down which the legendary serpent rolled.
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 sup
ernatural 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, it was a coincidence.
As regards this subject, the supernatural actors of the Iroquois, this book doesn’t have room for what could have been obtained. Ten this size couldn’t hold what has been lost. This chapter is only a profile of some bogies from Iroquois tradition. Some of the garish characters may have spun off the high divinities, figures from Iroquois religion. They are clearly separate from that now. Some are pure figures of folklore that haven’t been heard from otherwise in centuries. Some of them are as real and immediate as a contemporary paranormal report.
THE FEARSOME FOURSOME
Stone Giants, Flying Heads, Vampire Corpses, and Little People: Folklorists have found this supernatural quartet the dominant characters in the Iroquois forest tales.
Other beasties have come and gone. The Mohawk made offerings to this near Lake Champlain. The Seneca steered clear of that along the Allegheny. But all Iroquois nations—even North Carolina newcomers the Tuscarora—talked about these four, and variants are found in Iroquoian groups as far-ranging as the Cherokee and Wyandot. Most folklorists think these cycles are quite old, predating European contact.
Note that all are variants of the human form, and many, such as the Iroquois giants and vampires, have counterparts all over the world. Their Little People look even more like the elves and fairies of Europe. Only the curious Flying Heads lack off-continent parallels.
We don’t know a living Native American who claims to have seen or encountered Stone Giants, Flying Heads, or Vampire Corpses. They seem figures of folklore, and we’ll discuss them in this chapter. The Little People may be different. They have their own chapter.
THE STONE GIANTS
The Iroquois nations have legends about a tribe of ancient enemies whose name is usually translated as the Stone Giants. They were monstrous cannibals in skintight coats of weapon-proof scales.
Once the Stone Giants were a northeastern tribe content to live and let live, but they endured famine in their wanderings in the cold of the north. They turned to raw meat for sustenance and came into New York with a taste for fresh Iroquois. It was the source of a serious culture clash, and the then Five Nations were getting the worst of it when the tide turned. There are two versions of the matter.
One starred the famous Skunni Wundi, or “he crosses the creek.” Skunni Wundi was a trickster hero who’d grown from an impressionable boy into a resourceful young man. He’d made a legend for himself in his own village, but his fame was not yet international when he made his vow to rid his nation of the trolls. He had been doing some scouting in their territory and had left his belongings on the bank of a creek. He came back to them to find a woman of the Stone Giants inspecting them. She picked up his tomahawk as if it was a marvel, even licking the edge with her tongue. Then she set out to see what it could do. The weapon shocked her by splitting a boulder at just a touch.
One of the fundamentals of world myth is the premise that talents or qualities can sometimes be transferred by touch. Unaware that her own act—and her saliva—had given the weapon some of the special powers that protected every member of her tribe, the Stone Giantess presumed that the weapon’s owner could whip them all. At that point, the Iroquois hero showed himself, in no hurry to correct her. He added that he’d give her folk some of the boulder’s medicine if they troubled his people again. The giants packed up and left Iroquois territory for good.
In another version of the Stone Giants’ demise, the Creator disguised himself as a studly young Stone Giant and persuaded his new colleagues to gather into a single army in a valley at Onondaga. The avalanche he started from above overwhelmed them. When the elaborate hoax called the Cardiff giant—a ten-foot man carved out of a block of stone—was found and exhibited in 1869, the Onondaga were not surprised that it was unearthed in this valley so near the site of their legend.
Like the Little People, the Stone Giants display a number of powers. The Stone Giants had several types of magic, including the ability to bestow luck in hunting. Healers as well as fighters, the Stone Giants are sometimes associated with the lesser caste of False Face masks. Transferring magical power to a human artifact is another common motif. Most storytellers agreed that the being inside the flinty coat might be a normal looking, if large, human. Though statuesque, Stone Giant women could also be seductive, doffing their armor coats piece by piece in a mineral striptease by a young hunter’s fire.
The giants have peculiar weaknesses, though. Individual Stone Giants who went to live with human families were often chased by members of their own nation and needed human help to win a titanic duel. Though normal clubs, spears, and arrows couldn’t hurt the Stone Giants, certain types of wood were said to pierce or shatter their flinty armor. Red willow osier (a type of bush) and basswood (the lime or linden tree) were among these.
Another weakness involved the stiffness of their armor. The Stone Giants couldn’t tilt their heads back to look up. A good way to befuddle them was to climb a tree. The trickster hero Skunni Wundi pulled a move on a couple of them near the Oatka Creek near Leroy. Some Stone Giants had snuck up on him and his sister as they played by Buttermilk Falls. Skunni Wundi hid himself under the falls, snuck up behind them, and gave a sudden yell. As they turned their heads, their necks snapped.
The last of these Stone Giants lived for many years in the region of today’s Allegany State Park. A Seneca hunter took shelter from a blizzard in a cave and found the giant, who took pity on him. He taught the young man about the history of his nation, then let him depart as a friend. This was the source of one origin tale for the False Faces.
The Stone Giants seem likeliest of the four major Iroquois creatures to have had some origin in reality. So many Native nations of the Northeast have legends about ancient giants that some people interpret them as ancestral memories. The evidence of forts and battlefields attests to prehistoric wars. Some even interpret the Stone Giants to have been European visitors, possibly Vikings, who may have worn metal armor. Tuscarora historian David Cusick never doubted these giants and placed them in dim antiquity, estimating that they came from the north about twenty-five hundred years before Columbus.
A sense of the unknown past of their territory surely had to affect the Iroquois. Some vanished culture left stone-and-earth monuments all over upstate New York, ones that have fed the imagination of all subsequent holders of the land. (The builders had to be giants!) Pre-Iroquoian flint points are sometimes found in Iroquoian burials, often imbedded in masks representing Stone Giants, as if the Iroquois connected the antiquity of the points with the mythic beings.
Giant human skeletons have been reported at dozens of sites in Iroquois territory. Some were buried with artifacts that looked strange to the white settlers. Some skeletons were said to have been the remains of people who would have been nine feet tall. Add to that the regional mythology of Bigfoot, and it could make you wonder how real the Stone Giants were.
THE GREAT FLYING HEADS
The Iroquois have a penchant for direct description. The name says it all about these Great Flying Heads: bodiless, enormous, humanoid heads who either shot through the air where they wanted like Superman or flew by means of tiny, hyperactive wings. The height of a man, they were fitted with dreadful saucer eyes, huge jaws, tusklike teeth, and bear-size arms with wicked claws. Wild, flaring manes trailed behind them.
A ravenous meat eater, the Flying Head was one of the most dreaded beasties of the Northeast. Often drawn to fires in the woods and fresh-cooked kills, it shoveled anything it wanted
down its gullet.
The original Flying Heads were envisioned as spiritual beings, zipping about the world before the time of mankind. Associated with the power of wind, they may even have been miniversions of a god whose Seneca name is Dagwanoenyent, meaning “whirlwind” or “cyclone.” When an overnight storm mowed channels through a forest, laying trees about like twigs, it was thought that a couple of Heads had been at work.
In most tales, the Flying Head was a dim bulb. One we see in a common tale peered through the window of a cabin and saw a young girl roasting chestnuts in the coals and plucking them out with tongs. The Head figured that the coals themselves were a delicacy and barged in, determined to have its share, perhaps an appetizer before the main course of the girl. It wolfed down a cropful of red-hot coals and soared off in agony. No one in that village ever saw the beastie again, so maybe it burned to death.
Iroquois Supernatural: Talking Animals and Medicine People Page 25