archaeological and textual records - eCommons@Cornell - Cornell ...

while the life soul helped to carry on normal body functioning. By the same token, it
was presumed that if the free soul was away for too long, physical death was
imminent. Besides illness or other natural causes of the death, the free soul could be
endangered or compromised by things such as unfriendly magic and enemy curses,
and could be enslaved during the course of torture, if the prisoner cried out to his
captors (Hultkrantz 1997:188-189). The free soul also seems to be the part of the
person active in dreams (Englebrecht 2003:48).
Dreamers and Healers
Dreams were perhaps the most widely-regarded part of Iroquoian spirituality.
Throughout the Jesuit Relations, the missionaries repeatedly lament the dream
superstitions that seemed to permeate into all aspects of life.
Prior to contact with the missionaries, the people in any Iroquoian village who
had authority over spiritual matters were the medicine men, also known as shamans; in
the Jesuit Relations, the French authors refer to them pejoratively as “Jugglers.” As
the terms “shaman” and medicine man” respectively imply, the Iroquoian concept of
medicine was innately spiritual. Writing from the St. Michael Seneca mission during
the summer of 1669, Father Fremin criticizes the village shamans, for both the
proliferation of “superstition” against Christianity, and for what he feels is economic
exploitation: “They [Jugglers] are always summoned to explain the Dreams, and as
they know admirably how to turn them to their own profit, they live and grow rich on
the credulity of these poor people, who spare nothing – above ail, when they are sick –
to carry out what the Jugglers has told them the dream orders them to do” (JR 54:99).
22