Satanism Today - An Encyclopedia of Religion, Folklore and Popular ...

250 The Shawnee
hunt as best they could, and clung to memories of
a romanticized past. Many tribesmen eventually
slid into demoralized, dissolute lifestyles, consuming
increasing amounts of alcohol and occasionally
venting their frustration in acts of intratribal
and intrafamilial violence.
During this period of time Lalawethika, who
was to become Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee
prophet, was a less than stunningly successful
medicine man for a small village located in
eastern Indiana. A boastful alcoholic, he fully
embodied the demoralized state of his people. In
early 1805, in the wake of an epidemic of some
European disease on which the healer’s ministrations
had little impact, he unexpectedly fell into a
comalike state that the Shawnees interpreted as
death. However, before the funeral arrangements
could be completed, he revived, to the amazement
of his tribesmen. Considerably more amazing
were the revelations he had received during his
deathlike trance.
Tenskwatawa had been permitted to view
heaven, “a rich, fertile country, abounding in
game, fish, pleasant hunting grounds and fine
corn fields.” But he had also witnessed sinful
Shawnee spirits being tortured according to the
degree of their wickedness, with drunkards (one
of Tenskwatawa’s principal vices) being forced to
swallow molten lead. Overwhelmed by the power
of his vision, Tenskwatawa abandoned his old
ways. More revelations followed in succeeding
months, revelations that eventually added up to a
coherent new vision of religion and society.
Although the new revelation departed from
tradition on many points (e.g., notions of heavenly
and hellish realms were probably not indigenous),
its central thrust was a nativistic exhortation
to abandon Euramerican ways for the lifestyle
of earlier generations. According to Thomas
Jefferson’s account, the Master of Life instructed
Tenskwatawa,
to make known to the Indians that they were
created by him distinct from the whites, of
different natures, for different purposes,
and...that they must return from all the
ways of the whites to the habits and opinions
of their forefathers; they must not eat the
flesh of hog, of bullocks, of sheep, etc., the
deer and the buffalo having been created for
their food; they must not make bread of
wheat, but of Indian corn; they must not wear
linen nor wollen, but dress like their fathers,
in the skins and furs of animals; [and] they
must not drink ardent spirits. (cited in Klinck
1961, 53)
This revelation called tribesmen back to the
lifestyle and the principles (e.g., the laws of
Shawnee tradition) prescribed by the Creator. As
they had been warned “in the beginning,” the
abandonment of tradition had brought about
social chaos. Although their current degradation
involved the adoption of Euramerican ways,
earlier deviations had been responsible for their
military defeats. A nontraditional twist to the
new revelation was that the forces of chaos were
now identified with Euramericans. In another
revelation, the Master of Life went so far as to
declare that the invaders from the east were “not
my children, but the children of the Evil
Spirit ...They grew from the scum of the great
Water when it was troubled by the Evil Spirit.
And the froth was driven into the Woods by a
strong east wind. They are numerous, but I hate
them. They are unjust. They have taken away
your lands, which were not made for them.”
Although the inclusion of Euramericans was
new, in many other ways these teachings fit well
into traditional understandings. The Great
Serpent was the closest being the Shawnees had
to a devil, so that the identification of this snake
as the source of their conquerors was a reasonable
association: The Serpent was avenging itself
for the defeat it had suffered at the hands of the
Shawnee people many thousands of years ago.
In a sense, the sea snake was still alive in the
form of the various fragments of its flesh used as
power-sources in witchcraft. In fact, prior to the
Creator’s revelations through Tenskwatawa, some
Shawnees had already been attributing their
degraded state to the machinations of the Evil One
through the agency of Indian sorcerers. The greatest
evil Shawnee witches could perpetrate was
death, usually by an illness that was brought on by
the introduction of foreign substances into the