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Shemhazai and Azazel 251
target-person’s physical body. This motif was
reflected at the community level by perceiving the
threat of witchcraft to the social “body” in terms of
the physical presence of the witches’ medicine
bundles—bundles through which the physically
present Serpent (in the form of fragments of his
body) continued to avenge itself. These various
associations came together when Tenskwatawa
and his followers began to kill witches.
The new revelation included a redemptive
scenario in which Euramericans would be defeated
and the fortunes of Native Americans restored. The
promise of restored greatness had overwhelming
appeal, and the Prophet’s message spread quickly
to other tribes. Zealous converts among the
Delaware (an Algonquian tribe whose mythology
had many parallels to that of the Shawnees) seized
fellow tribesmen suspected of witchcraft—who,
predictably, turned out to be those Delaware
opposed to the new movement—and requested
that Tenskwatawa journey to their village and use
his supernatural power to identify witches.
The first prisoner to be condemned by the
Prophet was Anne Charity, a convert to
Christianity who had adopted Euramerican
manners and dress. She was suspended over a
large campfire and tortured until she confessed
that she was indeed a witch, and that she had given
her evil medicine bundle to her grandson. After
burning the old woman to death, the grandson
was apprehended and brought before the assembly.
Rightly fearing for his life, the young man
admitted to having borrowed the medicine
bundle, but claimed that he had returned it to his
grandmother after having used it only once, for
the innocuous purpose of flying through the air.
The grandson was released, but his confession
served to confirm the suspicions of widespread
witchcraft held by the Prophet and his followers.
Other individuals who had converted to
Christianity or who otherwise had some kind of
close association with Euramericans were then
tortured and burnt.
Although Tenskwatawa’s religio-political
movement was superseded by his brother
Tecumseh’s more secular efforts to organize opposition
to U.S. expansionism, and although
Tecumseh eventually suffered military defeat, the
movement left a lasting impression on Shawnee
demonology: Fieldworkers in the early part of the
twentieth century discovered that traditional
Shawnees continued to identify the Evil Spirit
with Euramericans.
For Further Reading:
Edmunds, R. David. The Shawnee Prophet. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska, 1983.
Klinck, Carl F., ed. Tecumseh: Fact and Fiction in
Early Records. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-
Hall, 1961.
Schutz, Noel William, Jr. “The Study of Shawnee
Myth in an Ethnographic and Ethnohistorical
Perspective.” Ph.D. dissertation Indiana
University. 1975. Ann Arbor: University
Microfilms Inc., 1989.
Voegelin, C. F., and John Yegerlehner. “Toward a
Definition of Formal Style, with Examples from
Shawnee.” In W. E. Richmond, ed. Studies in
Folklore. Bloomington: University of Indiana,
1957.
Shemhazai and Azazel
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all have angel lore
related to angelic lust for human beings. Although
the basic idea of spirit beings or demons having
sex with human beings is ancient, Judeo-Christian
speculation on such ideas grew out of two short,
obscure verses in Genesis (6:2 and 6:4) about the
“sons of God” taking to wife the “daughters of
men.” In these rather odd verses, the expression
“sons of God” was taken to indicate angels. The
traditional interpretation of these passages is that
these sons of God are fallen angels.
One of the Jewish tales flowing out of this
theme is the story of Shemhazai (a variant
spelling of Semyaza) and Azazel, a tale that was
taken over in Islam as the story of Harut and
Marut. According to the story, humanity’s inability
to avoid temptation and sin prompted God to
consider destroying the world by a flood. The
angels Shemhazi and Azazel reminded God that
the angels had warned him in advance about
humankind. God responded by asserting that
angels would have failed just as quickly if not
more so if placed under the same conditions. As
an answer to God’s challenge, Shemhazi and
Azazel came down to earth to show that angels
could do better.