Untitled - Smithsonian Institution

130 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 99
This is anop;od to bo done especially with twins, ^* although a single-
born baby could by the same means bo brought up to become a
witch.
If twins are born, and their parents intend to make witches of
them, no mother's milk is given them for 24 days (i. e., the taboo
period for them other, see p. 127); tliey are to be fed with the liquid
portion of corn hominy, k'a'no'€''no°. This must be given them only
during the night. Moreover, they are to be kept rigidly secluded from
all visitors duiing the same 24 days' period. Some of these injunc-
tions are strangely reminiscent of, and are no doubt related to, tlie
Iroquois custom of concealing children until puberty ("down-fended"
children, as J. N. B. Hewitt calls them), as practiced by the Onon-
daga., Mohawk, and Seneca.®^
At the end of this period a decoction of the bark of k*alo*'Gwo"
Df'Dawi^skaGe'"' {Rhus glabra L., smooth sumac), is drunk by the
mother, "to make her milk flow abundantly," and from then onward
she nurses tlie children: the result has been obtained.
As to the power of these twin witches, the most astonishing asser-
tions arc made. Not only do they not stop at flying through the
air or diving imder the ground, but they can even walk on the sunrays.
They can take all human or animal shapes conceivable.
Even when they are only a month old, "whatever they think
happens." If they are lying on the groimd in their swaddlings, and
crying for hunger, and their mother should happen to be eating, and
wishes to finish her meal before attending to them, her food will
become undone (i. e., raw) again, and the food of all those that happen
to be eating with her.
If their mother is cookiiig a meal while they cry for her, and she
does not heed them, the food she is preparing will never get done.
When they have grown to be urchins, and happen to be playing
outside, all of a sudden they will come scampering in, asking for food
if their mother says the food isn't ready yet, it will never get done.
But if she gives it to them straightway, even if she had only just
put it on the fire, it is ready to be eaten as soon as she hands it to
them.
They often go and play with the "Little People."
They can see the Little People, and talk with them, though we
can not.
But wherever they go, and however long a time they are absent,
their i)arents are never anxious on their account, knowing as they do
that they can take care of themselves.
"* It is immaterial whether they are of the same sex or not.
8' Cf. Hewitt, Iroquoian Cosmology, pp. 142, 252; Hewitt, Seneca Fiction, Leg-
ends, and Myths, pp. 510, 810.