Note 66 — Front matter
Reading edition
Ethn. Rep. 1880-81, p. 73:—Witches could and did assume animal shapes. For example a dog seen by a man which had fire streaming from its mouth and nostrils. It was night. The man shot at it, and the next morning tracked it by the marks of blood from its wound. At a bridge a woman’s tracks took the place of the dog’s, and finally he found the woman. She had died from the effect of the shot. Page 73: Likewise a hog, when pursued, disappeared at a small creek, and finally reappeared as an old man, who said it was he, whom they had been chasing. So they, the pursuers, knew he was a witch. Page 74: A Canadian Indian one evening pursued a white bull with fire streaming from its nostrils. He had never seen a white bull on the reservation before. “As it passed in front of a house it was transformed into a man with a large white blanket, who was ever afterward known as a witch.”
Ethn. Rep. 1901-02, p. 395:—A man going out at night noticed a queer-looking burro. Upon his return home he was told that a large cat had entered the house. He went out again, discovered a man wrapped in a blanket, but not in the Zuñi fashion, his head was sunk low in the blanket. He knew this creature to be a wizard.
Ethn. Rep. 1887-88, p. 458:—That the medicine man (Shaman) has the faculty of transforming himself into a coyote and other animals at pleasure and then resuming the human form, is as implicitly believed in by the American Indians as it was by our own forefathers in Europe. And page 459: The Abipones of Paraguay credit their medicine-men with power to put on the form of a tiger. The medicine-men of Honduras claimed the power of turning themselves into lions and tigers. Also the Shamans of the Nicaraguans possessed similar power. Hertz, p. 133 fol.:—“In der christlichen Zeit wurde der heidnische Cultus Teufelsanbetung und hier entstand mit dem Hexenglauben die Vorstellung von Menschen, die sich mit Hilfe des Satans aus reiner Mordlust zu Wölfen verwandeln. So wurde der Werwolf das Bild des tierisch Dämonischen in der Menschennatur.”