The Ondinnonk or Dream Culture of the Iroquois
Ritual Dream-Therapy for Violent and Sexual Desire
Sep 28, 2009
French Jesuit missionaries in the 17th-century North American-Canadian border wrote extensively of the Huron and Iroquois, providing a wealth of anthropological knowledge on the American Indians of the region. Of particular interest is their description of the Iroquois’ ritual significance of dreams and the acting out and fulfillment of desires contained within the dream state. Anthropologist William N. Fenton notes Iroquois scholar Anthony F.C. Wallace as the first proponent of the psychoanalytic theory of Iroquois dream fulfillment, a sophistication owing to their adoration and ritual significance of the spiritual and supernatural nature of dreams that “was greatly superior to that of the most enlightened Europeans of the time.”(63)
Psychic Stress and Frustration
The Iroquois, and the Hurons in particular, recognized the psychic stress caused by the inadequate fulfillment of subconscious desires. They also recognized the symbolic representation of the these desires as a sort of soul’s mirror of frustrated desires and repressions contained within the dreamer. As Wallace states in his monumental study of the Iroquois, The Death and the Rebirth of the Seneca, “[t]hey recognized conscious and unconscious parts of the mind” and were actively aware that “the frustration of these desires could cause mental and physical (psychosomatic) illness.” (63)
Iroquois Dream Therapy
Jesuit Paul Le Jeune wrote in 1636 that to the Iroquois dreams “are the Esculapius and Galen of the whole country.” (Kenton, 265) Dreams, therefore, provided a window in which to understand the patient’s sickness or malady, giving a glimpse of the psychic state or soul’s understanding of the affliction. The dreams could be a personal transgression or frustration bred in the individual’s own mind or, more seriously, a portent of the fate of the entire community or Iroquois nation. To extirpate these repressive desires, or to communicate the supernatural interpretation of an omen, the Iroquois relied on a host of rituals that sought to alleviate what they called Ondinnonk, the secret desire of the subconscious or the soul revealed in a dream. (Kenton, 266) Special rituals, guessing games, and macabre feasts and dances were produced to relinquish all of the patient’s desires until his or her unconscious was satisfied.
Violent Desires
These rituals and feasts were usually procured to act out the dream symbolically, especially in regards to dreams of violence, war, and hunting. One French priest describes a scene of a supposed Ononharoia or Dream Feast where one Huron violently rummaged through the priest’s encampment, intent on satisfying his desire of a dream in which he “killed a Frenchman.” The Huron was only appeased when the priest gave him a coat in which the priest claimed belonged to a dead Frenchman, thus satiating his desire in a symbolic gift or talisman. Other curatives for violent desires revealed in dreams were just as heavily imbued with symbolism but no less violent in their apparent rituals. Wallace relates a 1649 account of Father Francesco Bressani where a Huron who had dreamed that enemies had cut off his fingers used a seashell to amputate his own finger in order to avoid the same fate and enemy capture revealed in a dream. (65) Similar dreams of war, execution and even cannibalism were carried in a similar manner, sometimes with the sacrifice of a dog or possible enemy captor as a ritual cleansing of the dreamer’s unmet desire.
Sexual Desires
Jesuits also make a few cryptic references to rituals involving the fulfillment of sexual wishes revealed in dreams. These means of acting out these dreams, according to the missionaries, were less symbolic. In 1639 Father Le Jeune refers to the Anacwandat Feast in response to a purported sexually frustrated dreamer as a ritualistic orgy containing “many adulteries and fornications” between men and woman who were not husband and wife. Jesuit François le Mercier refers to the “shameful acts of concubinage” (Kenton, 166) he witnessed at the dream-therapy ceremonies in response to similar dreams of the Huron. Wallace also makes a particular reference to a Le Jeune’s account of a Huron elder who, nearing the end of his life with a gangrenous ulcer, sought an Anacwandat ceremony under Divine instruction, specifying that “there should be twelve girls, and a thirteenth for himself.” (64) The esteem and privileged title held by the elder meant, in Le Jeune’s report, that there was “no lack of persons to satisfy his desire.” (Wallace, 65)
A Conservative Culture
The sometimes violent and lascivious nature of such rituals is an interesting digression and sociological phenomenon to an otherwise orderly and conservative Iroquois and Huron culture. Violence was never given such abstract significance in other spheres of social life, but rather used as a logistical means of warfare, and monogamous marriage and fidelity were the ideal norms in civil matters. The psychic activity of dreams, however, held such authority to the Iroquois and Huron that Father Le Jeune claimed it was the true center of their religion.
Sources:
Fenton, William N. The False Faces of the Iroquois. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 1987. 159
Kenton, Edna, ed. The Indians of North America: The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents. Vol. 1-2. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company. 1927
Moore, James T. Indian and Jesuit: A Seventeenth-Century Encounter. Chicago: Loyola University Press. 1982.
Wallace, Anthony F.C.. The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca. New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1969.
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