A Koasati Supernatural Being

1. Introduction

The Koasati,¹ always a small group, have never attracted as much interest as the major peoples of the Southeast–the Creek, the Choctaw, and the Cherokee. Their traditional, pre-Christian ideas were never documented, and are now long-forgotten. However, some understanding of these ideas persisted among the oldest generation living in the 1980s.

Before the Koasati adopted Christianity, they did not have what one would call a theistic religion, i.e., they did not have a pantheon of gods. Special honor was paid to the sun, to the moon, to corn, beans, and mulberries, and there were dances held regularly that were felt to have beneficent effects on the people, but there was no worship, per se, of any deity. There was a supernatural power, hollilá, which existed everywhere and was of itself morally neutral, i.e., it could occur both in good and evil forms. For example, there was little practical difference between a doctor (alikcí ) and a sorcerer (atholló ), except that the former used supernatural power to help people and the latter used it to harm them.

In the mental map of the world held by Indians of long ago (athommacó:ba), there were a number of beings who were not part of the normal human or animal worlds, but rather belonged to the supernatural world. Because they were neither “gods” nor anything considered worthy of worship, knowledge of them survived the coming of Christianity in the way that traditional religious practices, such as the Green Corn Dance (cashókti bítka), one of the primary yearly rituals of the Koasati, did not. One of these supernatural beings was the Ilhoscobá.

2. The Ilhoscobá

The Koasati do not give an English name to this being; however, the word can be translated easily. The word ilhó:si is the agentive noun of the verb ilhó:sin, ‘to be lost in the woods; to forget’.² The word cobá means ‘great one; big one’, so the compound ilhos-coba (with regular vowel shortening before a consonant cluster) means ‘Great-One-Lost-in-the-Woods’. Martha John (1908–1996) dictated the following short text in 1982 describing this being:

Ilhoscobák a:ti-ilhosí:citǫ.3	Great-One-Lost-in-the-Woods made people get lost in the woods.
Ilanawíhlíhcok, yomáhlik ilhó:si:fo:kok, ilhoscobáp naksó:n haccá:lit.	People used to hunt, and when people going about got lost in the woods Great-One-Lost-in-the-Woods was standing somewhere.
Ilhó:si:k, má:lon haytanáhkat ołá:citǫ.	5 Whenever they got lost in the woods, they turned around and went back to the same place.
Má á:ti kánkok haccá:litǫ.	That evil person was standing [there].
Mó:tohok kammí:cáhpik fáyli:fó:kon, askáhkaton ittohayó.	10 Thereupon, when he had done this enough and he left off, they got out of the forest.
Kámmi:p, imí:safa ilá:citǫ.	This being so, they came [back] to their homes.

One can draw certain conclusions from the style of the text itself. First, the text is in the style that I have called “plain narrative” (Kimball 1991:571–72), and called a:łihilká by the Koasati. The fact that it is not a literary narrative (cokfa:łihilká), a genre in which John was highly proficient (Kimball 2010:42), indicates that John did not consider the Ilhoscobá to be a literary character. This is unlike the similarly-named A:tipacobá ‘Great-One-Who-Eats-Human-Beings’ or ‘Elephant’, which only occurs in literary narrative.

The content of the text offers certain clues as to what sort of entity the Koasati conceived the Ilhoscobá to be. In line 7, it is called má á:ti kánko ‘that evil person’. Thus, one can deduce that, when the Ilhoscobá was seen, it had the form of a human being. Other evil supernaturals could take human form, for example, the Clawed Witches (Kimball 2010:116–24), who would appear as human women before taking their true shapes as monsters with long hair, long claws, and long pendulous breasts which they threw over their shoulders...