Redmans Religion 5

Chapter five discussed the spirits of nature, The Sun, The Moon, The Thunderbird and how man must please these spirits in hope for their help and protection. Tribes all over the world would partake in rituals to ensure these good spirits would do so. There was a brief few paragraphs about how tribes in different places of the world believed in some sort of cannibal spirit. Rituals were not performed to receive help from these spirits. These spirits were not good, and they were feared by most Indians. During research, I found many evil and mystical spirits that Indians in different regions were afraid of, the two below are my favorite.
The first and most well-known is the cannibal spirit Windigo. The Windigo is a spirit that is believed to exist in forests by Indians in Northern America. It is said that The Windigo is a giant 15 foot tall creature, with deep sunken in eyes, and decaying yellowish skin. It has a hunger for human flesh. This creature is feared because it eats human beings. It will snatch up a person wondering in the woods alone, eat them and spit them back up as a cannibal. Humans can become a Windigo without being eaten. If they result to cannibalism in their tribe, the heart will turn to ice and they will become a Windigo. Even if survival depends on it, you will still become one of these evil spirits. This teaches people that it is better for one’s self to die, rather than to kill another to survive. People in the modern world even people who are not from an Indian tribe, or even have Indian descendants believe that the Windigo lurks in the forests of the North capturing hikers.
The Navajo tribe has a legendary monster called the Skin-Walker. They are shape shifting creatures that are created when humans commit a very evil crime such as killing a family member or when a medicine man chooses to use his mystical powers for evil instead of good. A Skin-Walker can read minds, control people who look them in the eyes, and they also have immunity to