Pliny Earle Goddard

Decades before the modern cryptid vocabulary existed, outsiders were already trying to record a complex Navajo lexicon of harmful supernatural practice rather than describing one generic shape-changing beast.

And even more revealing sources come from stories dictated in 1923 and 1924 by a Dine narrator as Sandoval or Hasteen to linguist Pliny Earl Goddard.

Goddard died before the material appeared, and Gladys Reichard edited it for publication in 1933 as Navajo Texts, whose contents included a section literally titled Pot Woman Teaches Witchcraft, as well as another identified as Wizard Story.

Reichard's introduction makes clear that recording such material was not treated casually because some narratives had to wait until winter when the ground was frozen, certain songs were considered too sacred to surrender at all, and the two witchcraft stories were described as possessing extreme potency.