In the collections of Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey, there’s a round ceramic disk, about the size and shape of a cobblestone, with the barest image of a face on it. Two eyes in a mushroom-shaped head, a mouth opened in a howl or scream of some kind. Radiocarbon dating puts its age at about seven hundred years old, which would make it one of the earliest known images of the Jersey Devil.
The Lenape knew it as Mësingw, a spirit being vital to preserving the balance of the forest. Mësingw (“Living Solid Face,” “Masked Being,” or “Keeper of the Game”), according to Herbert C. Kraft, who devoted his life to researching and documenting Lenape culture, was of prime importance to the Lenape. Of all the manetuwàk (spirit beings whose job it was to care for and maintain the world that Kishelëmukòng had created), Mësingw had one of the most important jobs: looking after the animals of the forest and ensuring their health and safety. Mësingw could sometimes be seen riding through the forest on a large buck, covered in long, black hair from head to toe like a bear. The right side of his large, round face was colored bright red, the left side colored black.
Alternately revered and feared, he ensured the prosperity and prevalence of vital game for the people but could also, if displeased, ruin a hunter’s luck, or “break his speech,” causing him to stammer uncontrollably, or scare him to death. Mësingw, for the Lenape, kept the forest in balance, mediating between humanity and animal life. When white settlers came to the land where the Lenape lived, they saw images and masks of a strange creature who, they were told, lived in the forbidding wilds of the Pine Barrens, the edge of the settled world. As they heard tales of Mësingw and saw the masks and effigies of the god, they saw him not as a figure of order but of terror.
Whatever prowled the foreboding Pine Barrens, early settlers thought, it was not Christian. And in the early Puritan imagination, fevered with thoughts of Satan and divine punishment, Mësingw merged with another local legend: the Leeds Devil. Stories tell of a “Mother Leeds,” who was in labor with her thirteenth child when she uttered, out of exasperation or pain, “Let this one be a devil!” resulting in a monstrous birth, the hideous creature fleeing the house as soon as it was birthed.