Story of the sweat logde.

     So Maushop had geven those four gifts to the human beings; the gift of the body made from the clay, the gift of the mind protedted by the skull carved from the living trees, the gift of the heart to give them the guides of love and beauty and joy, and the Creator´s spirit to make them related to all Dreation.

     Now. Matahdou decided thad he´d better give some gifts to thes human beings, too, so he called everybody together for a big giveaway and he  persented four gifts to everybody. Everybody had to take them because it was a great honor to have a giveaway, but when they found out what they were, they were very upset. They were really four poisons. He gave a poison to their bodies, which was disease. They had never been sick before that. And he gave a poison to their mins, which was confusion, so they no longer always knew what was true.  He gave them a poison to teir hearts, fear, which created all kinds of other bad feelings. And last of all he gave a poison to the spirit. Of course, the spirit is part of the Creator and you can´t really hurt it, but what he gave them was a sort of forgetfulness so that they forgot that they had that spirit and that they were part of the on family o Creation- that there was only one spirit in the world and that they were all part of it and were all related to everything.

     So Maushop got very angry with his brother - for the first time. And they began to have a big fight. They began wrestling and throwing each other and jumping around all over the universe, hurling stars at each other, breaking up everything that was around them. And the fight got bigger and bigger, because the both of them were evenly matched, and neither one of them could defrat the other one.

     And the spirits of the four directions watched this go on and they began to get upset, saying "These fellows are going to destroy the whole universe before it´s time. We´ve got a whole lot of years to go in this universe, and they´re going to destroy it right now. We´re going to have to do something."

     So they said, "We´ re going to leave Maushop down there on Metta´ oky, the earth, because he is a friend of all those creatures there and he´s good for them, and we´ll send Matahdou off to some other place."

     So they did. They told Maushop to throw his brother into the flames of the big fire. He did, and his brother went up in smoke. As he was going off in smoke, Matahdou said to his brother, "i am going off to this other place and I´ll come back in a few days and tell you about what it´s like."

     Maushop sat there after Matahdou was gone and said, "Well, that´s all very well. That takes care of Matahdou, I guess. But what about these poor human beings who have all these sickness now?"

     He thought about it and he thought about it, and the fire went down. He wasn´t getting anywhere. The kids were all running underfoot, and the dogs were barking, and everybody was making too muchnoise, so he said, " I´ll go back into my cave and meditate."

     So he went and closed himself in the dark and he sat there in the quiet and he thought and he thought. And he got kind of cold. That´s about all he got. So he went out to the fire and he got a few rocks that had been in the fire and were glowing red-hot and he brought them into the cave with him and closed it with a bearskin again and sat ther. And the rocks glowed and the whole cave got hot. It got very hot. He bagan to perspire. So he took a little skin of water and he had a drink and as he did, it spilled onto the rocks and it went   hiss-ss-ss-ss-- and steam hit him in the face. And he had an inspiration, a vision, right there. "Ah, this is the way human beings can heal themselves!"

     So he went out and he gathered everybody around and he said, "Now listen, everybody. This is what we´ve got to do with these poisons that you´ve got now.

     - Whenever you get yourself sick, you´ve got to build a fire. The fire is the force that runs throughout the universe. It´s the stars. It´s the sun. Its´s everything that moves. It´s that energy that´s in there.

     - And in that fire you put some rocks. They represent all the things in our universe - all the human beings, all the animals, the earth, everything that there is. And they sit in the fire and they get filled with this energy.

    - Then you take them into a little cave, or you make a litte lodge and you bring the rocks and some water in with you. And you close yourself in there and you make it all dark. What you´ ve done is you´ve created a small universe. And in that universe you have everything in the big universe with you, all infused with the energy.

    -And you take some water. The water spiritis the spirit of life. You pour that on those rocks and the spirit of the air and the winds will bring the healing jpower that takes place there, all through your bodies, and make you sweat. You ´ll breathe it into you and it ´ll go through your blood. And it ´ll purify you.

   - And if at the same time you sing some songs, shake a little rattle or something, you ´ll be putting everything into harmony inside your little universe, you see, bacause when you ´re sick, you´re out of harmony or out of rhythm with the rhythm of the universe, so you put it all back together again.

   And that is how we got the sweat lodge, which our people still use to heal and purify themselves, or to find a vision or wisdom to guide their lives.

From the book:

"Children of the Morning Light"  -Wampanoag tales

as told by Manitonquat (Medicine Story)