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sweathouses
the
earth-mother's
Recommended reading: "Sacred
and Profane Substances: the ritual use of narcotics in Later Neolithic
Europe"
Outside the peyote
cults (a relatively recent arrivial on the Northern Plains), and
occasional experimenters, there is no drug use in Lakota "sweatlodges".
In fact even the Peyote Church doesn't normally use that "medicine"
in an inipi (sweat-lodge) ceremony. I am very familiar with
Lakota, Blackfoot, Annishnabe, Dineh, Salish, and Cheyenne culture:
none of them traditionally used mind-altering drugs with the possible
exception of tobacco in their ceremonies. Some individuals played
around with them especially in the past 200 years, but they are
not a part of traditional spirituality especially in the sweatlodge.
We go into a sweat-lodge
for many reasons. The one reason was alluded to in a photo caption
in your article where the entrance to the lodge recalled a passage-tomb.
We go in the lodge to be reborn, which of course necessitates death.
As a newcomer
to these ways and a person who has used drugs to expand my consciousness
(with mixed results), it seems to me that drugs do not enhance the
experience of an inipi ceremony. Rather they make it difficult
to perceive the spirits who are called to that dark and womblike
place. Psylocibes and cannibis make it difficult to tell the difference
between a personal vision or hallucination, and a manifestation
of the presence of a "visitor".
That is the second
reason we go into a sweat-lodge: to commune with the spirits of
ancestors and non-human benefactors or protectors. And the third
and perhaps most important reason is to pray to our creator in thanks
- for a good ceremony, for good health and happiness, and for the
divine to regard us as grandchildren (and whatever else we want
to pray about)...
I liked your article,
and the last speculation about 'burnt-mounds' being sweatlodge-remains
sounds about right. I'm very interested in what my ancestors may
have used the sweatlodge for. I do not doubt that they used psilocybes
in them. However, drugs are not necessary for interacting with other
worlds and the beings in them. Experiences that we consider unusual
or fantastic are not necessarily the product of drug-induced hallucinations.
I'd go so far as to say that the reason we consider them fantastic
and unusual is a product of our delusions and the great "disremembering"
you refer to.
As a young man
I used drugs to shake up my delusional and narrow perception of
the universe. In the absence of elders and genuine spiritual traditions
this was a great gift. However, now that I am in the presence of
elders and good spiritual ways that are now being rekindled but
never were forgotten, my former drug-use still clouds my perception
of the spirit world. The farther I get from it the more able I am
to see the spirits and receive their teachings..."
from David Weaver:
"I
want to correct one of the definitions about the sweat lodges on
the American continent. They were not used as rites of passage from
boyhood to manhood.
There
are different types of lodges for different purposes. There
is a 40' circle at the lodge here on this land that is composed
of rocks from past lodges. Smudging is the cleansing of negative
energy through the smoke. Sage, Sweet-grass, Cedar and Copal resin
are used, depending on availability. The
leader calls in those who wish to swear and they enter clockwise
as well until all are inside. The firekeeper will hand in rocks
as requested and the door or flap will be closed. Songs and chants
are sung, requests are asked of the Great
Mystery
and this will continue around the circle of people sitting round
the pit filled with the hot rocks.
Each
time someone is finished, more water will be poured onto the stones.
There are usually four 'rounds', but the length will vary according
to the number of people - and the leader. Sometime people will jump
into water if it is near: standing water is preferred, as moving
water is thought to carry away the energy gained.
Some
people and traditions will only sweat with males or with There
were war lodges and of course they would consist of male warriors.
Sweat
lodges are also entered before going into the Vision
Quest,
and after coming out from the traditional 4 day quest. I have done
many sweat lodges and it is never a test of endurance. It is the
purification of mind, body and spirit. You indeed feel cleansed
afterwards. I've done lodges in summer
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IRISH SWEATHOUSES
AND THE GREAT FORGETTING
Anthony Weir
Part Two
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It has generally been accepted that sweathouses were resorted to as a prophylactic sauna-treatment for aches and pains. But far more aches and pains would have been incurred in heating a sweathouse than would ever have been alleviated. For a start, the entrance is as little as 75 cms high. To light a turf fire, maintain it and sweep out the ashes, ans strew the floor with bracken or rushes was no easy task. Even if the roof were partly dismantled to put the turf in, this would have been almost as awkward as bringing or throwing it in through the entrance - and the hot ashes would still have had to be swept out. In a society where everyone had rheumatic pains and arthritis at the very least, and where it was regarded as the normal human condition, it is it really likely that sweathouses several hundred metres from the nearest (stone) house, holding a maximum of 5 people in considerable discomfort and some risk of fainting or even burning, would have been used for the uncertain alleviation of aches and pains ?
The better-off rubbed themselves with poitín and patent rubs on sale at markets and fairs; the poorer drank what they could get - poitín, or, in mid-Ulster, ether - to ameliorate bodily discomfort. In any case, sauna treatment is of no avail to such complaints as sciatica, arthritis, and the aching backs still suffered by a high proportion of the more mature population. Arthritic hands and feet would be relieved more easily and effectively by immersion in warm peat-ash from an overnight fire than by squatting uncomfortably in a tiny, dark place.
Sweathouse doorway seen through a hole in
the corbelled roof,
Mrs McLoughlin of Tullynafreave claimed in 1992 that her maternal great-grandfather built the sweathouse standing some 50 metres from her modern dwelling to save his wife the trouble of travelling to the sweathouse in neighbouring Meenaslieve. She said that her grandmother and perhaps her mother also had used it, and did not think that their spouses had done so. But whether this is an isolated example of late construction (say around 1885) is impossible to determine. Similarly, it is impossible to establish a connection with the coal-mines (in use from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth centuries) that are at the heart of the currently-known distribution of sweathouses - now reported also from south-west Scotland. Sweathouses are, of course, part of a circumpolar phenomenon which produced the now well-known Finnish sauna. The Turkic tribes who moved from central Siberia and eventually overthrew the Byzantine Empire, seem to have easily adapted to the Byzantine and Roman steam-bath, producing the hammam or Turkish Bath. The North American form was the sweat lodge, used not for mere hygienic reasons, but for spiritual and physical purification, and sometimes as part of the initiation procedures for boys' passage into manhood. We can be sure that the Finnish sauna was not used for merely hygienic reasons before the 19th century obsession with cleanliness as the prime virtue took hold in the Protestant countries of the North.
The first Turkish Bath to be established in the British Isles was in county Cork in the 1860s - so there is no likelihood that it inspired simple Irish sweathouses, concentrated much farther north. The Finnish sauna was an offshoot from a Siberian-Mongolian practice, so it is reasonable to suppose that the Irish sweathouse came from Scandinavia via the Vikings or their successors in the Northern Isles at some time between the 10th and the 15th centuries. Before their secularisation, saunas were part of the universal combination of religious, medicinal and psycho-therapeutic modes which have only recently, like much else, been split off and compartmentalised by Western science and pseudo-science. Our culture has, as a consequence, taken 'exotic' and exciting elements of other cultures' psycho-social therapies (coffee, cocoa, tobacco, cocaine, cannabis and so on) as mere stimulants and 'highs'. The Turks made the public hammam a part of quasi-religious male confraternity. The Finns have likewise made the communal sauna a kind of men's club. Sweating is one of the many ways of altering consciousness, particularly when it is part (as sometimes in North America) of a series of tests and ordeals - and especially when it is done in the dark. But there is no evidence that the small Irish sweathouses were used in the distinctly religious and reverential way that the large North American sweat-lodges were used - and such a highly-evolved function is most unlikely. Something that few people allow themselves to realise is that many Native Americans were much more emotionally mature than the European invaders, who had (and have) destructive technologies way beyond their wisdom or insight or sensibility. (See the web-page associated with this site which elaborates on this.) The medicinal psycho-therapy of Siberia and Mongolia, which is still practised by shamans both male and female, involves mushrooms (Fly Agaric), alcohol, sweating and rapid cooling, fasting, whirling, sleep-deprivation and so on. These produce visions and out-of-body experiences, and are aids to achieving more aware states of consciousness than 'Western values' approve of, whereby the shaman-practitioner can see causes of illness or malaise, and the non-shaman can be suitably awed by the psychic forces released by the unblocking effects of physical ordeal and psychoactive drugs. Herodotus describes the Scythian practice of altering consciousness through cannabis by throwing the seeds on hot stones inside a tent and inhaling the vapour - the smoking of cannabis and opium is a rather late development. Long before the Scythian incursions, however, cannabis seems to have been inhaled at La Hougue-Bie on the island of Jersey, where 21 pottery vessels marked with burnt resin were found in the untouched chamber recently discovered. Consciousness-improving substances have, of course, been found also in other European sites: the Iron Age site of Wilmersdorf, for example, where remains of cannabis were found in an urn.
Sweathouse with unusually large and grand
entrance
Could Irish sweathouses
be a continuation of a tradition as old as the fulachta fíadh
? They are very flimsy structures, easily subject to total demolition
by livestock, and would survive from prehistoric times only through
the most extraordinary circumstances - so no evidence is likely
to emerge. None has ever been excavated. There is a great deal of literature on the effect and use of various kinds of mushroom (Psilocybe spp. and Fly Agaric). The appearance of the formerly ubiquitous "magic mushroom", Psilocybe semilanceata, fits rather well with descriptions of pixies, leprechauns and other 'little green men'. A more gross mushroom-spirit is the modern Santa Claus, dressed in the colours of Fly Agaric, associated with reindeer (from whose urine the unmetabolised but detoxified active constituent was drunk bv the shamans of sub-arctic reindeer-herdsmen, who enters down a chimney and brings gifts. The entrance to many circumpolar dwellings is also the smoke-hole, as in Irish sweathouses. In our culture of acquisition the gifts are meaningless objects of desire rather than real numinous Gifts, and the shaman figure (who degenerated to Father Frost in Westernised Russia and Scandinavia) coalesced with St Nicholas, the Three Magi and the ancient gift-tradition of Saturnalia.
Corradeverrid, county Cavan If Irish sweathouses were used like the secularised hammam and sauna, why were they not built close to stone-built dwellings and their turf-stacks ? Why were they, as reported, used infrequently - mostly in the Autumn ? Were they used exclusively by one sex ? Does one report of an "itinerant bath-master" indicate a psycho-therapeutic use supervised by a travelling doctor-shaman or Wise Man ? And why, in a country which, until the use of chemical fertlisers, was in October and November (the time of The Gap of the Year, Samhain, Hallowe'en) carpeted with Psilocybe semilanceata, also known as Liberty Caps, is there no record of their use ? These mushrooms are still plentiful on marginal land and on the edges of chemically 'fertilised' agricultural land. But there is a pattern of "collective forgetting" of mind-expanding plants and their extracts by cultures which inevitably adopt mind-numbing drugs such as alcohol. Thus the identity of Soma was lost, and only inactive "substitutes" were identified. It seems unlikely (though not impossible) that Psilocybe mushrooms were not consumed up to the time of the Famine - but of course the agonising and protracted trauma of the hungry years and the halving of the population by death and emigration affected Irish behaviour and attitudes to Wild Food or "famine food" - as nutritious nettles, rose-hips, elderberries and so on are still considered. After the Famine, only grocery-store victuals were eaten. Even now, eating blackberries is far from universal in Ireland: those who pick them tend to be English, other foreigners, or local children paid (a penny a pound, as I remember in the 1960s) to gather them.
Tullynahaia, county Leitrim For the decline of Irish traditions right across the spectrum, the Famine was Pelion piled upon the Ossa of Catholic Emancipation of 1829. This resulted in the rapid application to Ireland of a very urban-English Victorian-puritan 'respectability' that ran counter to many of the old ways and practices which had survived until the Penal days - practices which were bowdlerised and Christianised when they could not be suppressed. Ireland became for the first time - and remained until the end of the 20th century - a highly-conservative society which had also lost its traditions, and whose mores came from the right wing of the Catholic church. This is in contrast to Italy, for example, where all sorts of "pagan" survivals (from frog-cults and wolf-veneration to bleeding statues) can still be found in the centre and south, while sceptical atheism is almost the norm in Tuscany and the north.
Annagh Upper (side view), county Leitrim. So, after the Famine, few would have claimed or admitted to remember the eating of Psilocybe, which, it should be noted, were free, abundant and (through drying) available all year, and produce a state of consciousness far above that induced by alcohol. The world-wide phenomenon of the replacement of natural and fairly benign plants by manufactured, expensive and toxic alcohol is a sad paradigm for the take-over of the world by toxic "turbo-capitalism". In the same way, 'pagan' practices such as painting or capping phallic stones, using cure-stones (which were promptly and cleverly dubbed curse-stones) some of which still survive, wild dancing (for which the Irish were famous) and the veneration of Fairy Thorns were discouraged.
Cure-stones, Killinagh, county Cavan If dark, chthonic sweathouses had a psycho-therapeutic function stretching back at least to Bronze Age times, we can be sure that they too would have been discouraged by the twin powers of Church and State. By the time that uncasual enquiries started (after the First World War) they had fallen into desuetude, and their use had been erased (like much else) from the collective memory. Small wonder that enquirers were fobbed off with glib explanations of autumnal prophylaxy and 'sweating out the bad' as Mrs McLoughlin expressed it - though sweating out the bad might well be more than a picturesque metaphor - particularly since Mrs McLoughlin averred that it was only the women in her family who used the secluded sweathouse. By the dawn of 'Irish Independence' very few if any people knew how they had been used, for in Ireland the rupture of handed-down knowledge, especially from mothers to daughters, occurred earlier than anywhere else in rural Europe. To find out the used and properties of wild plants we have to go to English sources which are still relatively rich - for in England there has been no Great Forgetting beyond that of the universal secret history of the ignored, eschewed, female and oppressed.
Assaroe, county Donegal How much arcane knowledge died in the hedges with Famine victims, or was carried across the ocean to America and deliberately forgotten there, we will never know. What we can be sure of is that there has been in Ireland a Great Disremembering which acted as undertaker to the Great Hunger, and may still not have run its course. And although sweathouses still lurk in secret places and leprechaun-hatted Psilocybes still grow, their use and possible connection remain as obscure to us as the mind-set of Mesolithic hunter-gathers, the cosmology of Celtic kinglets, or the ecstasy of Atlantic anchorites.
[This text has been expanded from articles
which previously appeared in
This
page is included on the APPENDIX I In a quasi-erudite essay on 'Irish Soma', Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey) asks if Psilocybe and Fly Agaric (Amanita muscaria) grew in Ireland in ancient times. Of course they did - in huge numbers. APPENDIX II
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PART ONE
