Manabus

Menominee · demigod · Menominee traditional religion; continuing · demigod

Manabus is the great culture-hero and transformer of Menominee tradition, the being through whom the present order of the world was shaped and the medicine lodge given to humankind. Grandson of the earth-grandmother Nokomis, he was reared by her after the early death of his mother. Acting as emissary of the benevolent Great Good Spirit, he rid the world of monsters, taught the arts of survival, and figures in a long cycle of tales that shade from solemn creation to broad trickster escapade. The pivotal episode of his career is the drowning of his younger brother, the Wolf, by the malevolent powers beneath the water; his four days of mourning and his war of vengeance bring on a world-flood, after which he refashions the earth from a grain of soil retrieved by the muskrat. To console him for his brother's death and to reconcile the powers above and below, the good spirits founded the Mitäwin medicine society and initiated Manabus as its first member, so that human beings might cure sickness and lengthen their lives. Sources differ in glossing his name, some connecting it with the Great Hare and others with light or dawn.

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