Wassan-mon-ganeehla-ak

Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: Abenaki Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: A race of beings who play a celestial ball game with a ball of light, producing the aurora borealis.
Role in Mythos: They are Ancient Age beings in Abenaki cosmology whose nightly games create the northern lights.
Relation to Humans: In the Penobscot version of the tradition, a human boy repeatedly visits their sky country and joins their ball games, and his father, Old Chief M’Sartto, follows him there. The Wassan-mon-ganeehla-ak are hospitable to human visitors and allow them to return home safely.

On a cold night in the Kennebec Valley, a boy slipped from his family’s camp and walked north. He carried his bow and arrows but brought back no game, no stories, nothing at all. His father asked where he had been. The boy said nothing. He left again a few days later. Same direction. Same silence.

This is the opening frame of a Penobscot tale that leads, eventually, to the country of the Wassan-mon-ganeehla-ak, the beings responsible for the aurora borealis in Abenaki tradition. They are not a single creature but a race, a whole people, living somewhere beyond the Milky Way in a land that has no need for sun or moon or stars. The light there comes from everywhere and nowhere, a steady ambient glow with no visible source.

The Abenaki divide their mythological history into three ages. The Ancient Age, when humans and animals were undifferentiated. The Golden Age, when Gluskab walked the earth reshaping its dangers. The Present Age, where humans and animals are fully separate. The Wassan-mon-ganeehla-ak belong to the first of these, the Ancient Age, alongside beings like Kisosen the sun-bringing eagle and Kchi-awasos, the Great Bear whose blood turns autumn leaves brown when hunters kill him each fall. These are not minor footnotes in Abenaki cosmology. They are the original tenants.

What the Wassan-mon-ganeehla-ak do, primarily, is play ball. The game has no recorded name, but its effects are visible across the northern sky. When they throw and chase their ball of light, the motion scatters colour across the darkness, greens and reds and shifting curtains of violet that ripple and fold above the treeline. The Abenaki understood the aurora borealis not as a distant atmospheric accident but as the visible evidence of play, a game happening in another country whose light bleeds through into this one.

The fullest account comes from the Penobscot, an Abenaki-affiliated nation in what is now Maine. Old Chief M’Sartto, whose name means Morning Star, grew worried about his son’s constant unexplained journeys northward and followed the boy’s trail. After walking a long time, M’Sartto’s senses failed him completely. He could not see or hear. A strange numbness overtook his body. When awareness returned, he stood in the country of the Wassan-mon-ganeehla-ak. The beings around him looked nothing like his own people, spoke a language he could not understand, and treated him with a hospitality that required no common tongue.

An old man from the Lower Country, a fellow human who had arrived years earlier by the same route, eventually found M’Sartto and explained where he was. The path they had both followed was called the Spirits’ Path, running through the Milky Way. That disorienting loss of consciousness was simply what happened when a human body crossed from one world into another. The old man told M’Sartto that his son had been visiting regularly and was, at that moment, out on the field.

The ball game began. The players wore lights on their heads and belts called Menquan, rainbow belts, and as they played, colour flooded the field and spilled outward. M’Sartto spotted his son immediately: the one with the brightest light. The two visitors then petitioned the Chief of the Northern Lights for permission to take the boy home. The chief assembled his people for a farewell and ordered two great birds to carry father and son back along the Spirits’ Path. M’Sartto lost consciousness again during the return journey. He woke near his camp. His son had arrived first.

No source describes the Wassan-mon-ganeehla-ak in any anatomical detail beyond those lights and rainbow belts. They are people, but not human people. Their faces, their build, their movement across the playing field exist only in the gap between what the story says and what the listener imagines. The Penobscot account makes clear that M’Sartto found them “all different from his own people,” which is a politely enormous statement that the tradition declines to elaborate on. They just looked wrong. Or right, depending on where you were standing.

Their power is straightforward and total within its domain. They generate the aurora. Every ripple, every fold of green or red light, every silent flicker above the boreal forests is the Wassan-mon-ganeehla-ak at play. The game is not performed for an audience, not staged for human benefit. It simply happens, and the light leaks through. The related Inuit tradition holds that spirits play ball with a walrus skull, and some Algonquin peoples attributed the lights to fires lit by their creator Nanahbozho, but the Abenaki version is distinct: these are living beings engaged in sport, and the aurora is a byproduct, not a message.

Their limitations follow from their nature. The Wassan-mon-ganeehla-ak exist in their own country, accessible only through the Spirits’ Path along the Milky Way, and even then the crossing strips a human of all sensory awareness. They do not come south. They do not intervene in earthly affairs. They do not punish or reward. They play their game, and sometimes a human boy walks north long enough to find them, and they let him join in. That is the extent of the relationship: a border open in one direction, crossed by those strange or brave enough to keep walking past the point where the world stops making sense.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Wassan-mon-ganeehla-ak?

Wassan-mon-ganeehla-ak is an elemental being from Abenaki mythology, credited with creating the aurora borealis. It is described as a shapeshifter that uses a ball of lightning in a celestial game to paint the northern sky with color. In Abenaki lore, Wassan-mon-ganeehla-ak serves as the explanation for the natural phenomenon of the northern lights.

Who creates the aurora borealis in Abenaki mythology?

In Abenaki mythology, Wassan-mon-ganeehla-ak creates the aurora borealis. The being does so by playing a celestial game with a ball of lightning, tossing and hurling the pulsating orb of energy across the heavens to ignite the ethereal dance of light. The Abenaki regard the display as a cosmic spectacle and a reminder of the unity between sky, earth, and the creatures of both.

What does Wassan-mon-ganeehla-ak look like?

Wassan-mon-ganeehla-ak has no single physical form because it is a shapeshifter. In some appearances it takes the form of humans engaged in a celestial game, and in others it appears as walruses with gleaming tusks beneath the starlit sky. The one constant across its transformations is the ball of lightning it tosses across the heavens.

Where does Wassan-mon-ganeehla-ak come from?

Wassan-mon-ganeehla-ak comes from the mythology of the Abenaki, a Native American people of the United States. The being is said to be as old as the cosmos itself, an elemental spirit born from the first spark of lightning to dance across the sky. In Abenaki lore Wassan-mon-ganeehla-ak bridges the celestial and the terrestrial.

What are Wassan-mon-ganeehla-ak’s powers and weaknesses?

Wassan-mon-ganeehla-ak commands lightning, manipulates the lights of the aurora, and can shift between human and walrus forms at will. Its primary weakness is its intrinsic tie to the natural phenomena it represents. If the northern lights were to fade into obscurity or the skies remain perpetually clear, the essence of Wassan-mon-ganeehla-ak would diminish along with them.