20.

Near-Death Experience

IVALO AND KNUD RASMUSSEN

 

(1929)

 

 

Danish anthropologist Knud Rasmussen was born in Greenland in 1879. He grew up in contact with the Inuit (“Eskimo”), whose language he learned. He studied in Denmark but conducted most of his work independently of institutions. From 1921 to 1924 he led the Danish expedition to Arctic North America, during which he interviewed several shamans (known locally as angakut). Rasmussen took pains to write down people’s stories word for word. His texts on shamanism have been widely quoted because of their quality. Rasmussen is a shining light of ethnographic understanding. Here he quotes a man called Ivalo, who tells how his relative Niviatsian became a shaman.

 

 

Niviatsian, Aua’s cousin, was out hunting walrus with a number of other men near Iglulik; some were in front of him and others behind. Suddenly a great walrus came up through the ice close beside him, grasped him with his huge fore-flippers, just as a mother picks up her little child, and carried him off with it down into the deep. The other men ran up, and looking down through the hole in the ice where the walrus had disappeared, they could see it still holding him fast and trying to pierce him with its tusks. After a little while it let him go, and rose to the surface, a great distance off, to breathe. But Niviatsian, who had been dragged away from the hole through which he had first been pulled down, struggled with arms and legs to come up again. The men could follow his movements, and cut a hole about where they expected him to come up, and here my father actually did manage to pull him up. There was a gaping wound over his collarbone, and he was breathing through it; the gash had penetrated to the lung. Some of his ribs were broken, and the broken ends had caught in one of his lungs, so that he could not stand upright.

Niviatsian lay for a long time unconscious. When he came to himself, however, he was able to get on his feet without help. The wound over the collarbone was the only serious one; there were traces of the walrus’s tusks both on his head and in different parts of his body, but it seemed as if the animal had been unable to wound him there. Old folk said that this walrus had been sent by the Mother of the Sea Beasts, who was angry because Niviatsian’s wife had had a miscarriage and concealed the fact in order to avoid the taboo.

Niviatsian then went with his companions in towards land, but he had to walk a little way apart from them, on ice free from footmarks. Close to land, a small snow hut was built, and he was shut in there, laid down on a sealskin with all his wet clothes on. There he remained for three days and three nights without food or drink, this he was obliged to do in order to be allowed to live, for if he had gone up at once to the unclean dwellings of men after the ill-treatment he had received, he would have died.

All the time Niviatsian was in the little snow hut, the shaman up at the village was occupied incessantly in purifying his wife and his old mother, who were obliged to confess in the presence of others all their breaches of taboo, in order to appease the powers that ruled over life and death. And after three days, Niviatsian recovered, and had now become a great shaman. The walrus, which had failed to kill him, became his first helping spirit. That was the beginning.