21.

Seeking Knowledge in the Solitude of Nature

IGJUGÂRJUK AND KNUD RASMUSSEN (1930)

 

 

Knud Rasmussen quotes Inuit shaman Igjugârjuk on how he became a shaman. Igjugârjuk’s words have the ring of truth.

 

 

“When I was to be a shaman, I chose suffering through the two things that are most dangerous to us humans, suffering through hunger and suffering through cold. First I hungered five days and was then allowed to drink a mouthful of warm water; the old ones say that only if the water is warm will Pinga and Hila notice the novice and help him. Thereafter I went hungry another fifteen days, and again was given a mouthful of warm water. After that I hungered for ten days, and then could begin to eat. . . .

“These days of ‘seeking for knowledge’ are very tiring, for one must walk all the time, no matter what the weather is like and only rest in short snatches. I am usually quite done up, tired, not only in body but also in head, when I have found what I sought.

“We shamans in the interior have no special spirit language, and believe that the real angatkut do not need it. On my travels I have sometimes been present at a seance among the saltwater-dwellers, for instance among the coast people at Utkuhigjalik. These angatkut never seemed trustworthy to me. It always appeared to me that these salt-water angatkut attached more weight to tricks that would astonish the audience, when they jumped about the floor and lisped all sorts of absurdities and lies in their so-called spirit language; to me all this seemed only amusing and as something that would impress the ignorant. A real shaman does not jump about the floor and do tricks, nor does he seek by the aid of darkness, by putting out the lamps, to make the minds of his neighbours uneasy. For myself, I do not think I know much, but I do not think that wisdom or knowledge about things that are hidden can be sought in that manner. True wisdom is only to be found far away from people, out in the great solitude, and it is not found in play but only through suffering. Solitude and suffering open the human mind, and therefore a shaman must seek his wisdom there.

“But during my visits to the salt-water shamans . . . I have never openly expressed my contempt for their manner of summoning their helping spirits. A stranger ought always to be cautious, for—one may never know—they may of course be skilful in magic and, like our shamans, be able to kill through words and thoughts. This that I am telling you now, I dare confide to you, because you are a stranger from a far away country, but I would never speak about it to my own kins-men, except those whom I should teach to become shamans. While I was at Utkuhigjalik, people there had heard from my wife that I was a shaman, and therefore they once asked me to cure a sick man, a man who was so wasted that he could no longer swallow food. I summoned all the people of the village together and asked them to hold a song-feast, as is our custom, because we believe that all evil will shun a place where people are happy. And when the song-feast began, I went out alone into the night. They laughed at me, and my wife was later on able to tell me how they mocked me, because I would not do tricks to entertain everybody. But I kept away in lonely places, far from the village, for five days, thinking uninterruptedly of the sick man and wishing him health. He got better, and since then nobody at that village has mocked me.”

Rasmussen goes on to note:

 

Thus did Igjugârjuk speak about himself and his special powers, and the whole of the characteristic I have given him elsewhere will, I hope, make it obvious that he himself believed everything he told me. Nor had he in fact any reason for lying or exaggerating. I never attempted to contradict him, even if some of his accounts seemed quite improbable to me. For instance, I could not understand that a man could survive thirty to fifty degrees of cold, sitting in a tiny snow hut without taking any nourishment, simply a little tepid water twice during the whole period. I was afraid of making him cautious by doubting or asking him questions, and after all what I wanted to get to know, here as elsewhere, was these people’s own beliefs. And there is not the slightest doubt that they themselves believed that the holy art itself, which consisted in being able to see into the riddles of life, imparted to novices and practitioners some special power that enabled them to go through what ordinary mortals would not be able to survive.

The religious ideas of the Caribou Eskimos, and especially those of the Pâdlermiut, are among the most primitive I have found among all the Eskimos I visited throughout the whole expedition. The mistress of the animals of the hunt, Pinga, lives somewhere up in the air or in the sky, and is often named quite indiscriminately with Hila; she is the guardian of all life, both man and animal, but she does not offer man eternal hunting grounds like the godhead of the coast dwellers; she collects all life on the land itself, and makes it eternal solely in this manner, that everything living appears there.

When an animal or a person dies, the soul leaves the body and flies to Pinga who then lets the life or the soul rise again in another being, either man or animal. As a rule there is no fear of death, and I remember that Igjugârjuk would sometimes say half jokingly, that he had undoubtedly been so imperfect as a human being that his soul, when it went to Pinga after his death, would only be allowed to rise again as a little, burrowing lemming.