North-4 Text-4

Into the 21st Century most people still believed that a transcendental God
thrived above the foundations of postmodern fabrications; living between
birth and death, memory and fantasy, threshold and destination, having failed to perform an essential ritual, Tubiakou lost a patient and gave up shamanizing. Believing that his helping spirits had deserted him, he sold his unique costume to a government museum. "But a shaman cannot simply walk away from the spirits of his shaman ancestors. Eventually, my eyes sink into a book on the North like my boots sink into the mud, lift and move to the next puddle. There is no end until the next season, a different course. Chilly but happy, sweating from the thought that I may not have the stamina to make it through this journey that tests one to the marrow, my worst fear is that I’ll die and not be found, a voice not apart from billions of others who howl across the wireless tundra, avatars with proxied names, he realized that he must take up his profession again and asked for the return of his magical clothing. Museum curators prized it as a priceless ethnographic
rarity, however, and refused to give it back. Only after a sympathetic ethnographer interceded
did the Russian Ministry of Culture finally agree to lifting faith from its crystalline
depths, to launch a flight of metaphors toward celestial perfection.

A.S. Milovsky, “Tubiakou’s Spirit Flight.” Natural History, July 1992.

In a dialogue between 18th Century Danish missionary, Poul Egede, and a Greenland angakkoq (shaman), the angakkoq (A) asks the missionary (M) "if he knows that the northern lights are the souls of the dead playing soccer in the sky with the head of a walrus. M responds that he can tell who will go to heaven and who to the bad toornaarsuk, the devil. But A interrupts: 'You know nothing about heaven, you have never been there, I haven't seen any of your tracks.'" I Kleivan, "A Dialogue Between a Shaman and a Missionary in West Greenland in the 18th Century: The Sociology of a Text." In, J. Pentikäinen, Shamanism and Northern Ecology. Berlin, Germany, 1996.

“The spirits of the shamans used to visit the skies, possibly at the level of the clouds, but whether above or below them I am not absolutely sure. It is certain, however, that when they were on a kind of flight known as ikiaqqiijut (between layers) they did not go high in the heavens, but rather travelled somewhere below the level that aircraft fly today. G.A. Kappianaq. In, Uqalurait: An Oral History of Nunavut. J. Bennett and S. Rowley, Editors. Montreal, 2004.

"These animal transformations represent an aspect of the trance journeys undertaken by shamans, which may involve, as the shaman understands it, flying through the air or diving below the sea. Thus the symbols of birds may be suggestive of shamanic flight or those of fish may speak of quite a different sort of aqua-adventure." M & S Aldhouse-Green, The Quest for the Shaman. New York, 2005.