Becoming Half Hidden

Shamanism and Initiation Among the Inuit

Daniel Merkur

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781135521851
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First Published in 1993.This study seeks to analyze shamanism and initiation from the perspective of shamans, rather than from the laity's point of view. One of the aims of this research has been to get behind the shamans' language in order to understand their experiences.

Chapter One
A Study in Esoterica

In the secret languages of West and East Greenland shamans, the circumlocutions for “shaman” are “he who is half hidden” and “he who holds himself hidden.”¹ An East Greenland shaman’s song explains that “he who hides himself must do so in the uncanny hiding-place.” It is there, the song continues, that the novice shaman obtains his initiation.² These references to the esotericism of Inuit shamans and their initiations gain further meaning in the Netsilik phrase that shamans are able to see “the things that to others are hidden.”³ Shamanic esoterica were not created but discovered. A person was half hidden who had learned to know the uncanny hiding-place, where he discovered things hidden to others.

Despite the many and frequently excellent ethnographic reports of Inuit shamanism, no previous study has addressed the topic of shamanic initiation in a fashion that explains how a person might, in another culture, realistically go about becoming “half hidden.” The principal difficulty has been the secrecy of the shamans themselves. In elucidating Inuit laymen’s understanding of shamanic initiation, scholars of both ethnographic and psychological orientations have repeatedly failed to penetrate to the shamans’ esoteric and decidedly less fabulous point of view. As Rasmussen observed:

These men are very mysterious about their art, and usually turn off all questions with a jest. “Go out into the hills and learn it for yourself.” or “I have not the least idea how to call up spirits; it is all lies and cheating!” are the replies you receive if you ask for information in the presence of others. But if you go off with one of them, preferably on a seal-catching expedition, and then win his confidence, he will not object to telling you about it—under strict promise of secrecy, of course—”for the crowd, who do not themselves understand the hidden things, are so incredulous and so ready to mock”⁴

Even so, the matters that shamans have been willing to confide contain many omissions. When asked to explain how they became shamans, Inuit almost invariably report the events leading up to their ecstatic acquisitions of helping spirits. They almost never report courses of practical instruction, eg., in shamanic lore, the manufacture of shamanic paraphernalia, the diagnosis of illness, the conduct of seances, etc. Motives for the selective reportage are several. Many aspects of the tutelage received from an older shaman are taken for granted as common knowledge. Other matters are withheld because they are esoteric. Siikala has further suggested that “as spirits were regarded as the shaman’s real teachers, it is natural that people were not always very willing to speak of profane teaching.”⁵ Another motive is less exotic. No differently than Western professionals, Inuit shamans treat questions about their educations as inquiries concerning their credentials. Their responses offer bona fides by discussing the spirits that they have acquired.

Whatever may be the motives determining their selective contents, shamans’ discussions of initiation presuppose an extensive native context. Children and adults of both sexes may become an angakoq (plural, angakut), as the Inuit term their shamans.⁶ Ritual transvestitism, a practice common among Siberian shamans, was practiced by some Asiatic and Koniag Inuit laity and shamans.⁷ On St. Lawrence Island, where the practice had lapsed, transvestite homosexuals were said to be the most powerful shamans, even though homosexuality was ordinarily severely disapproved.⁸ Transvestite shamans are not elsewhere documented among the Inuit. However, a number of central and eastern Inuit myths and legends do refer to both male and female homosexuality among shamans,⁹ suggesting that ritual transvestitism may once have been practiced but has since been discontinued.¹⁰ Like almost all adult Inuit, almost all shamans are married.

Inuit shamans do not form secret societies. Experienced shamans train and initiate novices; but shamans are otherwise generally rivals, “prone to deny each other, since each one, as will readily be understood, claims to be the only prophet.”¹¹ Although all shamans may be described as professional ecstatics,¹² none depends on shamanism for a livelihood. Shamans or, more precisely, their helping spirits are paid in meat and goods for shamanizing, but the payments are no more than welcome addenda to livelihoods that are earned through the labors customary for their sexes.

Inuit shamans make or direct the manufacture of their various ritual paraphernalia. The diagnosis of illness sometimes involves the use of a divination stick.¹³ Shamanic seances generally involve the use of a drum,¹⁴ sometimes of a rattle,¹⁵ usually of a belt¹⁶ from which amulets may be suspended,¹⁷ sometimes a brow band,¹⁸ sometimes a rain coat made of gutskin,¹⁹ and the various secret devices that are necessary for the accomplishment of sleight-of-hand. A shaman may make and own masks²⁰ and “dolls” or figurines²¹in which his helping spirits take up residence.

In addition to a thorough, general knowledge of Inuit religion,²² Inuit shamans have lore of their own. A secret language is employed whenever they converse with spirits.²³ Magic words or spells²⁴ and magic songs²⁵ may be used to control both malicious and helping spirits. Ventriloquism and sleight-of-hand are employed in various shamanic feats. As well, Inuit shamans know the practical procedures of divination, conducting a seance, etc.

Almost the whole of the shamanic complex consists of shamanizing: performing a seance while in a religious trance. Seances are almost always held at night and in the darkness of huts whose lights have been extinguished.²⁶ However, seances may also be held in the open air during broad daylight.²⁷ Both male and female shamans are frequently mentioned either as naked or as naked above the waist.²⁸ Gutskin rain coats are sometimes worn instead. No ritual significance is documented for either practice, and the motive may simply be practical. Both nudity and garments that rattle audibly make feats of sleight-of-hand that much more convincing. In some cases, the shaman secretes himself on a sleeping platform at the back of the hut, behind a curtain of skins. In other cases, he shamanizes in the main area of the hut, surrounded by his audience. With only rare exceptions, the shaman is attended by one or more helping spirits.

The major functions of the shaman concern the activity of healing, but in an extended sense of the term appropriate to the Inuit point of view. When spirits, ghosts, or, in rare cases, inue or “indwellers” in nature²⁹ are believed to be in the vicinity and seeking to cause illness or death, a shaman may drive them off or destroy them. The effects of witchcraft are treated similarly.³⁰ Once illness has occurred, its diagnosis is accomplished by means of divinations.³¹ Most frequently, the particular divinatory technique of qilaneq, “head-lifting,” is employed.³² When the diagnosis of illness is not itself considered to be a full program of therapy, illnesses that are diagnosed as cases of spirit-intrusion³³ may be countered with such activities as suction,³⁴ rubbing,³⁵ and blowing.³⁶

Most illnesses are instead diagnosed as the consequences of soul-loss that has been caused by spirits, the indwellers in nature, or witchcraft. They may be remedied with seances in which the shaman sends his helping spirit on a journey in quest of the patient’s missing soul.³⁷ A greater shamanic feat, of which only the more accomplished shamans are capable, serves the same function. Accompanied by his helping spirit, the shaman undertakes a “spirit journey,” i.e., a journey in disembodied form as a free-soul, in order to retrieve the patient’s missing soul.³⁸ Often the shaman obtains a confession from the patient of one or more breaches of traditional observances³⁹ and suggests observances that will constitute penance.⁴⁰

On the Bering Sea and in East Greenland, shamans may also undertake to render women fertile.⁴¹ The shaman’s efforts to obtain a soul to be born is to some extent comparable in ideology to recovering a lost soul as a means by which to heal illness.

A second major purpose of Inuit shamanism is similarly remedial. The Inuit believe that game animals become scarce due to breaches of traditional observances. Remedy of the situation requires reconciliation either with the animals or with their indwellers. Again a seance is held, to which the shaman may attract either the animals⁴² or their indweller.⁴³Alternatively, shamans will themselves go on ecstatic journeys, out over the ice, down to a subterranean or submarine netherworld, or up to a supercelestial land, in order to visit either the animal indweller⁴⁴ or the breath-souls of the animals themselves.⁴⁵ Carefully seen, Inuit shamans remedy famine by fetching animal souls, complete with flesh upon them, as though they were healing soul-loss or an infertile woman.

Inuit shamans may also remedy bad weather that makes travel and hunting impossible, either by commanding their helping spirits to act on their behalf⁴⁶ or by undertaking an ecstatic journey to visit the indweller in the weather, winds, blizzard, or rain.⁴⁷ Because weather shamanism is only conducted in prolonged cases of bad weather that threaten famine, it too should be comprehended as a type of healing. Like disease, famine is attributed to the actions of ghosts, spirits, or indwellers in nature. Without ignoring its physical nature, shamanic healing addresses its metaphysical causes.

Shamans may predict future events, among them the weather and the outcome of the hunt.⁴⁸ Shamans may also exhibit clairvoyance, seeing events at a distance, such as the whereabouts of game animals or of a person who has become lost.⁴⁹ Shamans may see distant events in visions, or learn of them through their helping spirits’ journeys to the distant places, or by undertaking ecstatic journeys themselves. At least some shamans undertake to guarantee the weather, the availability of game, and the absence of evil spirits along a route that travelers are about to take. In such cases, the shaman may employ clairvoyance or may instead police the intended route in advance of the travelers, by means of an ecstatic journey.⁵⁰

Ventriloquism⁵¹ and sleight-of-hand⁵² form a frequent part of general seance practice. For example, shamans may present their clothes as having been torn⁵³ or their hands or weapons reddened with blood⁵⁴ as consequences of their ecstatic combats with ghosts or evil sp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Preface to the American Edition
• Chapter One: A Study in Esoterica
• Chapter Two: The Fiction of the Healed Healer
• Chapter Three: The Ecstasies of Inuit Laity
• Chapter Four: The Varieties of Ecstatic Seances
• Chapter Five: The Pattern of Shamanic Initiations
• Chapter Six: The Initiator’s Role
• Chapter Seven: The Vision Quest
• Chapter Eight: The Journey to the Moon and the Sun
• Chapter Nine: Helping Spirits and Shamanic Power
• Chapter Ten: The Seances of Commencement
• Epilogue
• Works Cited