Cold winter: Angakkuq
ANGAKKUQ
Category: Inuit culture
The angakkuq (plural angakkuit, also spelled sometimes “angakkuq”, “angakkut” or “angatkuq”) is a very important figure of Inuit culture that has often been considered the “Inuit medicine man”, a form of spirit mediator for the community.
Angakkuit are traditionally men – there are female angakkuit, and nothing forbids it, but they tend to be rarer than their male counterpart. There are many different ways to become an angakkuq: you can be the son of the current angakkuq, trained by your father; a prophecy might have been delivered at your birth saying you’ll become an angakkuq; you might have showed some form of power or unique traits that convinced a mentor to train you into become an angakkuq ; or you might have decided on your own to become an angakkuq after receiving some form of dream or vision. Interestingly it seems that orphans and people who survived nasty things and “hard times” have a bigger tendency to become angakkuq – thanks to them being actually helped out by the spirits of their deceased loved ones.
To become an angakkuq means learning a lot of things: you have to learn the roles of an angakkuq, the rites the angakkuq must perform, as well as the special language spoken by the angakkuit (an archaic form of vocabulary) and the oral traditions of the Inuit culture. The training also demands that an angakkuq finds a spirit guide, or a spirit familiar, a “tuurngaq”, who will sometimes bestow upon its master/protégé great powers – running as fast as a caribou, flying in the sky, or even being stabbed or shot without receiving any wound. These auxiliary spirits can actually be various things, from the spirits of ancestors to inhuman entities, and are invoked by the angakkuq using their name (each spirit having one specific name the angakkuq learns). An angakkuq can also (and usually has) more than one “auxiliary spirit”.
The angakkuq lives a mostly normal every-day life and is, in day-to-day, not treated differently from anybody else: it is only when he is called forth for one of his specific missions that the angakkuq suddenly becomes a different person. The angakkuq offers people spiritual guidance and assistance: his job is to cure sicknesses, to interpret dreams and to understand the cause of misfortunes through divination. The angakkuq is also a “law-enforcer”, in the sense that he makes sure the three basis of Inuit society are respected. The Inuits do not have laws per se, but a set of three principles: piqujait (things to do), maligait (things to follow) and tirigusuusiit (things to avoid). When one of these laws/taboos/principles is broken, the angakkuq needs to act, because the consequences is a misfortune on the people (hunt parties coming back empty or injured, the weather turning bad, accidents happening…). To fix the problem the angakkuq will need to do an astral journey, projecting their spirit outside of their body, to understand the cause of the problem , before returning among the Inuit and questioning the people related to the incident – given the spiritual journey undertaken the angakkuq already knows who is responsible for the crime, but the questioning is often done to prompt a confession (which often is the solution to solve the problem). When a confession isn’t enough however, the angakkuq will give penances to the criminal, ranging from cleaning the urine pots of the community to swapping his wife for someone else’s. Normally when an angakkuq performs his job for the entire village or community, he does it for free – he can only be “paid” if he helps individual family, or one person, who will reward them for their effort.
The angakkuit could also act when either a birth became too dangerous, or when a newborn child could not be calmed down in any way: in Inuit culture, it means that a deceased member of the family is trying to live again through the child, and as a result to ease the process the child should be named after this deceased. And when the family cannot determine on their own who the haunting dead is (or when the situation becomes too critic to have time to search for the name), the angakkuq is called to help and he will give the child the name of one of his companion spirits, which is bound to save the child’s life and give it back the strength it needs. Usually such a “spirit-named child” is considered more likely to become a spiritual figure like the angakkuq. Interestingly, a naming process can also be a way one becomes an angakkuq: indeed, Inuit people could be “renamed” in their life in answer to a specific crisis, and the old name they rejected would not be lost forever but rather become an “auxiliary spirit” to the person – who in turn now could become an angakkuq. A story involved for example a man named Nanuq who had been named after an older cousin, but when said cousin died Nanuq felt as if he too had suffered death and to ease his anguish he was officially renamed Qimuksiraaq, but his old name “Nanuq” became a spirit accompanying him – a spirit taking the shape of a polar bear (as Nanuq means “polar bear”), and so Qimuksiraaq became in turn an angakkuq. Similarly, an angakkuq could give their own name to their descendants, before or after their death (for example appearing in a dream and demanding to be honored in this way), and it is considered that someone inherited an angakkuq name would inherit some of their powers, or become an angakkuq themselves.
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There is an annual ritual to which all the angakkuit participate: it is the appeasing of Sedna, “the sea woman”, the fearful goddess ruling the depths of the ocean. Sedna is a goddess prone to being angry, and the only way to appease her is to travel spiritually to her underwater domain (Adlivun) to comb her hair – a thing she cannot do herself because she doesn’t have any fingers. The angakkuq could also rather beg Sedna to calm herself, or fight her to beat her down depending on their methods, all to convince the goddess to not let the Inuit starve – and in turn Sedna would fill the waters with fishes and sea animals that the people could eat.
