But
a shaman: A.S. Milovsky, "Tubiakou’s Spirit
Flight." Natural History, July 1992.
walk
away from the spirits: 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.
a
flight of metaphors: "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. "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.