Inuit religion
Traditional Inuit religious practices include animism and shamanism, in which spiritual healers mediate with spirits.
[4]Traditional stories, rituals, and taboos of the Inuit are often precautions against dangers posed by their harsh Arctic environment.
Knud Rasmussen asked his guide and friend Aua, an angakkuq (spiritual healer), about Inuit religious beliefs among the Iglulingmiut (people of Igloolik) and was told: "We don't believe.
[10] The duties of an angakkuq include helping the community when marine animals, kept by Takanaluk-arnaluk or Sea Woman in a pit in her house, become scarce, according to Aua, an informant and friend of the anthropologist Knud Rasmussen.
[12][11] The Inuit at Amitsoq Lake (a rich fishing ground) on King William Island had seasonal and other prohibitions for sewing certain items.
[13] Children at Amitsoq once had a game called tunangusartut in which they imitated the adults' behaviour towards the spirits, even reciting the same verbal formulae as angakkuit.
"[14] The homelands of the Netsilik Inuit (Netsilingmiut meaning "People of the Seal") have extremely long winters and stormy springs.
[15] While other Inuit cultures feature protective guardian powers, the Netsilik have traditional beliefs that life's hardships stemmed from the extensive use of such measures.
[20] If the people breached certain taboos, she held marine animals in the basin of her qulliq (an oil lamp that burns seal fat).
[22][23] This belief differs from that of the Greenlandic Inuit, in which the Moon's wrath could be invoked by breaking taboos.
They do not form a political unit and maintain only loose contact, but they share an inland lifestyle and some cultural unity.
[33] In many instances it refers to "outer space", "intellect", "weather", "sky", "universe":[33][34][35][36][37] there may be some correspondence with the presocratic concept of logos.
[41] The Inuit believed that all things have a form of spirit or soul (Inuktitut: anirniq meaning "breath"; plural anirniit), just like humans.
According to a customary Inuit saying, "The great peril of our existence lies in the fact that our diet consists entirely of souls."
The harshness and randomness of life in the Arctic ensured that Inuit lived constantly in fear of unseen forces.
A run of bad luck could end an entire community and begging potentially angry and vengeful but unseen powers for the necessities of day-to-day survival is a common consequence of a precarious existence.
The principal role of the angakkuq in Inuit culture and society was to advise and remind people of the rituals and taboos they needed to obey to placate the spirits, since he was held to be able to see and contact them.
This is the root word for other Christian terms: anirnisiaq means angel and God is rendered as anirnialuk, the great spirit.
These are called tuurngait (also tornait, tornat, tornrait, singular tuurngaq, torngak, tornrak, tarngek) and "are often described as a shaman's helping spirits, whose nature depends on the respective angakkuq".
Though once tuurngaq simply meant "killing spirit", it has, with Christianisation, taken on the meaning of a demon in the Christian belief system.
Shamans (anatquq or angakkuq in the Inuit languages of northern parts of Alaska and Canada[44]) played an important role in the religion of Inuit acting as religious leaders, tradesmen, healers, and characters in cultural stories holding mysterious, powerful, and sometimes superhuman abilities.
[45] Despite the fact they are almost always considered healers, this is not the complete extent of their duties and abilities and detaches them from their role as a mediator between normal humans and the world of spirits, animals, and souls for the traditional Inuit.
