The greatly esteemed profession of Conjuror is open among the Eskimo to both men and women. Anyone is eligible to become a student in the rites and lore of the caste, but only those who pass its tests (i.e., only those who attain, not only a really high degree of the power of mental concentration, of intuition and character reading; but some true occult gift), are allowed to practise. The art has its own hierarchy of professors according to their degree of aptitude and initiation. Only those with some particular qualification, natural or acquired, such as the power of throwing themselves into true trance, attain the highest degree of dignity. Aspirants to the position of conjuror who fall short of this, but have yet studied and schooled themselves to some purpose in the art, are not denied its practice altogether, but hold lesser rank and officiate on minor occasions.

The would-be conjuror is put through a fairly long and fairly severe course of training, the whole of which, wrapped up in an immense amount of magical circumlocution and sheer imposture, simply tends to enhance his intellectual qualities, such as they may be, [197]at the expense of the grosser appetites of the Eskimo lay individual.

The candidates to the caste—youth or young woman—begins by choosing a conjuror—male or female—under whom to study. And immediately the neophyte enters upon his apprenticeship. The length of time this may last rests upon his capacity to learn the rites and acquire the psychological stock-in-trade of a conjuror. It is to the teacher’s advantage to spin out this period of tuition as long as possible, since for the whole term of his training the disciple is the body servant of the master, and performs for him even the most menial offices. The novice is a sort of articled pupil into the bargain. He pays for his initiation.

First of all, he has to acknowledge all his breaches of the communal law and custom, and confess to the conjuror whatever of wrongdoing there may have been in his life. The Eskimo believe in this sort of confession, and it is frequently enjoined. He receives forgiveness, and thereupon embarks upon a wholly new course of life.

Fasting and abstinence and the mastery of the appetites of eating and drinking are the first trials, and the first victories he has to win. The Eskimo are vast eaters, and so much of their diet being flesh meat and in the raw state, their physique tends to grossness. This grossness has to be remedied if the conjuror is to be capable of dominating other minds by the greater force and clarity of his own. The neophyte eschews all luxuries whilst learning, again, [198]of course, with the idea of self-command and of that detachment from the unnecessary things of life which—under civilised conditions also—hang so many trammels round a finer aspiration. In the terms of Eskimo experience, this involves allowing the hair to grow long and hang down; to eat with the hands covered; and to go to rest without discarding the clothes. The strict diet, the austerities, the real course of mental training, improve the candidate’s natural powers of mind, enhance his memory, and concentrate his will and consolidate so solid a belief in the system and powers he is attaining that the graduate has really, at last, something professional and exclusive to offer the community.

To begin with, the aspirant has to become absolutely familiar with all the ancient customs of the people, and their significance. Then he has to study the spirit language, the tongue of the conjurors—that is to say, the language in which spirits are to be addressed and in which they express themselves through the initiate. He proceeds to study the cause of sickness (this however in a superstitious and not a natural sense), and what penalties to inflict for the wrongdoing which sickness is supposed to indicate. He has to learn all the various incantations for various occasions, and exactly how to set about them.

All this is merely the first stage of his apprenticeship. He begins to show of what stuff he is made, so far as the career of conjuror is concerned, when it comes to dealing with matters of guilt and secrecy. [199]The accomplished conjuror must be able to detect and affix guilt. Here he is concerned entirely with the minds of his fellow men, and trying to fathom and read them. The Eskimo mind is as tortuous as the Eastern. The conjuror pursues his own method, which may have a good deal to recommend it in the eyes of those who have made a study of the occult, but which is not the method of direct evidence and deduction. He throws himself into a perfectly genuine trance, and stakes everything on the intuitions of that state and the awesome effect of it upon the interested beholders.

To do this the conjuror sits down with his face to the wall, and drawing his hood well over his features, rocks himself backwards and forwards, calling the while on his familiar spirit (his Tongak) to come to him. He continues this howling and rocking until such concentration of mind is effected that he becomes unconscious; he foams at the mouth. Whilst in this condition of self-induced hypnotism—or however the spiritists may explain it—his spirit, it is believed, goes below to Sedna, or above to the regions of beatitude, to find out what has been the cause of the guilt in question, and discover the requisite punishment.

The interesting thing about this performance is that it is by no means the tissue of imposture one might suppose. The Eskimo conjuror may be no more and no less a fraud than the medium of a spiritistic séance. The writer has been creditably assured by these practitioners that the trance ensues [200]in the vision of a great white light (like the light thrown on a sheet by the magic lantern), and then in that illumination they see the whole scene of the supposed crime re-enacted, all the people implicated in it, and its every detail. They are told, or inspired, what penalty to inflict. On returning to consciousness, the vision is not forgotten, but sharply remembered. The conjuror is able to accuse the offender, to question him, and extort a confession from him. The penalty generally takes the form of some obnoxious task to be performed or some fine to be paid in kind.

This power to see the white light and to project in it the thoughts, probably, of the assistants at the conjuration—for the performance, when genuine, amounts to nothing less—is really a remarkable psychic feat. Probably the conjurors understand it as little as the laity; they have only trained themselves to achieve it, and they explain it according to the fantastic body of superstition which constitutes the Eskimo religion. It is only after long practice and the sustained effort after great mental concentration that the manifestation is attained, that the light can be seen, and incidents recorded in it. This is the final test for the honours of full conjurorship. The candidates sit night after night with the teacher, faces to the wall, and the lamps burning low, shutting out all extraneous objects and distractions, in the endeavour to see the light, to pass into trance. Those who remain for ever unable to arrive at this, fail to pass the test, and are rejected from the class of the [201]full-fledged. They must content themselves with minor dignities in the order of conjurors. One of these inferior grades is that of the Kunneyo, the one who incants for the seal hunters. Another is the Makkosâktok, the one who goes round with the whip during the Sedna ceremonies; and a third is the Noonageeksaktok, another official at the great annual celebration.

On the completion of his training and on his passing the final test for the witch-doctorate, the candidate is publicly acknowledged as a Conjuror. He makes a visitation of all the dwellings in the settlement, performs incantations in each, and receives in payment a number of charms, such as small pieces of carved ivory or bits of deerskin fringes. These things are valueless in themselves, but signify that the tribesfolk have accepted the new conjuror.

It is easy to see how the conjurors acquire the power they undoubtedly have over the people, and easy to imagine how much of fraud, imposition, hypocrisy and sheer self-seeking could be practised under the thick cloak of their rites, incantations, superstitions, and—last, but not least—their clever trickery and legerdemain. What may be perhaps not quite so easy is to convey to the reader an idea of the real good faith and of some demonstrable if inexplicable occult command underlying much of the conjuror’s art. The whole subject is too big, either from the point of view of primitive superstitions and procedure, or from that of occultism, to be dealt with at [202]much length here and now; but by way of illustrating the point that the Eskimo conjuror can perform miracles (collective hypnotism?) as striking as the well-known Eastern trick of the mango-tree, one of the incidents of the Sedna ceremony may be instanced.

At a certain stage of the Sedna proceedings, the conjuror, who has the spirit of a walrus or bear for Tongak (familiar spirit), spears himself through the jacket, or is speared by others, deep in the breast. When this whole performance is not merely a spectacular trick, it seems to be quite genuinely done. A line is attached to the deeply embedded, barbed spearhead, and the people catch hold of this and pull on it and haul the impaled man about, to prove that he is fairly caught, as the victim of a hunt might be. The conjuror is bathed in blood. At length, however, he is let go, and he makes his wounded way alone to the seashore. Here the Tongak releases him from the spear, and after a short space of time he returns to the festival whole and well as ever, with no sign about him except his torn clothing to indicate the rough handling he has undergone.

The whole stock-in-trade indeed of the Eskimo conjuror is a certain very demonstrable, acquired, occult power. Besides this, he has a good memory, an immense amount of shrewdness and cunning, an intimate knowledge of animals and their habits, of weather conditions and seasons, and, above all, of course, a capacity to judge of his fellow men.

It is after the period of training is over that the [203]conjuror becomes the bestial, sensual creature, full of cupidity and trickery, he is so often represented to be. After graduating in the guild, no further prohibitions and denials are observed. He marries, indeed; but no woman of the community is safe from him. Under one professional pretext or another, he may have his way with each and every one of them, with or without her own particular man’s consent. This, however, is seldom withheld. On the whole, monogamy is the rule among the Eskimo, although there are plenty of exceptions. The writer has known a conjuror with three wives, two of whom were sisters.

When a wife is childless it is a great grief both to her and her husband. The conjuror is called in for professional advice and to find out why she is not favoured by the spirits. He resorts to his incantations, but takes an obvious advantage of the situation (quite as much for his own ends as for the satisfaction of the would-be parents), and all is satisfactorily arranged. Again, when a man is very ill and has been performed over by the conjuror, one of the things demanded by the latter is that the patient’s coat shall be brought to his house in the evening by the man’s wife, and not taken home again until next day.

Eskimo life is full of this sort of thing, and the crudities of relationships entering into any of their typical folk-stories make these a little hard to reproduce in a manner acceptable to better taste. But there is certainly some distinction to be drawn between [204]the primitive doings of a people struggling numerically against the cruellest conditions of life nature can impose, (who moreover have no conception of the ethical idea of morality), and mere promiscuity and vice as practised for their own sakes by the “civilised” peoples of far more favoured lands.

One of the commonest occasions of calling in the aid of the conjuror is during bad weather. The days have been dark and stormy, with bitter gales and snowstorms, so that the hunters have been unable to go afield. The witch doctor arms himself with a whip—either an ordinary dog whip or one made from sea-weed—and a knife, and rushes out to join the howling elements. He slashes the wind and shouts down the gale. “Taba! Taba! Namuktok!” (Stop! Stop! It is enough!).

And presently the wind drops, and the accustomed death-like stillness of the frozen world supervenes upon the uproar.

The conjuror of course could read the signs of the weather even more astutely than the practised hunters, and awaited the moment when the gale had spent itself for the exhibition of his influence.

After the death of anyone looked upon as more or less of a criminal, the conjuror is called upon to drive the evil-intentioned spirit of the departed away from his old home. He does this by shading his eyes carefully in the effort to perceive the spirit. Then, with a knife or spear he rushes about, yelling and shouting, and stabbing as if at his invisible foe, calling upon [205]it to depart and go to its own place below. At length he vanquishes the spirit, and announces that it is to be dreaded no more; by their belief in him he removes their fears and restores tranquility of mind and body; whereupon he receives his dues and the perturbed and anxious relatives recover their poise and cheerfulness.

In order to grasp how seriously the Eskimo believe their lives, and every adventure of their lives, to be beset by unseen influences, it must be remarked that the main idea of their uncouth religion is that, not only man, but all things, animate or inanimate, have souls. Rocks, wood, earth, water, sun, moon, stars, fire, fog, icebergs, plants, all animals, all creeping things, and even hunting implements, have spirits which never die. The Tarnuk, or soul of a man, has the shape of a man, but is about one inch in height, and is to be discovered in the hand of a conjuror or in that of a new-born babe. The soul of a bear is like a bear; that of a walrus like a walrus; but the soul of a deer resembles a spider, and that of a salmon, a man! The souls of rocks are like sturdy, thickset men; the soul of the earth looks like a piece of liver. Animals’ souls are black and hairless, but those of some inanimate objects are clothed in deerskin. It would indeed take a great deal of study to determine how and why the people should have arrived at these fantastic notions and distinctions. Perhaps it would never be given to the mind of the modern white man to fathom the workings of such primitive intelligence, building up for itself a monstrous, nightmare [206]scheme of things, on foundations of the blackest ignorance.

For sheer phantasy, the writer is aware of course that the beliefs of the Eskimos are paralleled by those of many other uncivilised peoples. It may be that along lines of comparative savage mythology some generalisations might emerge which would throw light upon the whole subject. Here, however, would lie the study of a lifetime.

Briefly put, the Eskimo religion consists in the belief in a multiplicity of spirits, good and bad, and in one Supreme Spirit, of whom no fear is felt because he has no evil intention towards man. The conjuration and propitiation of the evil spirits is the constant business of the conjuring class, although everyone has some degree of power to deal with them. Man was made, indeed, by the Great Supreme Spirit, and his name was given, Âkkolukju; and woman, Omaneetok, was fashioned from his left-hand floating rib.

The Eskimo very highly esteem their own race, but hold Europeans in considerable contempt. They have an unpleasant legend of a woman and a dog being cast away together in a boat or on a floe, by way of accounting for the origin of the whites.

Man’s spirit, like the spirit of everything else, is immortal, and destined to a future life in bliss, in the region where the Great Spirit presides over a happy community of very prosperous Eskimo, such as has already been described. Those who die on the hunt go to this heaven, also women in childbirth, and those [207]who die a violent death by any sort of accident. The road to this Eskimo heaven is beset by many obstacles and pitfalls. It is haunted by savage animals, who lie in wait to attack, maim, and kill the wayfarers upon it. Legend has it that at the end of this road, at the rim of this world which is the gate to the next, two huge rocks are set, confronting each other across the narrow path. They sway ominously and often crash together, so that the soul seeking heaven has to run the risk of being caught and crushed between them as he endeavours to get through.

All illness other than that derived from these causes is looked upon as a consequence of sin, i.e., the failure to be a good member of the community, the having been of a quarrelsome turn, bad-tempered, mean or ungenerous, and the having failed to own up to these things when exhorted by the conjuror. When a sick person, having confessed yet dies, it is believed that he had some mental reservation and was not quite honest about his confession. These bad folk go to the Eskimo hell, to the awful realms of Sedna. But a third idea of a sort of purgatory comes in, a place to which the damned can escape before they are finally admitted to bliss. The spirit of the conjuror is able to go below and fight the evil one, and liberate the soul in question. The whole transaction is generally a somewhat expensive one for the relatives.

All animals have their guardian spirits (Tongak) who have power over their souls (Innua). The bear, [208]walrus, killer, ground seal, etc., have the best and strongest familiars. It is the custom for each conjuror to adopt one of these spirits as his own, in order to avail himself of its attributes and powers. The bear is a special favourite, since his Tongak is possessed of cunning and intelligence above the ordinary. Sedna, the goddess or protectress of the sea creatures in her briny underworld, controls and safeguards their bodies only; each one’s particular Tongak controls its soul. The conjuror, in turn, controls the Tongak; so this important personage can counteract Sedna’s machinations against successful hunting. The hunter invokes the aid of the conjuror, who thereupon causes the Tongak of the seals to enter into the man and lead him to success. This familiar companionship is forfeited if the hunter commit some breach of the law and does not confess as much to the witch doctor, or if he fail to pay for the services rendered.

Eskimo mythology is almost an inexhaustible subject. In addition to the active, informing spirit called the Tongak, which everyone possesses and which can be invoked for guidance or assistance by every man at his need, all other beings, animate and inanimate, possess an indwelling spirit peculiar to themselves alone. This individual, permanent, presiding spirit is the Innua, something distinct from the patron spirit, the Tongak.

The writer has collected an immense mass of notes on the Eskimo deities, as they were described to him [209]by the most creditable of the conjurors. He believes that his list is unique, and offers the student of such matters entirely original material. In it are enumerated no less than fifty of these tutelary spirits, with their personal descriptions (generally uncouth and imaginative to a degree), their supposed habitat—earth, air, or water—and their characteristic activities or patronages.

There is Keekut, for instance, a being who lives on the land, in appearance is like a dog without hair, and who works in a more or less maleficent manner. There is Segook, a spirit with a head like a crow, a body like that of a human being, and who is black. It has wings. It is a benefactor to the tribesfolk, and brings them meat in its beak. It is fabled to exist upon the eyes of deer and seals. The list is monotonously fabulous, and could only be wearisome to the general reader.

Ataksok lives in the sky. He is like a ball, and has the means of bringing joy to his beholders as often as he may be invoked by the conjurors. Akseloak is the spirit of rocking stones. When called upon, he arrives rolling, and falls flat upon his face at the witch doctor’s feet. Ooyarraksakju is a female spirit, and lives in the rocks and boulders; is beneficent in her activities.

So the list goes on. It would doubtless have a value all its own for the student of primitive imagery or fable, and form an addition to ethnographical researches on the Eskimo; but to give it here in extenso would perhaps serve little or no purpose. [210]