ABSTRACT
The great Danish Arctic explorer and ethnographer, Rasmussen, records how one of the Eskimo shamans, or inspired priests, whom he encountered had in vain sought instruction in his mystical vocation from other shamans. Finally, like St Antony, the founder of the Anchorites, this Eskimo neophyte sought inspiration in solitude and wandered off to pursue a lonely vigil in the wilderness. ‘There,’ he told Rasmussen,
I soon became melancholy. I would sometimes fall to weeping and feel unhappy without knowing why. Then for no reason all would suddenly be changed, and I felt a great, inexplicable joy, a joy so powerful that I could not restrain it, but had to break into song, a mighty song, with room for only one word: joy, joy! And I had to use the full strength of my voice. And then in the midst of such a fit of mysterious and overwhelming delight I became a shaman, not knowing myself how it came about. But I was a shaman. I could see and hear in a totally different way. I had gained my enlightenment, the shaman’s light of brain and body, and this in such a manner that it was not only I who could see through the darkness of life, but the same bright light also shone out from me, imperceptible to human beings but visible to all spirits of earth and sky and sea, and these now came to me to become my helping spirits (Rasmussen, 1929, p. 119).
