Ethnological Sketch of the Angmagsalik Eskimo. 97 



quarlers of the earth or up to the sun or the moon. Now-a-days, 

 they said, there are no angakut who can make air-voyages, as 

 none of them has had a chance of watching this done by another, 

 and without that they are unable to make such voyages tliemselves." 



Under the category of sicknesses come also cases in which a 

 man is incapable of hunting seals, or a wife is unable to bear children. 

 In the latter case the angakok, supposing he has the power, 

 must make a journey to the moon, whence a child is thrown down 

 to the wife, who afterwards becomes pregnant. After having per- 

 formed this toilsome journey, the angakok has the right of sleeping 

 with the wife. 



When an angakok has performed his arts in order to heal a 

 sick person, an indispensable condition for the success of the cure 

 is that it shall be paid for. It is the tartok, however, and not the 

 angakok that is paid for its trouble. The angakut merely arrange 

 about the presents. The payment is, of course, proportioned to the 

 circumstances of the sick person. By way of example I may 

 mention that our neighbour, Sanimuinak, received this winter a 

 sledge, a dog, a harpoon-point made of narwhal tusk, a handful of 

 precious (that is small) pearls etc. When he told us about it he 

 laughed heartily himself at folk's incredulity. 



The Angmagsaliks, like all the Eskimo, possess an incredible 

 capacity for patience and endurance in great suffering, but, on the 

 other hand, a little pain makes them at once believe they are going 

 to die. Thus, they often are much concerned about a trifling 

 ailment such as a headache, and in such cases the angakok is at 

 once summoned to heal the sick man. No wonder then that the 

 cures frequently succeed. If a person has high fever accompanied 

 by headache, the angakok says that there is a danger of his going 

 mad. In order to avoid this fate the sick person must confess that 

 he is an ilisitsok, a wizard or witch, and as such saddle himself with 

 crimes^), such as having robbed people's souls, or having killed 

 people by supernatural means. If he fails to make such a confession, 

 the sick man may easily become deranged or go raving mad — 

 which really means that he talks in delirium. How barbarously 

 patients are treated in such cases will be recounted further on. 

 When the sick person has confessed that he is an ilisitsok or 

 an angakok disciple, he loses the power of acting as such in 

 the future. 



These angakok disciples, however, sometimes retain their power 

 of communing with the spirit world, and thus are able to have 



') Possibly to be explained by suggestive hallucination. 

 XXXIX. 



