The spirit of the polar bear
The Russian scientist S.M. Uspensky once found polar bear skulls carefully stacked in piles several feet high on a remote Siberian beach where an ancient Arctic race had at one time prayed to the spirit of the bear.The Ket, a tribe of central Siberia, regarded the bear as their ancestor. They too, placed bear skulls in the fork of a tree and to this day the Ket refer to the bear as gyp, "grandfather," or qoi, "stepfather".
Neanderthal man and Arctic man lived in the deeply mystic and spiritual world of the hunter who must kill in order to live. This was the ethos of the Inuit. The Inuit is a member of the Inuit people, the term having official status in Canada and also used elsewhere as a synonym for the Eskimo in general. However, this latter use, in including Siberians who are not Inupiaq-speakers, is, strictly speaking, not accurate). However, that apart, the Inuit believed that all animals and man had inua, "souls", and to ensure future hunting success and harmony with the spirits of nature it was essential to placate the souls of slain animals, especially an animal as huge and man-like as the bear.
The bear could stand upright, like an enormous hairy giant, and when skinned, with his pinkish blubber, his finger-like claws and massive torso , looks gruesomely, horrifyingly like an immense naked human.
In this spiritual world of early Arctic man, animals were kin, an ancient belief reflected in totemism and in fables and mythology.
It was a mental world where the real and the unreal, the factual and the spiritual, merged. A shaman of the Polar Inuit explained an unsuccessful polar bear hunt in an area where bears were usually numerous, like this:"
The bears are not here, because there is no ice here, and there is no ice here because the wind is too strong, and the wind is too strong because we have insulted the spirits.
The Polar Bear - The Ultimate Bear
The polar bear was the ultimate bear, white, huge, mysterious. The Jesuit missionary Bellarmine Lafortune noted in the 1930 "A polar bear was hunted on foot and the hunter's greatest prestige came from his success as a polar bear hunter". It was an extremely risky hunt. The ice often drifted away and many a King Islander, hot in pursuit of a polar bear, was cut off from his home in this way; some returned safely but others disappeared forever.When a hunter returned with a bear, ancient ceremonies were observed to propitiate the bear's soul, for during all this time, the spirit of the great white bear hovered unseen, but strangely felt, about the village.
If offended, it would depart in anger, and evil might strike the entire community. The bear's skull was taken to the kagri, the communal house, and placed upon a raised bench.
It remained in this place of honor until the polar bear dance.
Gifts were placed near the bear skull: skin scrapers, needle cases and ulus, the semi-lunar woman's knife, if the bear was a female, and a carving knife or drill, if the bear was a male. The gifts had their own spirits and essence, and these became the property of the bear's inua, its soul.
The magic power of polar bears
To absorb the magic power of the bear, many Inuit wore amulets, most often a bear tooth as a pendant. The Inuit shaman needed more; he wanted the bear's spirit to be his tornaq, his magic helper.It was a quest fraught with enormous danger. The bear spirit, the "flying bear" could take the shaman to the moon, or deep into the sea, to seek help for his people, the mother of seals and whales and walruses.
And the bear spirit could protect his master from the power of evil.
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