Talk:Shamanism among Eskimo peoples/Examples of using term shamanism among Eskimos in recent scientific literature/Positive birth-rituals

Positive birth-rituals. …

While the first contact with one or more objects increased the infant's individual properties, the mother's daily eating ritual imprinted its social “writing” on the child's character. From day to day the child had its part of its mother's meals through a titbit of solid food which its mother would shake above its lips and put aside, tit by bit, until the child itself began to eat solid food. By virtue of this daily ritual the child gradually grew into a proper human and social being who took his family's and his community's interests to the heart. For he new-born child was as yet no proper human being. At her first performance of the eating ritual the West Greenland mother even addressed the baby with words from the language used by the shamans in exchanges with the helping spirits. For this was the tongue of the alien inue, and it consisted in the local dialect interlarded with metaphors and archaic terms replacing the ordinary ones. One myth of warning to neglectful mothers also demonstrates the alien potentials contained in a new-born infant. A new-born child got no part in its mother's meals and rapidly developed into a giant with huge upper and lower teeth. One night, while suckling it suddenly sunk its teeth into its mother's breast and devoured both breast and mother. Then it turned against its father, while the remaining housemates took to their heels.

The concept of the cannibal child which devours its closest of kin, its only certain supporters of life, expressed the Eskimo's horror at the most asocial conceivable human inclination. …

Page 14 of:

Kleivan, I. and Sonne, B.: Eskimos / Greenland and Canada. (Series: Iconography of religions, section VIII /Artic Peoples/, fascicle 2). Institute of Religious Iconography • State University Groningen. E.J. Brill, Leiden (The Netherland), 1985. ISBN: 90 04 07160 1.

Red emphasis is my addition Physis 10:47, 6 April 2007 (UTC)