DAY #15 ARSARNERIT: THE GREENLANDIC WORD FOR AURORA BOREALIS
Where Spirit Children kick their umbilical cord in the heavens
For about nine years I cherished a dream, something I had to do before I died: painting in Greenland with the Northern Lights crackling and cackling overhead!
Some background:
In 2022 spent one month painting in Greenland, following the death of my mother. I wrote 31 daily posts on Facebook and my writing gathered a dedicated following. People were disappointed when the daily posts ended. I now regret that I did not make myself a Substack before leaving for Greenland. I have decided to make those posts available here by running them all again, spaced out over intervals, so they can be found online. I am also bundling them into a book, combining the stories, photographs and artwork. (And I will back in Greenland, teaching a sacred art course, in September 2024. There are some places left!)Thanks for reading Imelda Almqvist's Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
15 October 2022, Sisimiut, Greenland
Last night my dream came true! I soon discovered that, surprisingly they make sounds. They crackle and hiss. Some Inuit people teach their children that whistling brings lights closer, while clapping your hands makes them retreat. I did not try this! Some communities believe that those sounds are the eerie voices of the spirits and the departed.
It was a rare clear night. Snow had stopped falling for once. While painting, I looked out of my window to observe the Moon sailing over the fjord. I was treated to an even more impressive show than I expected: the Northern Lights were dancing, mirrored by the ice in the fjord. The Moon looked like a giant eye in the sky, observing it all. I threw on my padded arctic coat and flew out of the house!
It was a fast-moving “show”: the shapes change constantly, fade out and return. There is a pulsating feel to it. The show started (in my personal perception) with a giant starfish rising behind the snowy mountain peaks. The arms turned into antlers, so briefly the mountain had antlers, with the stars of Ursa Major right at the heart of it . Ursa Major is star constellation The Great (She) Bear for us. The Inuit perceive this constellatkion as a Great Caribou or reindeer. (Please see my recent post about the Inuit star constellation Tukturjuk!)
This was a poetic treat for those who love Inuit astronomy and star lore! Next the lights appeared to form a giant bear paw in the sky (the Great She Bear reasserting herself?) and those shapes soon merged into a beating (pulsating) large green heart.
I put my phone on night setting and hoped for the best. I had been warned, by a professional photographer, that without a proper camera with advanced aperture and time settings, the pictures would not come out well. And indeed, they are not award-winning photographs but that makes them no less precious to me!
The Greenlandic word for the Northern Lights is Arsarnerit. According to ancient legend and folklore these lights appear when the souls of deceased people (who are perceived as flying up to the sky after death and becoming stars in the firmament) are playing football with a walrus skull. However, on Nunivak Island in the Bering Sea, the Inuit communith there flipped this around. They thought the lights were walrus spirits playing with a human skull!
From ethnographic records we know that some Inuit people used to point at specific stars in the night sky as their ancestors living on.
Another Inuit word for the lights is Aksarnirq: the souls of dead people dancing and carrying torches to guide those (us) still residing in earth world below.
Yet another Inuit tribe (they are spread over a vast arctic territory, so beliefs vary from area to area) believed that the Aurora Borealis is created by spirit children living on in the sky. The special light effects are caused by them kicking their umbilical cords! (See my painting, at the top of this essay).
Picture credit: Jonatan Pie
In Alaska, some Inuit communities perceived the northern lights as the spirits of animals they had hunted, such as beluga whales, seals, salmon, and deer. And again, other tribes flips this around and saw the lights as the souls of dead animals, still hunting in the sky overhead.
Not all Inuit beliefs were comforting or reassuring: the Inuit of Hudson Bay dreaded seeing the aurora. They believed that they were the lanterns of demons pursuing lost souls.
In Alaska some Inuit people carried knives to “protect themselves from the evil indwelling spirits of the aurora borealis.”
To finish on a positive note: in Estonia (a Baltic state, so not Inuit territory) people believed that the northern lights appeared when whales were playing games or when sleighs transported guests to a spectacular wedding feast.
Let me close with a snippet of science: the Northern Lights are caused by high-energy particles from the Sun cascading down on Earth. As they near our planet, they interact with Earth's magnetic field, which channels them toward the north and south magnetic poles. This causes the magnificent sweeping and pulsating curves!
Did you know that we find the same phenomenon in the Antarctic region? They are called Aurora Australis or Southern Lights.
Here is one more of my own blurred and poor quality captures:
The northern lights can be seen from space!
The picture below is a digital simulation created by NASA (not an actual photograph, as I understand it): Ring of Fire at he North Pole.
I aim to post two essays a week here on Substack, but if you would like to see my daily posts about about sacred art, Nordic spirituality and my life as a Forest Witch, please follow me on Instagram or Facebook, thank you!
Imelda Almqvist, Forest House and School, Sweden
BIO FOR IMELDA ALMQVIST
Imelda Almqvist is an international teacher of Sacred Art and Seiðr/Old Norse Traditions (the ancestral wisdom teachings of Northern Europe). So far she has written four non-fiction books and two picture books for children. Natural Born Shamans: A Spiritual Toolkit for Life (Using shamanism creatively with young people of all ages) in 2016, Sacred Art: A Hollow Bone for Spirit (Where Art Meets Shamanism) in 2019, Medicine of the Imagination - Dwelling in Possibility (an impassioned plea for fearless imagination) in 2020 and North Sea Water In My Veins (The Pre-Christian spirituality of the Low Countries) will be published in June 2022.
The Green Bear is a series of picture book for children, aged 3 – 8 years. The stories and vibrant artwork, set in Scandinavia, invite children to explore enchanting parallel worlds and to keep their sense of magic alive as they grow up.
Imelda has presented her work on both The Shift Network and Sounds True. She appears in a TV program, titled Ice Age Shaman, made for the Smithsonian Museum, in the series Mystic Britain, talking about Mesolithic arctic deer shamanism.
Imelda is currently working on a handbook for rune magicians (about the runes of the Elder Futhark) and on more books in the Green Bear Series. Imelda runs an on-line school called Pregnant Hag Teachings, where all classes she teaches remain available as recordings, which can be watched any time!
Website:
http://www.shaman-healer-painter.co.uk/
YouTube Channel: youtube.com/user/imeldaalmqvist
Online School: https://pregnant-hag-teachings.teachable.com/courses/
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Imelda Almqvist
Thank you for sharing. The photos are great nonetheless!