DAY #9 LETTING BONES SPEAK

Making a Bone Oracle with bones and skulls from Greenland!

Introduction:

One year ago I spent a 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 account 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!)

6 December 2023

The original post appears in full below but I wanted to start by sharing what I have done with the bones and skulls I found in Greenland, in the year that has passed. I made myself a Bone Oracle!

This means I have created a (paper) surface (painted with glyphs) on which I place bones and skulls (pulled out of a container, with my eyes closed) and then I interpret where the bones land.

The operating syllabic script is not an alphabet (because it doesn’t follow any ABC order, not does it consist of single letters), but an abugida: Inuktitut.

An abugida is a writing system in which a character typically represents a consonant pronounced with a standard vowel sound that may be modified to indicate variant sounds by adding extra marks.

Inuktitut is used by Inuit people in the Canadian Arctic. (Greenlandic is written using the Western script).

Inuktitut is a particularly interesting version of an abugida because the glyphs or characters rotate to indicate which vowel follows the letter. You can see this in the illustration below (source is Wikipedia):

So the placement of the bones interacts with syllables. Putting those syllables together creates words (in Inuktitut) and I then assign meaning to the type of bone(s) interacting with words. The information I interpret is gathered as follows: which bone, where on the map, Inuit word(s) thus created?

Inuktitut is closely related, but not identical, to Greenlandic. They are mutually intelligible to a large degree, but when it comes to more advanced vocabulary Greenlandic has a huge number of loan words from Danish (being a Danish colony), while Inuktitut is influenced by English.

One cool thing is about this that I am learning Inuit languages while using my Bone Oracle! In the photograph at the top of this essay you will see a recent Bone and Skull Cast I did at my Forest House in Sweden (where the Bone Oracle lives).

Greenland, 9 October 2022

Today I was told, by a local, that I am a local now!

After one week you have seen all corners of town and all the locals have seen you around. You are no longer a “new face”, you “belong here”. I will “take that”, as I am thrilled to be a local, living my Arctic Dream.

The scenery has blown me away. The hardest thing is trying to find the balance between hiking and painting. I am aiming for a 50/50 split most days. Five hours of hiking (in daylight) followed by five hours of painting. I also need to eat sometimes and do video calls with my sons and husband!

I already notice how my paintings and drawings are grouping themselves into smaller series, exploring particular themes. This is not a conscious process or active decision. I simply roll with whatever presents itself, both on my hikes and in my dreams.

When I first arrived, it was all about bones. It was not so much of a dismemberment (which had already occurred when my mother was dying and many things in my own life died along with her).

This feels like the next stage: being re-membered, as in being put back together in a different way. In my dreams I was given a reindeer spine (I keep finding caribou vertebrae everywhere I go). I grew a new jawbone and caribou teeth. I also grew a narwhal tusk!

The spirits are filling me up with animal powers and the magical abilities that go with that. It is a huge privilege, if a little unsettling at times. I am never quite sure who or what is going to look back at me, in the mirror...

I just hope that I do not turn into a reindeer or narwhal so convincingly that a local hunter shoots me and eats me for dinner!

Imelda Almqvist