Page:Eskimo Life.djvu/272

228 every night, when, in vivid dreams, it goes hunting or joins in merrymakings and so forth. The soul can also remain at home when the man is on a journey, a notion which Cranz believes to arise from home-sickness. It can also be lost, or stolen by means of witchcraft. Then the man falls ill and must get his angekok to set off and fetch his soul back again. If, in the meantime, any disaster has happened to it, for example if it has been eaten up by another angekok's tornarssuk, the man must die. An angekok, however, had also power to provide a new soul or exchange a sick soul for a sound, which, according to Cranz, he could obtain from, say, a hare, a reindeer, a bird, or a young child.

The strangest thing of all is that the soul could not only be lost in its entirety, but that pieces of it could also go astray; and then the angekok had to be called in to patch it up.

Among the Greenlanders of the east coast, according to Holm, a third element in addition to these two enters into the composition of man: to wit 'the name' (atekata). 'The name is as large as the man himself, and enters into the child after its birth, on its mouth being damped with water, while at the same time the "names" of the dead are spoken.' Among all the Greenlanders, even the Christians, the first child born after the death of a member of the