Page:The Mythology of All Races Vol 10 (North American).djvu/54

10 girl with a dog: the ancestors of the white men she put in the sole of a boot and sent them to find their own country, and when the white men's ships came again, lo, as seen from above, the body of each ship looked precisely like the sole of a boot!

Birth and death, in Eskimo conception, are less a beginning and an end than episodes of life. Bodies are only instruments of souls—the souls which are their "owners"; and what respect is shown for the bodies of the dead is based upon a very definite awe of the potencies of their Inue, which have been augmented rather than diminished by the last liberation. Souls may be born and reborn both as man and as beast, and some have been known to run the whole gamut of the animal kingdom before returning to human shape. Ordinarily human souls are reborn as men. Monsters, too, are born of human parents: one of the most ghastly of the northern tales is the story of "the Baby who ate its parents"; it tore off its mother's breasts as she suckled it, it devoured her body and ate its father; and then, covered with its parents blood and crying for meat, it crawled horribly toward the folk, who fled in terror.

Besides the soul which is the body's "owner" the Eskimo believe in a name-soul. The name of the dead man is not mentioned by his kinsfolk until a child has come into the world to bear it anew. Then, when the name has thus been reborn, the dead man's proper soul is free to leave the corpse and go to the land of the departed. An odd variant of this Greenlandic notion was encountered by Stefansson among the western tribes: these people believe that the soul of the dead relative enters the body of the new-born child, guarding and protecting its life and uttering all its words until it reaches the age of discretion; then the child's own soul is supposed to assume sway, and it is called after a name of its own. If there have