Spirit and the Arctic

As fate and luck would have it, some of my work has involved traveling five hundred miles North from Fairbanks to Utqiagvik, a town of about five thousand primarily Inupiat/Inuit inhabitants on the Arctic Ocean.

The landscape of the arctic can be empty, barren, bleak. With the exposure to such a stark external world, the whisperings of the internal world become all the more perceptible. (From a Jungian point of view, the inner world is all the more likely to be projected on the external world in such an empty landscape.)

The Inuit worldview is that “inua” (spirit) inhabits all living beings and elements of the natural world, even the landscape and its features.  Some animals  had especially strong “inua” – polar bears, whales, caribou, as did aspects of the environment, including the wind, the sea, the rivers.   

To me, the ivory, bone, and stone sculptures of the Inuit are reflective of the spirit and spirits of the landscape and the people; there is an exquisite simplicity of form that  graces these spiritual creations.

This is similar to the alchemical  assertion  “As above, so below”  –   “As on the inside, so on the outside.”:   

The inner spirit –  the divine spark –  is projected onto the external world. 

Sedna, artist unknown, East Greenland

Karoo Ashevak

David Ruben Piqtoukun

Nelson Takkiruq, Gjoa Haven

Nalenik Temela