A coastal village tale recounts a boy’s forbidden love for his sister, leading her to escape into the sky as the moon, pursued by him as the sun, causing eclipses. Their father, consumed by despair, turned malevolent, spreading disease and consuming both the dead and living. Shamans eventually subdued him, inspiring burial traditions that bind the deceased to prevent possession by evil spirits.
Source:
The Eskimo about Bering Strait
by Edward William Nelson
[Smithsonian Institution]
Bureau of American Ethnology
Eighteenth Annual Report
Washington, 1900
► Themes of the story
Forbidden Love: The brother’s prohibited affection for his sister initiates the central conflict.
Transformation: The siblings’ metamorphosis into the sun and the moon, and the father’s change into a malevolent being.
Supernatural Beings: The involvement of shamans and the father’s transformation into an evil spirit highlight interactions with supernatural entities.
► From the same Region or People
Learn more about Inuit peoples
from St. Michael
In a coast village once lived a man and his wife who had two children, a girl and a boy. When these children grew large enough, so that the boy could turn over the gravel stone, he became in love with his sister. Being constantly importuned by the boy his sister finally, to avoid him, floated away into the sky and became the moon. The boy has pursued her ever since, becoming the sun, and sometimes overtakes and embraces her, thus causing an eclipse of the moon. After his children had gone their father became very gloomy and hated his kind, going about the earth scattering disease and death among mankind, and the victims of disease became his food, until he became so evil that his desire could not be satisfied in this way, so he killed and ate people who were well.
► Continue reading…
Through fear of this being people threw the bodies of their dead just outside the village that he might be fed without injuring the living. Whenever he came about the bodies would disappear during the night. Finally he became so bad that all the most powerful shamans joined together and, by using their magic powers, were enabled to capture and bind him hand and foot, so that he was no longer able to wander about doing mischief. Although bound and unable to move about, he has still the power to introduce disease and afflict mankind. To prevent evil spirits from wandering and taking possession of dead bodies and thus giving them a fictitious animation for evil purposes, and in memory of the binding of this evil one, the dead are no longer thrown out, but are tied hand and foot in the position in which the demon was bound and placed in the grave box.
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Dreamtime Whispers 