While the angekoks are the dispensers of good, the issintok, or evil men, are the workers of injurious spells, enchantments, and metamorphoses. Like the witches of both Englands, the Old and the New, these malignant creatures are rarely submitted to trial until they have suffered punishment—the old “Jeddart justice”—castigat auditque. Two of them, in 1818, suffered the penalty of their crime on the same day, one at Kannonak, the other at Upernavik. The latter was laudably killed in accordance with the “old custom” ... custom being everywhere the apology for any act revolting to moral sense. He was first harpooned, then disembowelled; a flap letdown from his forehead “to cover his eyes and prevent his seeing again”—he had, it appears, the repute of an evil eye; and then small portions of his heart were eaten, to ensure that he should not come back to earth unchanged.
When an Eskimo has injured any one of his countrymen,—has cut his seal-lines, or lamed his dogs, or burned his bladder-float—or perpetrated some equally grievous offence—the angekok summons him to meet the countryside before the tribunal of the hunapok. The friends of the parties, and the idlers for miles around, assemble about the justice-seat; it may be at some little cluster of huts, or, if the weather permit, in the open air. The accuser rises, and strikes a few discords with a seal-rib on a tom-tom or drum. “He then passes to the charge, and pours out in long paragraphic words all the abuse and ridicule to which his outrageous vernacular can give expression. The accused meanwhile is silent; but, as the orator pauses after a signal hit, or to flourish a cadence on his musical instrument, the whole audience, friends, neutrals, and opponents signalise their approval by outcries as harmonious as those we sometimes hear in our town meetings at home. Stimulated by the applause, and warming with his own fires, the accuser renews the attack, his eloquence becoming more and more licentious and vituperative, until it has exhausted either his strength or his vocabulary of invective. Now comes the accused, with defence, and counter-charge, and retorted abuse; the assembly still listening and applauding through a lengthened session. The Homeric debate at a close, the angekoks hold a powwow, and a penalty is denounced against the accused for his guilt, or the accuser for his unsustained prosecution.”
CHAPTER XVII.
A MEDIÆVAL SUPERSTITION: THE FLAGELLANTS.
Among the extraordinary delusions of the human mind, none is more hateful than the conviction cherished among so many sects, that the Supreme Being can be propitiated by the self-imposed torture of His worshippers. And nothing more vividly illustrates the difference between the God of the Christian religion and the stern deity of so many human creeds, than the aspect of the former as man’s Heavenly Father, Who requires from him no other offering than that of a contrite and humble heart,—Who asks not that the Indian Fakir should cramp his limbs and lacerate his body, or that S. Simeon Stylites should stand night and day, in the scorching sun of summer, and the freezing cold of winter, on his lonely pillar. It is a proof of our wider and deeper knowledge of God that we are beginning to emancipate ourselves from the thraldom of this evil idea, and to recognise in Him a tender, compassionate Guide and Friend, Who, unto them that love Him, causeth all things to work for the best. In modern Calvinism the superstition still lingers, and it is supposed that a gloomy life, unrelieved even by the most innocent pleasures, must needs be acceptable to the Almighty Love; but this shadow in the Christian’s faith is rapidly receding before the growing and broadening light. We are sons of God, and heirs; and what He asks from us, what alone He will receive, is the offering of affection and the sacrifice of fear. And the greatest claim which Christianity puts forward to the hearts and minds of men is that it has delivered, or will deliver them, when rightly understood, from the degrading superstition of the ascetic solitary and the self-torturer. “Its true dignity is, that unseen it has ever gone about doing good. Link after link has it struck from the chain of every human thraldom; error after error has it banished; pain after pain has it driven from body or from mind; and so silently has the blessing come, that (like the sick man whom the Saviour made to walk) ‘he that was healed wist not who it was.’”
But error is slow to die; and long after the introduction of Christianity men continued to think that God would not hear them, unless, like the priests of Baal, they approached Him in blood and tears. At the bottom of it lay, no doubt, a truth, that the spirit could be exalted and purified only by contempt of the flesh:—and not perceiving that what was demanded of them was a moral and spiritual victory, they sought, by sore treatment of the body, to conquer its sinful appetites. They forgot that Christ had spoken of the body as “a temple,”—the temple of the Holy Ghost; that it was as much the creation of God as the immortal soul, and as His wondrous handiwork should be treated with the reverence due to all that He has made. And they came to look upon the body as a deadly enemy, the slave and accomplice of the devil, which could be subdued only by a regimen of pain and terror. And so, when an evil suggestion tempted them, they scourged themselves until the blood ran from their mangled flesh, or they plunged naked into the deep winter snow, or barefooted they trod the flinty soil, or they fasted until the exhausted brain sank into the stupor of delirium.
Thus we read of S. Hilarion:—
Covering his limbs only with a sackcloth, and having a cloak of skin, he wandered forth into the desert that lies beyond Gaza, and enjoyed the “vast and terrible solitude,” feeding on only fifteen figs after the setting of the sun; and because the region was of ill repute from robberies, no man had ever before stayed in that place. The devil, seeing what he was doing, and whither he had gone, was tormented. And he who of old boasted, saying: “I shall ascend into heaven, I shall sit above the stars of heaven, and shall be like unto the Most High,” now saw that he had been conquered by a boy, and trampled under foot by him, who, on account of his youth, could commit no sin. He therefore began to tempt his senses; but he, enraged with himself, and beating his breast with his fist, as if he would drive out thoughts by blows, “I will force thee, mine ass,” said he, “not to kick; and feed thee with straw, not barley. I will wear thee out with hunger and thirst; I will burden thee with heavy loads; I will hunt thee through heat and cold, till thou thinkest more of food than of play.” He therefore sustained his sinking spirit with the juice of herbs and a few figs, after each three or four days, praying frequently, and singing psalms, and digging the ground with a mattock, to increase the labour of fasting by that of work. At the same time, by weaving baskets of rushes, he imitated the discipline of the Egyptian monks, and the Apostle’s saying, “He that will not work, neither let him eat,” till he was so attenuated, and his body so exhausted, that his flesh scarce clung to his bones.