Goulet.pdf

Edmund Searles
It wasn’t until several months after the incident in the pool that I
learned the local explanation for Levi’s fear of water. Mary Ellen over-
heard me discussing his phobia with his sisters, and she said, “Levi is
named after Inookie’s [another elderly Inuk whose family is related to
Levi’s] son Jamasee who drowned a year before Levi was born. Levi’s
namesake died in the water and transmitted this fear of water to Levi.”
I was partly amused but mostly skeptical. This was more the remnant
of a bizarre folk theory than an explanation for a particularly psy-
chological symptom. In fact, this comment made me more interested
in analytical psychology and the role of memories and emotion in ex-
plaining why Levi acted the way he did, a tendency I have retained.
Perhaps it was a traumatic episode with water in his recent past that
caused him to act the way he did. Surely, the explanation must be based
on experiences in his own lifetime, not those of another.
I was unable, at the time, to really understand or appreciate the cos-
mic significance of this explanation for his fear of water. I could not
accept the veracity of folk theories that attribute causality and agency
to name souls that move from one generation to the next. And be-
cause of my skepticism at the time, I did not pursue the topic any fur-
ther with either Mary Ellen or any of her Inuit in-laws, which I regret
to this day. They would have been more than happy, I suspect, to ex-
plain this and other features of a complex system of pre- and post-
Christian beliefs about the nature of time, souls, and persons. It is only
recently, however, that I have begun to appreciate the significance of
this and other aspects of Inuit cosmology and spirituality, a universe
replete with various types of supernatural actors and supra-sensible
experiences, a point I will return to shortly.
Although the arrival of Christian and secular metaphysical claims
somewhat weakened the power of these myths and the influence they
have on everyday life, stories of shape shifting and soul cycling are
still quite common, even among devout Anglicans and Roman Cath-
olics. As a person increasingly drawn to the origins of certain beliefs
and doctrines and willing to accept the ontology of mystic presence,
divinity, sacrality, and profanity in everyday lives and in different parts
of the world, I feel much more prepared to investigate saturated phe-
nomena and meaning in the Arctic by examining several examples of