They say that once an Inuit shaman, playing a drum as is ritual, entered a trance and his soul began to wander through the aurora borealis, that crazy discharge of colored lights that fascinates those who see it. There he encountered beams of light that turned out to be spirits playing with a ball, which in turn turned out to be the skull of a seal... And the story continues. There are many Inuit legends about the northern lights. Westerners, on the other hand, long ago concluded through science that this phenomenon of the night sky was nothing more than the intense and frequent flashes produced by solar particles colliding with the Earth's atmosphere. Full stop. Perhaps our science is superior. But perhaps we can learn something from a culture that coexists in a point of balance with the sky, the harsh polar climate, and nature.
The word Inuit means 'people'. They reject being called by the term Eskimos ('meat-eaters') which they consider derogatory. The Inuit's relationship with the sky is very special. From Greenland and the Canadian and American towns they inhabit, the stars are seen with special intensity and the northern lights take over the sky with a mysterious and enchanting air.
From the terrace of the Fabra Observatory, on Tibidabo mountain in Barcelona, however, the city lights unfold vehemently and sometimes, to the naked eye, it is difficult even to spot the Big Dipper. But at the Dinners with Stars, organized by Sternalia and promoted by Obra Social "la Caixa", in addition to tasting new flavors before one of the best views of the city, we can learn about the sky and beyond from wise people like cultural anthropologist Francesc Bailón, who today tells us about the peculiarities of the Inuit world.
While he does so, the full moon shines imposingly over the city —with even more force than the thousands of watts from homes and streetlights— and warns us of the eclipse that in a few days will dye it blood red. The public murmurs in surprise when Bailón recounts that, for the Inuit, an eclipse signifies the violation of the goddess Malina, representative of the Sun, by Anningan, god of the Moon… Science, again, counter-argues that eclipses are light phenomena that occur when the Sun and Moon align in a certain way. However, as happens to the privileged who have seen an aurora borealis, when we observe an eclipse we cannot help but feel embraced by a certain inexplicable mystique.
From Inuit culture, some myths reach us that Bailón debunks, such as, for example, that they do not have as many names to define the color white as is believed, nor the tradition of lending wives, and that most of them do not even live in igloos. Hunters straddling ancestral tradition and contagion with the cultures of their conquerors, contemporary Inuit have cell phones, study university degrees, and many are Christians (so the mythology we spoke of survives for some only as an anecdote).
But if we think there is no relationship between the scientific view of the stars and the Inuit world, we are profoundly mistaken. Five of the 55 satellites orbiting Saturn, for example, bear names from their mythology: Ijiraq, Sedna, Paaliaq, Kiviuq, and Tarneq.
As a wonderful dessert for this dinner, a pleasant walk reveals the history of the Fabra Observatory. First, they let us see for a few seconds —for some, the only ones of our lives— Saturn through a telescope more than a century old. Then they explain that with another of the observatory's telescopes, the astronomer and first director of the center, Josep Comas i Solà, discovered Titan's atmosphere in 1908, Saturn's largest moon. His observations were so advanced for the technology of his time that they could not be confirmed until 1944! Who knows if the Barcelona astronomer didn't have something of a magician, a shaman, like the Inuit, to whom he was somehow connected by the ringed planet.
Once this express class of Inuit culture has been assimilated, we can think that perhaps they do not have as advanced a knowledge of the stars as our civilization has developed through science. That perhaps the council of Inuit elders was not right either, a few years ago, when they warned NASA that the Earth's axis was shifting and that was why the poles were melting. And that perhaps the Inuit people do not know that, living far from these poles, Westerners have done much more to melt them than they have…
It must be for a reason that the Inuit do not have a word for selfishness. They always think of the collective. Maintaining peace among their own is another of their core values. And, although tasks were traditionally divided by gender (men hunted and women prepared food and skins), according to Bailón, there is no society today with as much female participation in politics as Greenland. In addition, their simple lifestyle, based on hunting and fishing, is designed to coexist harmoniously with nature. So, regardless of whether we understand the world through myths or science, perhaps we should now think that what can help us relate better to the universe is to try, someday, to have values as solid, pure, and unbreakable as those of the Inuit people.
Text: Germán Aranda Photography: Laia Sabaté
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