Carving

Item number 2807/1 from the MOA: University of British Columbia.

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Description

Carved tupilak (tupilaq). The head of the creature appears to be an animal with black circular eyes, a large snout with big round nostrils, an open mouth with four canines and its tongue sticking out through the teeth. The body of the creature is in the position of someone crawling on all fours with their arms bent, but also with a small carved point where a tail would be.

History Of Use

In Greenlandic the word ‘tupilak’ means an ancestor soul or spirit, and previously referred to mysterious, sinister spirits. Today, however, the word is mainly used to refer to small figures carved in tooth, bone or stone for the tourist market. Traditionally, a tupilak spirit could be called upon to help against a foe by a shaman secretly creating a figure made from various bones or other parts of animals and then singing a spell over it. The tupilak was often put out to sea so that it could find the enemy itself and kill him. However, this course of action was not without risk because if the tupilak’s victim had greater powers of witchcraft than its creator, he could repel its attack and instead send the tupilak back to kill its originator. In the twentieth century, when Europeans began exploring East Greenland, tupilaks were produced from materials such as wood, bone, tooth and antler points for the Europeans to collect as souveniers.