Tupilaq
Shamanic Killing-Familiar / Animated Composite Being
Greenlandic Inuit (Kalaallit and Tunumiit traditions)The tupilaq (Greenlandic Kalaallisut singular *tupilak*; ethnographic plural *tupilait*) is the destructive familiar of pre-colonial Greenlandic Inuit shamanism, secretly fabricated by an *angakkoq* (shaman) and sent to kill a specific named human enemy. The Greenlandic word covers two distinct things: the original ritual being and the modern carved figurine now sold as Greenlandic folk art. The original tupilait were assembled from animal bones, skin, hair, sinew, driftwood, seaweed, and (in the most-cited ethnographic accounts) parts of a dead child. The shaman activated the assembled object by chanting and, in the curator Hans Lange's documented description, by letting it suckle at his genitals until grown to the desired size, then placed it in the sea to seek out the named victim. The defining narrative tension is the rebound rule: if the intended victim was a more powerful shaman, the tupilaq could be turned back to kill its creator, as in Knud Rasmussen's 1921 tale 'Nukúnguasik, Who Escaped from the Tupilak,' where the failed creature 'swam back at once to the man who had made it, in order to eat him up.' No archaeological tupilaq has ever been recovered, because the originals were assembled in secret from perishable materials and dispatched at once; every surviving description comes from shamanic confession-narratives recorded by nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Danish ethnographers (Henrik Rink 1875, Gustav Holm 1884-1885 Konebåd Expedition, William Thalbitzer 1905-1906 Ammassalik, Knud Rasmussen). The carved tradition begins in 1905-1906 when the Danish ethnographer William Thalbitzer in Ammassalik (now Tasiilaq) asked the angakkoq Mitsivarniannga to carve three model tupilait, since no actual ones existed; the three figures (a human-like form, a bird, and a harpooned dog) are now part of the Danish National Museum collections. From this commission grew a major twentieth-century Greenlandic folk-art tradition, carved primarily from sperm-whale tooth (which gives the figures their characteristic curved conical shape), walrus tusk, caribou antler, musk-ox horn, driftwood, and occasionally soapstone. The Greenland National Museum and Archives in Nuuk holds the largest concentration of carved tupilait. The bestiary entry's central observation is the cultural transformation: a destructive ritual technology became, in the twentieth century, an internationally collected art form sold to tourists and exhibited in major European and North American museums.
