Sometimes these are close relatives or friends who, feeling the end draw near, ask the man and/or the woman to give their name to their next child.

Who are these soul-names and who chooses them? They are chosen by the child’s parents and are the names of relatives or close friends of the father or the mother, deceased during her pregnancy, or even before, and whom the parents want to bring back to live with them by attaching them to the body of their child. And since an Inuit child usually receives several names over its lifetime, it will experience itself as both one and many, in so far as it knows that it is the meeting point of the reincarnation cycles of several soul-names, which live again each time they are given, in a different form and with a different human face. Unlike the inner soul that animates the body and grows with it, the child’s soul-name completely envelops it and transmits the identity of all those who form the chain of its homonyms. They are souls themselves, since they harbour the identity and the life experience of those who have carried the same name. For the Inuit, names are not merely labels. This is something it becomes when it receives one or several names from its parents in a ceremony attended by all of the relatives together with the neighbours and the parents’ friends. A human child is born.īut the newborn baby is not yet a social being. This inner soul is endowed with intelligence and partakes of Sila, who is the mind of the world. It contains a soul, another gift from Sila, which will grow with the child’s body and be its double, a double that will leave only at the person’s death and travel to the world of the dead. This bubble of air connects the child with the cosmic breath.

The child becomes human on the day of its birth when Sila, the master of the universe, introduces a bubble of air into the child’s body that will become its breath, its life principle. At this stage of intrauterine life, the child is a foetus with no soul. Its body will be nourished by the meat from the game killed by its father and eaten by its mother. It will resemble its father or its mother, depending on the strength of the life force of each. The child takes shape in the mother’s womb. With her blood, the mother makes its flesh and its skin.

The father makes the child’s bones, its skeleton, with his sperm. Let us take again the example of the Inuit to complete it and to introduce the analysis of a few other representations of what it is to “make a baby.” For the Inuit, to make a baby, the parents must have sexual intercourse.

Children of blood and bone epub