Professor Moriarty told a sacred Inuit Story. He said he could only do that if he did so with great reverence, for if you do that you can remove “a Berlin wall of misunderstandings between peoples.” Takana Kapsalut[1] was the name of an Inuit woman. Her father was angry with her for not having a mate and threw her out of the kayak. When she tried to hang on he chopped off her fingers which then floated on the surfaced of the ocean as she sunk to the bottom.
This was the creative dream time of the beginning. Her fingers became mammals of the sea. She is the mother of sea beasts. When people on the earth don’t walk in the great imagination or don’t walk beautifully on the earth, when they sin, and when they do things against the Great Imagination a wall of anger grows around her on the ocean floor no seals will rise up at the breathing holes. As a result, people are hungry so they visit a Great Shaman who takes a journey to the ocean floor and he will go through various states of mind on his journey down for his state of mind will be equal to the state of mind of the earth.
The Shaman climbs a ladder up a cliff, but the rungs are turned like knives. He wants to go across the river but this is a trap for on the other side is an evil person, a witch. The wall of anger is meant to protect Takana Kapsalut and the shaman sings in the voice of whale, the voice of a wolf, and in all the voices of nature. That helps dissolve the wall of anger and makes the journey of the Shaman successful so the people can again go and hunt successfully and end the hunger of the people.
Takana Kapsalut is the mother of archetypes and she walks beautifully on the earth and rescues it. Takana Kapsalut is the mistress of life or the mother of life. But we in Europe, according to Moriarty have not walked in the great imagination. In the depths of our psyches “which is one with the universe anyway,” says Moriarty. Somewhere there is a mother of archetypes or a mother of great visons. Only someone who takes a great journey down the depths of his or her own psyche and sings there with a whale voice and dolphin voice understands that “ the great life can emerge up again into us and again arise into the surface consciousness so that we will again be walking within the great Imagination and the great world.”
In the 20th century not many of us can do this. Instead, as Teilhard de Chardin said,
“we will walk in the “noise sphere”. We don’t hear the Great Imagination coming out of our televisions and our radios We are walking in our desert of Zin. No we are not blessed. Like the children of Israel our souls have dried away.
Moriarty said we need someone to go down to the bottom of the ocean to the floor of the psyche and sing there with the commonage voice with voices of nature and comb out Takana Kapsalut’s hair to comb out the sins of the people against grass, against elk, and all the creatures of the world against whom we have waged war. We need to comb out Cartesianism, comb out our Medusa mindset and comb out our economics. We need a entirely new attitude to nature. One that is foreign to European consciousness.
Then perhaps we can walk on the soil of Europe again the way our Paleolithic ancestors walked among the animals of the earth. This is not walking among the animals to declare war on them. They walked among the animals in commonage consciousness. Then we can again walk on the earth in a great and sacred way. This is what the Inuit story urges us to do.
[1] I am not sure how to spell the name