"The Aagjuuk stars also signalled the time for the midwinter celebration known as tivajuut. Symbolically complex and involving masquerade, partner exchange, and shamanistic ritual, this festival was usually held in a qaggiq - a large igloo specially built for the purpose... This celebration was made in order to strengthen the land - nunagiksaqtut..."

And string games were used up to the point when Aagjuuk appeared, but not after that:

"From Alaska's Noatak area, Jenness records information linking the Aagjuuk stars with string-figure games. He was given the following story at Harrison Bay (70^o 30´ N, 152^o 24´ W) by Alak, a North Alaskan Eskimo who had lived on the Noatak river during his youth.

I knew of two men who lived in another settlement on the Noatak river. They did not believe in the spirit of the string figures, but said they originated from two stars, agguk, which are visible only when the sun has returned after the winter night.

One of these men was inside a dance-house when a flood of mist poured in ... His two companions rapidly made and unmade the figure 'Two Labrets', an action intended to drive away the spirit of the string figures, uttering the usual formula ... but the mist kept pouring in...

Again, in a diary entry dated 18 December 1913 Jenness notes the same Alak telling him that 'they never played cat's cradles while two stars called agruk were visible, just before the long days of summer... They played other games then, like whizzer {a noise maker}..."

"Alak's comments indicate that, for the Noatak area at least, the appearance of Aagjuuk, rather than the Sun, signalled the end of the string-game season. And the opinion, expressed in the first passage, that string figures came from, and are therefore related to, Aagjuuk may have given rise to the prohibition against playing them after the solstice appearance of these stars. It is also possible that the string game mentioned by Alak - 'Two Labrets' - rapidly made and unmade in an attempt to drive off the 'string figure spirit', was intended to symbolize Aagjuuk's two stars and so confound the constellation with its own likeness or spirit."

"Etalook refers to the 'aagruuk' as 'labrets^'13,

¹³ Labrets, the circular lower-lip ornaments of some Western Arctic Eskimo groups, certainly evoke an astral image if we recall that early Inuit gaphic representations of stars were usually circular. See, for instance, the illustration on page 102 of Birgitte Sonne's Agayut: Eskímo Masks from the 5th Thule Expedition (1988).

giving them, it seems, an alternate name, ayaqhaagnailak, 'they prohibit the playing of string games':

They {the aagruuk stars} are the ones that discourage playing a string game... That's what they're called, ayaqhaagnailak, those two stars... When the two stars come out where is no daylight, people are advised not to play a string game then, but {play instead} with hii, hii, hii... toy noisemakers of wood or bone and braided sinew... Our parents tell us not to play the string games anymore..."