Anguta: Father of the Mistress of the Sea and Keeper of the Dead in Inuit Mythology

Anguta is the male counterpart figure to Sedna. His name in Inuktitut means literally the father or her father, and in the sources he is rarely treated independently of Sedna.

From a religious-studies perspective this interlocking is typical: Anguta appears as a complementary instance who completes the drama of Sedna’s mutilation and transfers it into the realm of the dead. This functional binding to Sedna is stabilized both linguistically and narratively.

While Sedna controls the sea animals, Anguta, according to the records of Franz Boas and Knud Rasmussen, is responsible for the dead.

He receives the deceased in Adlivun, a cold region beneath the sea, and decides which of them may rise further, into the land of daytime joys, and which must remain below. This role as administrator of transition makes him, in religious-historical terms, a judge-of-the-dead figure of his own kind.

The figure is accented differently from region to region. In some sources Anguta is nearly identical with the moon Igaluk, in others clearly distinct.

This variation reflects the non-systematic theology of the Inuit tradition and is not to be resolved by religious studies but rather to be appreciated as a characteristic of non-dogmatic religious practice. Tolerance toward inconsistencies is part of the religious style.

Anguta too, who as father of Sedna and keeper of the dead is mostly handed down only in connection with the mistress of the sea, is studied in more recent research with expanded methods that combine ethnographic precision, language-critical source examination and comparative classification.

Scholars from the Inuit community itself today belong to this research and revise older attributions from Western pens, some of them shaped by colonial assumptions.

The name Anguta is an elliptical formation from angun or ataata, the words for father or male parent. Anguta therefore literally means not father as a proper name, but her father with reference to Sedna.

The language holds the name in the relational form, which is notable from a religious-studies perspective, since Anguta can never be linguistically detached from his role as father.

Other names attested for the figure are Ataagujuk or Atak. In West Greenland the form Anguta sometimes appears, in Iglulik Tutik for a similar function.

The regional variety is considerable and calls for caution in any unified portrayal. The task of religious studies is to make the variations visible without forcing them into an artificial unity.

The elliptical linguistic form fits a theology that does not conceive of figures as autonomous persons but as nodes in networks of relationships. Anguta is always father of Sedna, never Anguta on his own.

This relationality is the key to understanding the Inuit divine world and clearly distinguishes it from the autonomous person-concepts of Indo-European divine worlds, in which proper names constitute an identity of their own.

A further avenue arises from the religious-sociological question of Anguta’s social function.

As administrator of the transition into the realm of the dead Adlivun, he vividly embodies the fact that the religious order of the Inuit did not stand apart from social practice but was firmly interwoven with it. This interlocking is a religious-anthropological field of research in its own right, which Frédéric Laugrand and Jarich Oosten in particular have worked through systematically.

In the handed-down narratives Anguta is described as an old, one-armed man. His mutilation mirrors the mutilation of Sedna that he himself caused: he too has lost an arm, which reinforces the aetiological character of the narrative.

In some versions he lost the arm during the punishment by Sedna, who pulled him into the boat after the deed and likewise brought him to injury.

Visual depictions are rare and stem almost exclusively from contemporary Inuit art since the 1960s. Kenojuak Ashevak and other Cape Dorset artists have occasionally depicted Anguta, mostly in an intermediate space between human and spirit.

This iconographic restraint corresponds to the phenomenological observation that Anguta was less central in religious practice than in the narrative sources.

Symbolically, Anguta is associated with the boat, the paddle and the gesture of chopping. This symbolism points to the core myth and to his role as the one who forms the interface between this world and the next, between boat and sea floor.

From the standpoint of the phenomenology of religion, this mediating position between the worlds is a typical feature of judge-of-the-dead figures in many religions worldwide.

Comparatively considered, Anguta fits into the circumpolar religious topography, whose basic features have been preserved over thousands of kilometres in a remarkably uniform structure. This wide-ranging stability counts among the most striking phenomenological findings of the discipline and remains to this day the subject of ongoing research discussion.

In the core myth of the Sedna narrative, Anguta is the father who throws his daughter into the sea and chops off her finger joints. In the sources this deed is not morally condemned but presented as a necessity: without Anguta’s deed the boat, along with everyone in it, would sink.

The mutilation of Sedna is a collective saving of lives at the price of individual suffering. This reading distinguishes the narrative from the purely sacrifice-oriented myths of other religions.

In some variants Sedna then pulls her father down to herself into the sea. Anguta becomes the inhabitant of the underworld and administrator of the dead.

This sequence of guilt and transition into the realm of the dead is a religious-studies pattern in its own right, which Mircea Eliade described as a typical Arctic topography of guilt-transformation and which has found wide resonance in comparative myth research.

Daniel Merkur interprets the pattern psychoanalytically and religious-historically at once: Anguta is said to be the ambivalent father who, through his guilty act, first opens the possibility for the world of resources to come into being.

This reading is contested but heuristically productive and has established its own line of discussion in the psychology of religion, linking the myths with modern conceptions of ambivalent parental figures.

Adlivun means literally those beneath us. In Iglulik theology Adlivun is the cold region lying beneath the sea, where the deceased have their first station. Anguta receives them there and decides which of them, after a certain period of purification, may rise further into Quivitoq, the upper land of the dead, and which remain below.

From a religious-studies perspective Adlivun is not a moral tribunal of punishment in the Christian sense. The purification is rather a rite of passage, comparable to a quarantine in which the person sheds their human remnants before assuming a different existence.

Whoever violated especially many taboos during life remains longer in Adlivun, sometimes permanently. This ethics-distant conception clearly distinguishes it from Christian or Buddhist judgments of the dead.

The exact topography and population of Adlivun varies considerably from region to region. In Iglulik Adlivun is depicted as populated with the deceased, in Netsilik rather as a cold place of transition, in West Greenland partly as a dimension of its own population.

Anguta remains throughout the key figure. From the standpoint of the phenomenology of religion, the regional variation of the otherworldly geography is typical of orally transmitted religions without a codified theology.

In some regional traditions Anguta merges with the moon Igaluk, who is likewise an ambivalent, sometimes aggressive male figure. This merging is not systematic but varies according to source and region.

Knud Rasmussen pointed out that the dividing lines between individual male deities in the Inuit tradition are often fluid. From the standpoint of the phenomenology of religion, this fluidity is a feature of the Inuit divine world in its own right.

From this arises the religious-studies question of whether the Inuit tradition knows clearly delimited gods at all, or rather bundles of functions that are personified differently according to occasion. Frédéric Laugrand and Jarich Oosten incline toward the latter reading, which explains the variations and underscores the methodological challenge of religious-studies description.

For practice this meant that a shaman could, according to the occasion, invoke either Anguta in his role as keeper of the dead or Igaluk in his role as the moon, without the addressees being understood as wholly separate.

The function determines the name, not the other way around. From the standpoint of the phenomenology of religion, this functional theology is a model in its own right and challenges the Western conception of gods with clear identities.

Shamans who were to accompany the deceased or to question the dead travelled, according to Inuit conception, to Adlivun and there appeared before Anguta.

The journey was more dangerous and rarer than the journey to Sedna, because Anguta was regarded as little receptive to negotiation. Whoever saw him and did not appear respectfully enough could himself remain in the land of the dead.

Daniel Merkur describes an Iglulik account in which an Angakkuq travels to Adlivun in order to bring back the soul of a recently deceased person for the bereaved, or at least to obtain information about their condition.

The journey leads through dark, cold areas in which the dead move about shadowily, until the shaman finally steps before Anguta. These accounts are valuable to religious studies because they document the concrete experiential structure of shamanic trance.

Apotropaically, the Inuit worked with mourning rituals intended to dispose Anguta favourably. The correct treatment of the corpse, the observance of the mourning period and the speaking or not speaking of the name of the deceased were religious practices that were registered in Adlivun and thereby with Anguta.

These practices are well documented within the ethnology of religion and underscore the central significance of the mourning rituals for Inuit theology.

From a religious-studies perspective Anguta belongs to the broad class of keepers and judges of the dead that are represented in most religions.

Comparable are the Egyptian Osiris, the Greek Hades, the Hindu Yama, the Japanese Enma-O. In the circumpolar region there are parallels to Sami Jabmiidaibmu conceptions, in which likewise a world of the dead beneath the earth is guarded by a keeper.

The distinctive feature of Anguta lies in his relational identity. While Osiris, Hades and Yama are independent gods with their own circle of myths, Anguta remains bound, linguistically and narratively, to Sedna.

This asymmetry is instructive for religious studies because it shows that not every judge-of-the-dead figure must be conceived autonomously, but can also appear as a relational function.

Structurally, Anguta most resembles the father-of-the-dead figures in the mythologies of Oceania, where similar relational constellations occur more frequently. Here a Pacific-circumpolar layer of tradition may shimmer through, though this remains speculative and, without language-historical evidence, must be treated as a heuristic hypothesis. Religious-historical research is here dependent on structural comparisons, which remain methodologically problematic.

Research on Anguta has grown in the shadow of Sedna research. Early records in Boas, Rink and Rasmussen treat him primarily as a secondary figure in the Sedna myth.

An independent Anguta research does not exist in the narrower sense, but Daniel Merkur, Frédéric Laugrand and Birgitte Sonne have worked out his significance as keeper of the dead and made him more visible as a figure in his own right.

In contemporary Inuit art and literature Anguta appears occasionally, often as an ambivalent father or as keeper of an unknown transition. In non-indigenous reception he is comparatively unknown, which mirrors the asymmetry of research attention toward Sedna and at the same time marks a gap in research practice.

From a religious-studies perspective a more precise study of Anguta would be desirable, because it would help to contour more clearly the theology of the dead of the central-Arctic Inuit.

First approaches to this are found in the work of Frédéric Laugrand on Inuit eschatology, which systematically examines the relationship between taboo violation and post-mortem existence and thereby considerably expands the state of research.

Anguta connects with Sedna, Igaluk, Sila, Tornarssuk, Pinga, Nanook, Tupilak, Malina and Qailertetang. The culture hub Inuit tradition places him within religious history.

Parallels to keeper-of-the-dead figures are found in the Sami series of entries, in particular with Jabmiidaibmu, which designates a comparable function of a world of the dead beneath the earth.