Sedna: Mistress and Guardian of the Animals in the Inuit Pantheon

Sedna is the most prominent numinous figure of the central Arctic Inuit tradition. According to the transmitted narratives, she resides at the bottom of the sea and controls the stocks of seals, whales, and walruses that are vital to subsistence.

Unlike many pan-Arctic deities, Sedna possesses a continuous narrative biography that identifies her as a formerly human woman whose mutilation and submersion transferred her into the position of mistress of the animals. This narrative depth makes her a case that is especially amenable to religious-studies analysis.

In religious-studies terms, Sedna is classified as an instance of the type of the mistress of the animals, which is widely distributed across Siberia and North America.

Knud Rasmussen, Ann Fienup-Riordan, and Daniel Merkur have shown in agreement that her control over the game animals marks the central economic and religious nexus of traditional Inuit society. According to Inuit teaching, whoever violates the taboos directed at her closes off the hunting grounds.

Sedna’s power is not morally judging in the Western sense, but reciprocally regulated. She withholds her animals or releases them, depending on whether the way of life of the people preserves her taboo system.

In scholarship this mechanism is discussed as a religious resource economy that interlocks social cohesion and the regulation of hunting. She is thus at once a theological and a sociopolitical authority, which distinguishes her from many other divine figures.

Because Sedna possesses an unusually self-contained narrative biography, more recent religious-studies research has tested its methodologically expanded approaches precisely on her: it interweaves ethnographic attention to detail, linguistic source criticism, and a comparative perspective.

Scholars from within the Inuit community itself are significantly involved today, reviewing and correcting older, in part colonially tinged interpretations of the mistress of the sea.

The name Sedna that is common today stems from the Inuktitut of the Baffin region and became canonical through Franz Boas’s records at the end of the nineteenth century.

Sedna’s actual, apotropaically tabooed name is often avoided in storytelling situations. Instead, honorific names such as Nuliajuk circulate, which literally means the ever-courted one and predominates in the Netsilik and Iglulik region.

Among the Aivilingmiut and Iglulingmiut the form Takannakapsaluk is customary, in Greenland Arnakuagsak or Arnarquassaaq. The regional diversity is not only linguistic but each variant brings with it slightly modified strands of myth.

Thus the Iglulik variant places greater emphasis on the strands of adoption and marriage, while the Baffin variant brings the father Anguta and the boat drama to the fore. In Alaska related concepts exist, though they in part diverge functionally from the central Arctic Sedna.

Etymologically, Daniel Merkur interprets the name Nuliajuk in the sense of a woman constantly courted by spirits and sees in this a mirroring of the shamanic journey: the shaman must seek her out like a suitor who wins her favor.

Other name forms reflect the function: Arnaq simply means woman, nuna land or world, so that bynames such as woman beneath the sea remain semantically transparent. The diversity of names corresponds to the phenomenology-of-religion observation that powerful numinous figures are often addressed only through circumlocutions.

In the transmitted narratives Sedna is described as a mighty woman on the sea floor whose hands are either no longer present at all or have turned into seal flippers. Her hair is long, heavy, and permanently matted, since without fingers she can no longer comb it herself.

According to several accounts, the diseases and the scarcity of the game animals arise from this matted hair. This bodily vulnerability is, in the phenomenology of religion, a distinct motif.

Visual depictions were rare in traditional Inuit culture, since the figurative portrayal of the mistress of the sea was itself taboo-laden. Only contemporary Inuit art since the 1950s, for example in Cape Dorset (Kinngait) and Pangnirtung, has made Sedna an iconographically tangible motif.

Stone prints by artists such as Ningiukulu Teevee, Kenojuak Ashevak, or Pitseolak Ashoona often show her as a being with a human upper body and a tail fin.

The contemporary pictorial tradition is, in religious-studies terms, to be distinguished from the pre-Christian tradition. In Rasmussen’s records the shamans report that they could see Sedna only under special trance conditions and that any anticipatory depiction was considered presumptuous.

Today’s pictorial tradition is thus less a rendering of a historical iconography than a distinct modern appropriation of the figure.

Symbolically, the water animals themselves are associated with her: ringed seals, bearded seals, walruses, belugas, narwhals. In the narratives about her creation, these animals emerged from the severed finger joints, an etiological motif that makes the economic dependency ritually visible as a ritual.

Whoever kills a seal has, in religious-mythic terms, received a part of Sedna’s own body, which establishes the obligation to treat it respectfully.

In almost all variants the core narrative follows a fixed basic framework, as Franz Boas, Knud Rasmussen, and later Daniel Merkur have documented. Sedna is the daughter of the man Anguta. She refuses to marry a human man.

Finally she accepts a suitor who reveals himself to be a fulmar, a dog, or an unknown stranger. After the marriage she recognizes the true nature of her husband and cries out for her father.

Anguta fetches her with the umiak, the women’s boat. During the flight the fulmar-man gathers a storm. To save the boat from sinking, Anguta throws his daughter into the sea. When she clings to the rim of the boat, he hacks off her finger joints.

From the first joint arise the small seals, from the second the bearded seals, from the third the walruses and whales. This successive genesis of the sea animals is a typical motif of etiological narrative literature.

Mutilated, Sedna sinks to the sea floor and there becomes the mistress of the animals. She remains ambivalent toward the father who betrayed her, toward the people whose taboo violations cause her hair to mat, and toward the shamans who descend to her in trance.

This myth is not primarily a myth of punishment but an etiological model for the emergence of the hunting economy. In religious-studies terms it is a paradigmatic case of a creation mythology in which the world arises not out of order but out of injury.

When hunting luck failed for a longer period, it was, according to Inuit conception, the central task of the angakkuq, the shaman, to descend to Sedna. In Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos Rasmussen rendered one of the densest descriptions of this journey, which became the standard passage of circumpolar shamanism research in religious-studies discourse.

The shaman enters a trance through drumming, chanting, and breathing techniques. His double or his soul leaves the body, traverses an icy tundra plain, overcomes a rotating iceberg passage, a raging current with razor-sharp ice floes, and finally a dog that guards the entrance to Sedna’s house.

Arriving in the house, he finds Sedna with matted hair in which the animals have become entangled.

The shaman’s task is to comb her hair, to clean it, and to conduct himself conciliatorily. During this act the human community in the igloo, led by the assistant shaman, confesses its taboo violations.

Only when the transgressions have been spoken aloud does Sedna release the animals. In Shamanism and Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy Mircea Eliade treated this practice as an exemplary case of shamanic mediation.

Daniel Merkur emphasizes that the journey must not be misunderstood as an individual healing practice but is a collective crisis ritual in which the economic crisis is religiously symbolized and communally resolved. The social function is at least as important as the theological one, and in practice the two cannot be separated.

The system of taboos surrounding Sedna is known in the Inuit language as pittailiniq, which literally means that which must be refrained from. These prohibitions are not moral in the Christian sense but are anchored in the economy of hunting and subsistence.

According to Sedna’s conception, whoever mixes land and sea animals in the same meal, whoever does not treat seal meat properly, whoever butchers seals during menstruation, or whoever conceals a death befouls her hair.

Apotropaic effects are exerted above all by the purification obligations after birth and death, the separate keeping of seal and caribou tools, the handling of the first animal killed, and the returning of water into the mouth of the killed seal as a sign of respect.

The latter gesture, referred to in scholarship as the seal burial, is regarded as a central gift of consolation toward the soul of the animal and indirectly toward Sedna.

Protective amulets known as aarnguaq are also attested. These can consist of bones, claws, or beak remains of killed animals and are attached to infants or hunters.

They are not magical in the sense of a mechanical effect but indicate a cultivated relationship with the non-human persons on whom survival depends. This ethic of relationship clearly distinguishes Inuit religion from magical-instrumental traditions.

In the phenomenology of religion, Sedna belongs to the wide family of the mistresses of the animals, which Adolf Friedrich and later Otto Zerries systematically described for northern Eurasia and North America.

Parallels are found in the Chukchi kelet conception, among the Koryak and Itelmen mistresses of the sea, and with the Yupik Qailertetang, who in some narratives even appears as Sedna’s companion.

In the wider circumpolar comparison she moves into proximity to the Finno-Ugric Mehtsä-Emä or forest mother and to the Sami mistresses of the animals such as Leibolmmái. The structural correspondence lies in the reciprocal logic: the prey is not a resource but a gift of a numinous person.

In subarctic-circumpolar discourse, Ann Fienup-Riordan has shown for the Yupik tradition that the structurally similar figures there are not uniformly personified but appear as a bundle of relationships and taboos.

The central-Arctic Inuit tradition, by contrast, tends more strongly toward personalization in the one great figure of Sedna. This difference within the circumpolar region is instructive in religious-studies terms, because it shows that the religious form does not necessarily follow from the ecological configuration.

With the missionization of the Inuit by Moravian and Anglican missionaries from the eighteenth century onward, intensified in Canada in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Sedna cult came under considerable pressure.

In many places the shamans were defamed as sorcerers and their drums publicly burned. The practice of the angakkuq formally ceased in many regions, which does not, however, mean that the Sedna narratives disappeared.

Well documented in religious-studies terms is a transformation into the domain of narrative literature and later of contemporary art. Sedna became a literary and artistic symbol of identity for a culture under colonial pressure. After the establishment of the Nunavut territory in 1999, she has become a component of school curricula and museum education.

Since the 2000s the restitution movement of indigenous religions has led to the rediscovery of shamanic practices in a deconfessionalized form. The religious-studies observation here is descriptive: it is a hybrid form of memory practice, identity construction, and partial ritual revival, not an unbroken continuity. This postcolonial configuration is a distinct field of religious-studies research.

In non-indigenous reception Sedna has become the most prominent figure of Arctic religion. In astronomy, a transneptunian object discovered in 2003 bears the name 90377 Sedna, which documents the reach of the figure beyond the narrower religious-studies sphere.

In popular culture she is present in novels, films, comics, and games, frequently in a heavily simplified, sometimes problematically romanticized form.

Within the Inuit communities themselves the attitude toward this external reception is ambivalent. While the visibility is welcomed as cultural recognition, voices such as that of the Inuit curator Heather Igloliorte or the writer Rachel Qitsualik criticize the fact that external uses often ignore the religious references and reduce the figure to an aesthetic mermaid.

The religious-studies research of the last twenty years, for example by Frédéric Laugrand, Jarich Oosten, and Anna Lia Berthelsen, emphasizes the necessity of reading Sedna not as an isolated divine image but as a node of a network of relationships among humans, animals, and land.

In this reading she becomes the key figure of an ecological anthropology of religion of the Arctic. This theoretical shift has considerable effects on the perception of the entire religious history of the Arctic.

For a deeper classification within the Inuit world of conceptions, the entries on Sila, the breath-space of the world, on Anguta, her father, on Tornarssuk, the shamanic helping spirit, on Nanook, the polar bear spirit, and on Qailertetang, the weather-giving companion, are recommended.

More broadly, the cultural hub Inuit tradition provides the religious-historical framing. Those seeking the connection of mistresses of the animals from other cultures will find structurally similar configurations among the Sami entries, for example with Madderakka.