In the North American Arctic, from Alaska across northern Canada to Greenland, live the Inuit. For centuries their survival depended on hunting sea and land animals in one of the harshest environments on the planet. In this world the central religious figure was the angakkuq (plural angakkuit), the shaman, and one of the most feared and respected powers was the woman who lives at the bottom of the sea, known above all by the name Sedna.
Who the angakkuq was
The angakkuq was a person, man or woman, able to communicate with the world of spirits. The role included many tasks: finding game in times of famine, understanding the causes of misfortune, guiding the community through difficult passages of life, countering hostile influences.
One did not become an angakkuq by personal choice. Many accounts speak of a spiritual calling, a long apprenticeship with a teacher, and trials of solitude, cold and fasting. An important stage was the experience called qaumaniq, «illumination»: an inner light that allowed one to see what is hidden from others, in time and space.
The helping spirits
The angakkuq acted through helping spirits, the tuurngait (singular tuurngaq). They could take the form of animals, people or beings hard to describe. Each angakkuq had one or more, obtained during initiation, and called them with songs and formulas in a special language, different from everyday speech.
Séances often took place in the darkness of the winter house or the igloo. Sources describe the angakkuq bound with cords, the sound of the drum, different voices that seemed to come from every side, and the account of the journey made by the shaman's spirit.
The myth of Sedna
Sedna is the name used mainly by the Inuit of Baffin Island; other groups call her Nuliajuk, Arnaquagsaq, Takannaaluk or other names. The story has many variants, but its core is similar.
A young woman refused every suitor. She ended up marrying a being that turned out to be a seabird, or in other versions a dog, and lived with him in wretched conditions. Her father went to fetch her by kayak, but during the escape a storm broke out. To save himself, the father threw his daughter into the sea; when she clung to the edge of the boat, he cut off her fingers, joint by joint. The fingers that fell into the water became the seals, walruses, whales and the other sea animals. Sedna sank to the bottom and remained there as mistress of the sea animals.
The journey to the bottom of the sea
From then on, Inuit life depended on Sedna's goodwill. When people broke taboos, for example by disrespecting the animals they had killed or by ignoring the rules surrounding birth and death, the transgressions gathered like filth in her hair. Without fingers, Sedna could not comb it: angered, she held back the animals and the hunt failed.
It then fell to the angakkuq to make the most dangerous journey. With the help of his spirits, he descended to the bottom of the sea, passed guardians and obstacles, reached Sedna's dwelling and combed her hair, calming her. Sedna then released the animals. On his return, the shaman asked the community to confess the transgressions committed, so that order could be restored.
This story ties the fate of the community to the behaviour of each individual. A hidden fault does not concern only the one who committed it: it weighs on everyone, because it offends the mother of the animals. Public confession was therefore not a humiliation, but an act of collective responsibility that freed the group from the accumulated burden.
The myth powerfully expresses an idea common to many hunting peoples: animals are not mere resources, but beings who give themselves to humans if humans respect the rules of the relationship.
The recorded testimonies
Much of what we know about traditional angakkuit comes from testimonies gathered in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by explorers and ethnographers such as Franz Boas and Knud Rasmussen. During the Fifth Thule Expedition, Rasmussen recorded the words of Aua, an Iglulik angakkuq, who described the fears and rules of his people with great clarity.
With the arrival of Christian missions the practice of the angakkuit declined and in many communities went underground. Today a number of Inuit are working to recover the memory of this tradition, and the figure of Sedna is very present in contemporary Inuit art, especially in sculpture.
In short
- The angakkuq was the Inuit specialist in dealing with spirits, man or woman.
- He or she acted with the help of the tuurngait spirits and the inner illumination qaumaniq.
- Sedna, whose severed fingers became sea animals, is the mistress of the sea.
- Transgressions foul her hair; the shaman descends to comb it and frees the game.
- The testimonies collected by Boas and Rasmussen are key sources on this tradition.
