Anguta

The house has no deerskins in it. That is the first thing the shamans noticed, and it tells a great deal about the place. It is a large house under the earth, split down the middle, one side for a woman and one side for her father. Across the threshold lies a dog that shifts only a little, just enough to let a soul squeeze by. On the ledge, under a heap of old skins, lies the father. He has one eye. He does not move. And every soul that comes through the door will spend the next year lying beside him while he pinches it.

His name is Anguta, and it is hardly a name at all. In the Baffin Island dialect Boas recorded in the 1880s, anguta means simply “his father”, and Boas says outright that the old man is often called nothing more than that: Anguta, her father. The “her” is Sedna, the woman of the sea animals and mistress of the underworld called Adlivun, and nearly everything the record says about him is said because of her. He also answers to Savirqong, the man with the knife. The knife earns its place in the name.

The story Boas took down from the Oqomiut and the Akudnirmiut begins on a solitary shore where a widower lived quietly with his daughter. Sedna was handsome, proud, and uninterested in every young man who came to court her, until a fulmar flew in over the breaking spring ice and sang to her about a land of birds where no one was ever hungry, where she would sleep on soft bearskins and her lamp would never run dry. She went. The tent turned out to be made of fishskins full of holes, the wind and snow came straight through, and the bed was hard walrus hide. She sang for her father to come and fetch her.

A year later he came. He heard what had been done to her, killed the fulmar, put her in his boat and rowed for home. The other fulmars found their companion dead and flew after them, and they raised a storm. The sea stood up around the little boat in walls. Anguta, to save himself, threw his daughter over the side. She held on to the gunwale. He took his knife and cut off the first joints of her fingers, which fell into the water and became whales, the nails turning to whalebone. She held on with what was left, and the next joints became seals. When he cut away the stumps, they swam off as bearded seals. The birds, believing her drowned, let the storm drop, and he pulled her back into the boat.

She did not forgive him. Once they were ashore she called her dogs and set them on him while he slept, and they gnawed off his hands and feet. Waking maimed, he cursed himself, his daughter and the dogs. The earth opened and took the hut, the father, the daughter and the dogs down together. That is how he came to Adlivun, and he has been there since.

A second Baffin version, preserved in an old song, is harder still. In it the father comes with a son, cuts off her fingers in the same storm, then pierces her eye and kills her. He carries her body to the beach, lays it out, covers it with a dogskin, and lets the tide come in over it. The angakut, who sometimes visited the house below or saw the pair walking among the living, described them in a way that fits both tellings at once: Sedna huge and one-eyed and scarcely able to move, and her father a cripple too.

It is as a cripple that he goes about his work. He appears to the dying, and he takes hold of them with his right hand, which has three fingers. The dead he seizes are carried down to his daughter’s house, where the dog moves just far enough aside and the long year on the ledge begins. Where they went after that depended, in the Baffin Island and Frobisher Bay accounts, on how they had lived and how they had died. Boas’s informants spoke of a happy land above called Qudlivun, full of easily caught deer and never touched by snow or ice, and a deeper country below Adlivun. Anguta’s year is the waiting room. Nobody describes it as comfortable.

His rank depends on who was asked. Charles Francis Hall, the American who lived among the Inuit of Frobisher Bay between 1860 and 1862 with the Cumberland Sound interpreter Taqulittuq, wrote in 1865 that the people there believed in one Supreme Being called Anguta, who made the earth, the sea and the heavenly bodies, and a secondary divinity, his daughter Sidne, who made every living thing and received the people’s prayers and offerings. Boas, working further north twenty years later, found the order the other way round. The Supreme Being of the Central Inuit he knew was a woman, and her name was Sedna. Her father, in his record, is a jailer of souls rather than the maker of the world. The two accounts cannot both be the whole truth, and the sources do not settle it.

Farther west, an earlier visitor named Lyon had heard of a father and daughter among the Iglulik, and Boas thought the tradition plainly the same. There the daughter was Nuliajoq and the father Anautalik, also called Napajoq, and Boas glossed the first name as “the man with something to cut”. Lyon’s Anautalik is a small man, no bigger than a boy of ten, with one arm and a huge bearskin mitten on its hand, quiet and good-natured, living in a fine house that no one can reach for the walrus lying round it and the bears howling at the door. He eats nothing and needs nothing, and Lyon was told he was patron of the land animals and sometimes kept them back from the people. Boas went looking for that detail on Baffin Island and could not find a trace of it.

Anguta’s power, in the Baffin record, is simple and grim. He can reach the dying, he can hold the dead, and his daughter’s house is also his. Everything else he once had, he has lost. He cannot walk or grip; he never moves from his place while in the house; the dogs took his hands and feet, and his curse took him underground. He is the man who bought his own life with his daughter’s fingers, and the price he pays is to lie in her house forever, one-eyed and still, pinching the dead in the dark.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Anguta in Inuit mythology?

Anguta is the father of Sedna, the Inuit woman of the sea animals, in the Baffin Island tradition recorded by Franz Boas in 1888. After Sedna’s dogs maimed him, the earth swallowed father, daughter and dogs, and Anguta now lives with Sedna in the underworld called Adlivun. His name simply means “his father” or “her father” in the local dialect.

What does Anguta do to the dead?

Anguta seizes the souls of the dead and carries them to Sedna’s house in Adlivun. According to Boas, the dead must stay there for a whole year, lying beside Anguta while he pinches them. Shamans said he appears to the dying and grasps them with a right hand that has only three fingers.

Why did Anguta cut off Sedna’s fingers?

In the story of Sedna and the fulmar, Anguta rescued his daughter from her bird husband, and the other fulmars raised a storm to punish them. To save himself, Anguta threw Sedna overboard and cut off her fingers when she clung to the boat. The pieces of her fingers became whales, seals and bearded seals.

Is Anguta the creator god of the Inuit?

Charles Francis Hall wrote in 1865 that the Inuit of Frobisher Bay believed Anguta was the Supreme Being who created the earth, sea and heavenly bodies. Franz Boas, recording on Baffin Island in the 1880s, found instead that the Supreme Being was Sedna, with her father in a lesser role as keeper of the dead. The two accounts disagree, and neither settles the question.

What does Anguta look like?

Anguta is described as a crippled man with only one eye who lies without moving on the ledge of Sedna’s house under old skins. His daughter’s dogs gnawed off his hands and feet, and the shamans said his right hand has three fingers. An earlier Iglulik account describes the matching figure, Anautalik, as a one-armed man no bigger than a boy of ten.

Related Entries

Sedna, Adlivun, Aningaat and Siqiniq, Sila, Torngarsuk, Qalupalik, Tupilaq, Adlet, Tunghak, Psychopomp, Charon, Anubis, Yama, Erlik, Hel