Aningaat and Siqiniq

Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: Inuit Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: Sibling personifications of the moon and sun whose unending chase across the sky sets the rhythm of day and night.
Role in Mythos: Their story explains the movement of the sun and moon, the moon’s dappled gray face, and, in Greenlandic tellings, the lunar phases and eclipses.
Relation to Humans: They began as human orphans, and their story carried hard lessons about deceit, incest, and shame into every camp where it was told. Siqiniq’s returning light is still greeted in the first-sunrise tradition, while Aningaat’s moon lights the long Arctic night for travelers.

The lamp goes out first. In the dark of a winter camp, in a house lit by a single qulliq, a young woman hears someone slip in through the entrance passage, and the small seal-oil flame she keeps burning is pinched into smoke. Hands find her in the blackness. She never sees a face. Alone afterward, with the reek of lamp smoke hanging in the cold air, she settles on a plan that needs no light at all. She rubs lamp soot across her face, and she waits for him to come back.

That trick with the soot sits at the heart of one of the most widely travelled stories in the Inuit world, told from Greenland to the western Arctic for as long as anyone has records. Hans Egede heard a version in Greenland in the eighteenth century. Franz Boas wrote one down on Baffin Island in the 1880s. Knud Rasmussen’s Fifth Thule Expedition gathered tellings across the central Arctic in the 1920s, and Igloolik elders such as George Kappianaq and Alexina Kublu were still recording full versions at the end of the twentieth century. The sister is Siqiniq, a name that simply means sun. The brother is Aningaat, which the anthropologist Bernard Saladin d’Anglure reads as favourite brother, though some tellings call him only Taqqiq, the moon. In Greenland she was remembered as Malina or Ajut.

The story begins long before the sky, with two orphans living with their grandmother. The boy, Aningaat, is blind. One day a polar bear comes right up to the window of the house, and Aningaat shoots it through the opening; the thud of the kill is unmistakable. The old woman tells him he hit nothing but the window frame. Then she butchers the bear in secret, keeps the meat for herself and the girl, feeds the boy dog meat, and puts him out of the main house to live apart. His sister smuggles bear meat to him when she can. The old woman lies to a blind child about what is lying in front of his face, and the stories do not forgive her for it.

One day he asks his sister to lead him to a lake where red-throated loons call. He stands at the water’s edge until a voice from a kayak invites him aboard, and he is paddled out to the middle of the lake and pulled under. The cold closes over him; when his lungs give out they surface, and the voice asks whether he can see. Then they dive again. With every plunge the dark thins a little, and in some tellings the stranger licks his eyes between dives. By the last surfacing the boy is blinking at a world with edges again, and the kind stranger turns out to be a loon.

At home he asks about the white bearskin he can suddenly see, and his grandmother lies again, claiming visitors in an umiaq left it behind. So he makes a harpoon. He hunts the white whales that pass along the shore, with his grandmother tied to the harpoon line as a living anchor. She tells him to strike the smallest whale. He picks the biggest one on purpose. The line snaps taut, drags her skidding into the sea; she surfaces once, and the water keeps her. In Kappianaq’s telling she does not entirely die, but becomes the first narwhal, her twisted hair hardening into the tusk.

What follows is a drift across the land. The siblings move camp, the sister is attacked while fetching water and healed by her brother, and for a time they settle among a strange people born without genitals or anuses. Both marry into the group anyway, and the sister bears a child. Then comes a festival, and the great communal snowhouse, and the dark where this story has been heading all along.

The visitor comes again, and this time he leaves wearing her mark. She follows him out. Laughter is rolling from the qaggiq where the festival is under way, and when she looks inside, everyone is laughing at Aningaat, her own brother, his face smeared black with soot. What she does next is among the most famous gestures in Inuit storytelling. She cuts off one of her breasts and offers it to him, telling him that if he liked her body so much he should eat this too. In Kappianaq’s telling she only bares the breast; in Thomas Kusugaq’s the moment is absent altogether. The chase is in all of them.

She lights a torch and runs into the night, and Aningaat snatches up a torch of his own and follows. Hers keeps its flame. His goes out, or burns down to cold red embers, depending on who is telling it. Round and round they run, and then upward, off the snow and into the sky, where they are running still. She became the sun. He became the moon. The dappled gray across the full moon’s face is lamp soot that never washed off, and the alternation of day and night is the chase itself, the brother forever behind.

The tellings disagree at the edges. Rasmussen recorded one Paallirmiut version, from a woman named Kibkârjuk, in which nothing is taken by force and the siblings are lovers by consent, though it still ends with the sun’s torch flaming and the moon’s reduced to embers. Greenlandic versions push the astronomy further: the moon brother wastes thin with the chase and slips away to hunt, returning as the new moon, and on the rare occasions he closes the distance and catches his sister, the sky darkens in an eclipse. Far to the west and south, Athabaskan storytellers kept the blind boy and the loon as a complete tale in its own right, with no sky chase at all.

As sun and moon, the siblings hold the two great offices of the Arctic sky. Siqiniq brings warmth and daylight back after the polar dark, and her first thin return over the horizon is still marked by the first-sunrise tradition her story inspired. In the months she is gone, her brother does her work: a traveler crossing sea ice at midday in December moves through a world lit silver-gray by the moon, snow squeaking underfoot, his shadow thrown long and faint across the floe. But their power has a closed shape. Aningaat is always behind, his light borrowed embers without heat, his face carrying a stain he cannot wash off. Siqiniq can never stop running, because stopping means being caught. Every shadow on the face of a full moon is soot from a quarrel in a house that no longer exists, and every sunrise is a woman who is still not ready to be caught.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who are Aningaat and Siqiniq?

Aningaat and Siqiniq are a brother and sister in Inuit mythology who became the moon and the sun. They began as human orphans, and after Aningaat visited his sister in the dark and was exposed by a soot mark, she fled into the sky carrying a burning torch with her brother chasing behind. Their endless pursuit explains why the sun and moon cross the sky and never meet.

What does the myth of Aningaat and Siqiniq explain?

The myth explains the daily movement of the sun and moon, the moon’s dappled gray face, and in Greenlandic versions the lunar phases and eclipses. The gray patches on the moon are the lamp soot that marked Aningaat’s face, and his torch burned down to embers, which is why moonlight is pale and cold while Siqiniq’s sunlight stayed bright and warm.

How did Aningaat get his sight back?

A loon restored Aningaat’s sight at a lake. The blind boy was invited into a kayak by a stranger’s voice, carried to the middle of the lake, and repeatedly pulled underwater; in some tellings the stranger licked his eyes between dives. With each dive he could see a little more, and when his sight was fully restored the stranger was revealed to be a loon.

What happened to Aningaat’s grandmother?

Aningaat harpooned the largest white whale while his grandmother was tied to the harpoon line as an anchor, and the whale dragged her into the sea. This was his revenge for her lying that his shot at the polar bear had missed and starving him while he was blind. In George Kappianaq’s Igloolik telling she became the first narwhal, her twisted hair forming the tusk.

Why did Siqiniq cut off her breast?

Siqiniq cut off her breast after discovering that her secret night visitor was her own brother, Aningaat. She offered it to him, telling him to eat it if he liked her body so much, then lit a torch and fled. The versions differ on this point: in one Igloolik telling she only bared the breast, and in another the gesture is absent entirely.