Kigatilik

Also Known As: Rasmussen’s Kigutilik, glossed by him as the spirit with the giant’s teeth, from Inuktitut kigut, tooth
Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: Inuit Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: A spirit that a shaman could in principle have taken into service, and the only thing it is recorded doing is frightening him badly enough that he never tried.
Role in Mythos: It belongs to the private visionary corpus of one Iglulik shaman rather than to any shared body of story, and it survives because he drew it.
Relation to Humans: One man saw it, once, and ran. Nothing in the record has it seeking people out, harming anyone, or being known to the community at all before the drawing was made.

One spring, out on the sea ice hunting seal, a young man watched something come up through an opening in the floe. It stood taller than a bear. It roared at him, and he ran, and he did not stop until he was home. What he saw reached the outside world only because he drew it: Knud Rasmussen printed the drawing in 1929, in his report on the Iglulik Eskimos for the Fifth Thule Expedition, and set the entire story down in four sentences of caption underneath. That caption is the record. There is no second telling, no variant, and no other witness.

The man was Anarqâq, and Rasmussen knew him well enough to be rude about him in print. He had come into the Iglulik country from King William Land and Back River, where he picked up his first grounding in shamanism, and he had been something of a vagabond all his life. He was no great hunter. Rasmussen thought him highly strung and easily affected, a man who traded on the credulity of his neighbours, and tells a story about a crying child, a lump of frozen seal blood snatched from the entrance passage, and a torn coat produced afterwards as proof of a fight with an evil spirit. What Anarqâq did have, and Rasmussen does not dispute it, was visions. They came whenever he was left alone in the interior, tired and hungry and looking for caribou.

So Rasmussen asked him to draw them. Anarqâq hesitated, afraid of offending the spirits, and agreed only when the payment offered was enough to content his helping spirits as well as himself, and on one condition: the drawings could go wherever the white men liked in their own country, but they were not to be shown among his own people. He had never in his life put a pencil to paper. He did not scribble. He sat for hours with his eyes shut, holding each vision still in his head, and drew only when he had it.

Kigutilik came out of one of those sittings. The name says what the caption says: kigut is a tooth, and the ending marks the one that has them. Rasmussen recorded the same word-shape as an ordinary personal name in the same camp, a young wife called Kigutikarjuk, the one with the small teeth. This is the version with the large ones. He is bigger than a bear and higher, on long legs knobbed at the joints, his skin bare and carrying hair only in ragged fringes, with two tails and a single big ear that appears to hang from a fold of skin rather than from a head. His teeth are as gross as a walrus’s tusks.

The meeting takes one line. It came up out of the hole in the ice, it let out a mighty roar, three flat syllables Rasmussen wrote down as ah, ah, ah, and Anarqâq was so frightened that he fled home without first securing it for a helping spirit.

That last clause is the whole entry, and it is easy to read straight past. A spirit that showed itself to a shaman was not only a danger to be survived. It was an opportunity. The other beings in the same set of drawings show how the transaction was meant to run. Nartoq rushed at Anarqâq threateningly, disappeared the moment he prepared to defend himself, came back later perfectly calm, gave its name, explained that its hot temper was a reflection of his own bad temper, and became one of his best helpers. Issitôq, the giant eye, arrived not long after his parents died and introduced itself by saying that it too struggled with sad thoughts and would therefore come along. Terror, then a name, then a bargain. Kigutilik is the one that stopped at terror.

He did not kill anybody. The record gives him no home, no origin, no family, no kind, no season beyond that one spring, no second appearance, and nothing whatever to do. He is a thing that came out of a hole in the ice once, made a noise, and was drawn afterwards by the man who ran from him. There is no myth here in the ordinary sense, only a sighting, and it survives because the man who had it happened to be sitting across a table from an ethnographer with paper and a fee.

The English accounts in circulation now describe him as a fanged demon that hunts and kills shamans. That is not in Rasmussen. When the drawing was reprinted in 1965 in Larousse World Mythology, the caption still had it right, saying only that he puts the shaman to flight. Somewhere after that, a spirit one frightened man declined to recruit became a specialist killer of the very people who failed to recruit him. Nothing supports it. What is actually on the page is smaller and considerably stranger: a two-tailed thing with one ear, standing in the meltwater on the spring ice, roaring at a man who had come out to kill seals and who decided on the spot that this was not a spirit he wanted working for him.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Kigatilik?

Kigatilik, spelled Kigutilik by Knud Rasmussen, is a spirit of Inuit belief known from a single sighting by the Iglulik shaman Anarqâq. The name means roughly the one with the teeth, and Rasmussen glossed it as the spirit with the giant’s teeth. It is known from one drawing and one caption, published in 1929.

Where does the story of Kigatilik come from?

The entire record is one plate caption in Knud Rasmussen’s Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos, published in 1929 as part of the report of the Fifth Thule Expedition. Rasmussen paid the shaman Anarqâq to draw the spirits he had seen, and Kigatilik is one of those drawings. No earlier or independent account of the being exists.

Does Kigatilik kill shamans?

No source says so. In the only account that exists, Kigatilik came up out of a hole in the spring sea ice, roared, and frightened Anarqâq so badly that he ran home without trying to take it as a helping spirit. The claim that it hunts and kills shamans appears in later English retellings and is not in Rasmussen, nor in the 1965 Larousse caption, which says only that it put the shaman to flight.

What does Kigatilik look like?

Rasmussen’s caption describes it as bigger than a bear but taller, standing on long legs with large bumps at the joints, bare-skinned with hair only in fringes, with two tails, one big ear that seems joined only to a fold of skin, and teeth as thick as a walrus’s tusks. That description comes from Anarqâq’s own drawing and is the only one on record.

Who was Anarqâq?

Anarqâq was a young Iglulik shaman who had come from King William Land and Back River, and who worked with Knud Rasmussen during the Fifth Thule Expedition. Rasmussen described him as highly strung and no great hunter, and doubted some of his public performances, but paid him to record his visions on paper. Anarqâq had never used a pencil before and would sit for hours with his eyes closed before drawing.