Sedna

When the seals stopped coming, nobody blamed the hunters. The animals had not gone anywhere. They were being held, down in a house at the bottom of the sea, by a woman with ruined hands, and the only remedy was to send someone to her. That errand belonged to the angakkuq, and it was the hardest thing the work asked. Knud Rasmussen, listening at Iglulik in the early 1920s, wrote the requirement down without ornament: a shaman had to be able to fall to the bottom of the sea in order to bring the hunted animals to light.

The woman has many names and no single one. At Iglulik she is Takánakapsâluk, the woman down there, and also the terrible one down there. The Netsilik call her Nuliajuk. In West Greenland she is Sassuma Arnaa, the mother of the deep; in the far north of Greenland, Nerrivik; among the Copper Inuit of Coronation Gulf, Arnapkapfaaluk, the big bad woman. On Killiniq, off Labrador, she was the old woman who lived in the sea. The name that travelled south and stuck in English is Sedna, a Baffin form written down by Franz Boas in the 1880s, and it has since been stretched to cover an Arctic’s worth of local figures who were never quite the same being. Inuktitut spells it Sanna.

Her origin is told a dozen ways, and the tellings refuse to tidy into one another. In the Baffin account she is courted by a stranger who turns out to be a fulmar, and is carried off to a nest of stinking skins on a sea cliff. Elsewhere the suitor is a raven or a petrel, or she rejects every man in the village and marries a dog instead. In another she is a giant, daughter of Anguta, with an appetite that turns on her own parents. Among the Netsilik she is not a proud beauty at all but a mistreated orphan whom the other children push into the water, and who afterwards marries a sculpin and stays. What every version keeps is the kayak. Her father takes her out onto open water; she goes over the side, thrown or fleeing or dropped to buy off a storm; she gets her hands on the gunwale; and he puts a blade through her fingers, sometimes the tips, then the second joint, then the last. The joints fall into the cold and swim away as ringed seals, as walrus, as whales. Then she sinks.

Every animal an Inuit hunter needed came off her hands. That is the whole of the arrangement, and it is not a comfortable one.

Below, she keeps house. The people of Iglulik put her land under the sea, a narrow strip of ground with water on either side whose inhabitants were called the dwellers in the narrow land, and some held that every dead person came first to Takánakapsâluk, who alone decided where they went next. Those who had lived without breaking the old rules were sent straight on to the land of day, which lies in the direction of dawn. Those who had not were kept in her house a while to work off what they had done. Boas’s Baffin material sets a comparable underworld beneath the water, Adlivun, and gives it to her to rule.

What she looks like depends on who is looking, and when. The hands are constant: fingerless, or short of their joints, an injury that never healed and is never hidden. So is the hair, a heavy black mass she cannot manage herself, since combing takes fingers. The tail is a later habit. The half-woman, half-sea-mammal figure most people now picture, rising out of grey-green stone with flukes below the waist, belongs largely to twentieth-century Inuit carving, where she became one of the most worked subjects in the medium, sometimes serene with long flowing hair and sometimes staring, wild-headed and plainly furious. One retelling gives her a single eye, the other lost to the storm. The older accounts are less interested in her body than in her mood.

The visit is the centre of it. The shaman goes down, gets past whatever waits at the door, and then does something oddly domestic: washes her, and combs and braids the hair she cannot reach. That is the negotiation, and there is no other lever. Attended to, she loosens her grip, and the seals go back out under the ice to the breathing holes where hunters wait over them in the dark. Offerings travelled the same way. At Killiniq people fed the sea worn-out harpoon heads, broken knives, morsels of meat and bone. There were feasts in her honour too, with meat shared out, gifts exchanged and water drunk from a particular vessel, and they mattered most in the winters when there was least to share.

Her power runs in one direction and it is close to absolute. She holds the game and can hold it indefinitely. She can raise the weather that keeps kayaks off the water, put sickness into a camp, and decide where the dead are housed and for how long. What she cannot do is much of anything for herself. She cannot dress her own hair. She cannot leave the sea floor. She carries no weapon, has no monster’s teeth and no thunder, and she never once comes up to take revenge in person; her punishment is always an absence, the animals simply not there. And she can be reached. A living person brave enough and skilled enough can come down, touch her, tidy her, argue, and surface again with the hunt restored. A goddess whose anger is answerable by grooming is a goddess inside a relationship, which is exactly what the Inuit understanding of the sea required.

The name has since left the Arctic altogether. A small, extremely distant world found beyond Neptune in November 2003 was catalogued as 90377 Sedna by Michael Brown, Chad Trujillo and David Rabinowitz, so the woman at the bottom of the sea now also sits near the outer edge of the solar system, in both places holding something just out of reach.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Sedna in Inuit mythology?

Sedna is the Inuit goddess of the sea and of the marine animals, also called the Mother of the Sea. She controls the seals, walruses and whales that Inuit hunters depended on, and in several traditions she also rules the world beneath the sea where the dead arrive. She is known by different names across the Arctic, including Nuliajuk, Takánakapsâluk, Sassuma Arnaa and Arnapkapfaaluk.

How did Sedna become a goddess?

In every version of the story Sedna ends up in the sea after being taken out in her father’s kayak, and when she clings to the side of the boat he cuts off her fingers. The severed finger joints become the first seals, walruses and whales, and Sedna sinks to the sea floor to rule over them. The reason she is put overboard changes from telling to telling: a bird-husband’s storm, a marriage to a dog, a giant daughter’s hunger, or, among the Netsilik, other children drowning a mistreated orphan.

Why do Inuit shamans comb Sedna’s hair?

Because Sedna has no fingers and cannot comb it herself. When she was angered by broken taboos she withheld the sea animals and caused famine, so an angakkuq would travel down to her house at the bottom of the sea to wash her and comb and braid her hair. Once she was attended to she released the animals back to the hunters.

What is Sedna the goddess of, and is she good or evil?

Sedna is the goddess of the sea, of the animals in it, and in many accounts of the underworld beneath it. She is neither straightforwardly good nor evil: she can bring famine, storms and sickness when she is angry, and abundance when she is appeased, and Inuit tradition treats that double nature as normal rather than as a contradiction.

Why is there a planet named Sedna?

A small, very distant object discovered beyond Neptune in November 2003 by Michael Brown, Chad Trujillo and David Rabinowitz was named 90377 Sedna after the Inuit sea goddess. It is one of the coldest and most remote known bodies in the solar system.

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