Wakan Tanka

Also Known As: Standard Lakota Orthography Wakȟáŋ Tȟáŋka, literally “great mysterious one”; addressed by shamans as Tobtob Kin, “the four times four”; usually Englished as the Great Spirit, and increasingly as the Great Mystery
Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: Native American Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: Sixteen sacred persons who are each kan and therefore all only the same as one, holding between them the sun, the sky, the earth, the rock, the moon, the wind, the winged one, the buffalo, the bear and the four powers that live inside a living body.
Role in Mythos: It is the totality of the sacred among the Lakota, the source everything was made from and the address every prayer is finally aimed at.
Relation to Humans: It makes its wishes known to people either in a vision or through a shaman, and never in writing. Half of it has no physical properties at all, and that half appears in vision to shamans only, so most of what a person can know of it arrives secondhand.

Lightning comes down over the Northern Plains in a forked white line, and the Lakota word for it carries another word folded inside it. Wakȟáŋhdi. The root is wakȟáŋ, which the missionaries who compiled the first dictionaries rendered as holy, because holy was the word they had available. The men who actually used it meant something less tidy. Incomprehensible. Wonderful. Past working out. Anything at all could be wakȟáŋ, and a rock might be wakȟáŋ one day and nothing much the next.

An old Oglala man called Good Seat put this to the agency physician about as plainly as it can be put. Wakan was anything that was hard to understand. When someone did a thing that nobody understood, that was wakan. When the thing done was something that nobody could understand at all, that was Wakan Tanka. How the world was made is Wakan Tanka. How the sun was made is Wakan Tanka. Where the spirits and the ghosts are is Wakan Tanka.

English has spent most of two centuries handing that back as the Great Spirit: singular, capitalised, male, seated somewhere above the weather. James Owen Dorsey, working for the Bureau of Ethnology, headed his chapter on the subject “Alleged belief in a Great Spirit” and went at the claim with the flat impatience of a man who had heard it once too often. Indians had been quick to adopt the phrases of civilisation when speaking to white people, he wrote, and used their own terms when speaking to one another. Wakaŋ-taŋka meant, literally, great mysterious one. It was now applied to God by the missionaries and their converts. Among the Dakota it was also a name for the Thunder-being.

What it meant before all that is on record, because one of the men who knew wrote it down himself rather than submitting to be interviewed about it. George Sword had been a warrior, became a shaman, and ended as a captain of the agency police, and he set the old knowledge down in Lakota so that it would have to be translated rather than paraphrased. The shamans, he said, do not address Wakan Tanka by that name at all. They call it Tobtob Kin, and that phrase belongs to the secret language of the shamans. It means the four times four.

Sixteen, then. Wi the sun and Hanwi the moon. Skan the sky, Tate the wind, the Four Winds and the Whirlwind. Maka the earth and Wohpe. Inyan the rock and Wakinyan the winged one. The buffalo god and the bear god. Then the four that live inside living things: the ghost, the breath, the small shadow, and the spirit-power a person carries about with them. Sword’s own summary of the arithmetic is the best sentence anyone has managed on the subject. Wakan Tanka is like sixteen different persons, but each person is kan, and therefore they are all only the same as one.

This is how it gets its business done. When Wakan Tanka wishes one of mankind to do something, it makes the wish known in a vision or through a shaman, and there is no book and no message left in writing. A man walks up onto a hill with nothing and stays there without food or water until something arrives, and what arrives is a picture rather than a sentence, and he carries it back down to a shaman to be read for him. The gods with no physical properties never appear in a vision to anyone except a shaman.

Sword’s grammar for all this is more precise than translation usually allows through. Every one of the god persons has ton, which is the power to do supernatural things. Half of the good gods are ton ton, meaning they have physical properties, and half are ton ton sni and have none. Half of those with physical properties are visible, half of those without are invisible, and the rest appear or do not appear exactly as they choose. That is not a pantheon in the Greek sense. It is closer to a physics.

Ask what it looks like and the honest answer is the sun on the back of the neck, the rock underfoot, the moon, and the wind pushing the grass flat in a long grey wave. There is no face. The visible half can be pointed at by anybody standing outdoors, and the invisible half was never available to be described in the first place, which is why every attempt to picture Wakan Tanka ends up picturing something else.

Once a year the whole of it was made briefly visible in one place. A cottonwood was chosen, addressed directly as a person and told what was about to happen to it, then felled and carried in and raised at the centre of the camp circle. Black Elk gave the speech to the tree. From the tips of its lofty branches down to its roots the winged and the four-legged peoples had made their homes in it; standing at the centre of the sacred hoop it would be the people, and would be as the pipe, stretching from heaven to earth. Mothers laid their children at the base of it.

Then men danced against that pole with skewers set through the skin of their chests, leaning back on the thongs, faces painted black, singing that when they prayed to Wakantanka he heard them and granted whatever was good. The reasoning behind the skewers was given by one of the dancers and does not need improving on. Every creature on the earth was placed there by Wakan Tanka, so a man who offers a horse is handing back something that was never his to begin with. His own body is the only thing that actually belongs to him. That is the entire argument for cutting it.

The powers follow from the shape of the idea rather than from any list of feats. Inyan the rock is the primal source of all things, Maka the earth is the ancestress of everyone alive and the provider for all of them, Skan is the great all-powerful spirit of the sky, and Wi is the chief of the gods. Because the sixteen are also one, a prayer aimed at any of them lands. Because wakan is a quality rather than a possession, the same power runs through a shaman, a buffalo skull, a stone picked up off a hillside and the lightning going down the sky.

The limits are real, and nearly all of them are limits on the people rather than on the thing itself. Half of it cannot be seen at all. Of the half that can, the seeing is rationed, since the invisible gods come to shamans only and only in vision. The names in Sword’s list are not the everyday words either but the shamans’ words, built with a sacred ending that ordinary speech does not use, so even the vocabulary is gated. And the record that came through to English is a translation of a translation.

That last point deserves stating without softening, because the neat four-rank hierarchy that circulates today, superior gods and associate gods and subordinate gods and inferior gods, was not drawn up by the Lakota. It is James Walker’s arrangement. Walker was the agency physician at Pine Ridge from 1896 to 1914, and he assembled it from what Little Wound, American Horse, Bad Wound, Short Bull, No Flesh, Ringing Shield, Thomas Tyon, Finger, Thunder Bear and Sword told him, through interpreters, and in Sword’s case from pages written out in Lakota. Walker wanted a system badly. His informants gave him accounts that do not entirely agree with one another, and the tidiness is his own. Set his ranking beside Sword’s list and the seam shows plainly: Walker seats Unk, contention, cast into the waters and made the ancestress of all evil beings, in the second rank, while Sword’s four times four are the good gods only, and Wohpe stands in that place instead.

None of this is a closed system being reconstructed from fragments. The word is still in use, the ceremonies are still held, and the argument over how to render it in English is one that Lakota people are conducting themselves rather than having conducted about them. Great Mystery is the translation most often pressed against Great Spirit, on the grounds that the first describes a limit and the second describes a person. The difference is not decorative. One of them says here is who made the world. The other says here is the point at which understanding stops, and we have sixteen names for it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does Wakan Tanka mean?

Wakan Tanka means “great mysterious one” in Lakota, from wakȟáŋ, meaning incomprehensible or beyond understanding, and tȟáŋka, meaning great. It is commonly translated as the Great Spirit, but many prefer Great Mystery, on the grounds that wakȟáŋ describes the limit of human understanding rather than the personality of a god. The same root sits inside the Lakota word for lightning, wakȟáŋhdi.

Is Wakan Tanka one god or many?

Both, and the Lakota answer says so directly. The shaman George Sword described Wakan Tanka as sixteen sacred persons addressed in the shamans’ language as Tobtob Kin, “the four times four,” and then explained that because each of the sixteen is kan, they are all only the same as one. Treating Wakan Tanka as a single supreme being in the Christian sense is a post-contact reading, not the older one.

Who are the sixteen gods of Wakan Tanka?

By Sword’s account they are Wi the sun and Hanwi the moon; Skan the sky, Tate the wind, the Four Winds and the Whirlwind; Maka the earth and Wohpe; Inyan the rock and Wakinyan the winged one; the buffalo god and the bear god; and the ghost, the breath, the small shadow and the spirit-power carried inside a living body. Half of them have physical properties and half have none.

How do people communicate with Wakan Tanka?

Wakan Tanka makes its wishes known to a person either through a vision or through a shaman, and never in writing. A seeker goes out alone without food or water and waits for something to come, then brings what he saw back to a shaman to be interpreted. The gods without physical properties appear in vision only to shamans.

Did the Lakota always call Wakan Tanka the Great Spirit?

No. James Owen Dorsey of the Bureau of Ethnology titled his chapter on the question “Alleged belief in a Great Spirit” and concluded that the singular Great Spirit had been read into Siouan religion from outside, noting that people used the phrases of the newcomers when speaking to white visitors and their own terms among themselves. He recorded that Wakaŋ-taŋka was applied to God by missionaries and their converts, and that among the Dakota it was also a name for the Thunder-being.