“Those Who Live Beneath Us”: Sedna the Inuit Woman of the Sea

Transcript of “Those Who Live Beneath Us”: Sedna the Inuit Woman of the Sea

Hello, and welcome to Myth Matters, storytelling and conversation about mythology and what myth can offer us today. I’m your host and personal mythologist Dr. Catherine Svehla. Wherever you may be in this wide, beautiful, crazy world of ours, you are part of this story circle. 

One characteristic of myth is the existence of variations on a given story. The shifting details point the listener in different directions. The Greek god Dionysus is one example. According to the mainstream or more popular version, Dionysus is the son of Zeus and the mortal woman Semele, a daughter of the Greek King Cadmus. If you are familiar with Euripides’s famous play about Dionysus, “The Bacchae,” you recall that the play takes place in Thebes as the god has returned to his mother’s hometown. 

But in Orphic mythology, which is based on the stories of Orpheus, Dionysus, also called Zagreus, was the son of Zeus and his daughter Persephone, the queen of the underworld. 

Was Dionysus part human or all god? How does this change his association with the underworld?  Interesting questions, and they are only posed if we accept the seeming contradiction about his parentage. The ancient Greeks made use of both possibilites. When these are accepted, the variations demonstrate the complexity of the mystery personified by the god Dionysus. 

Below the surface of common understanding, things that appear irreconcilable are aspects of the same reality.

This is my starting point for the myth that I want to share with you today, the origin story of Sedna, the goddess mother of the sea, marine animals, and the underworld in the myths of the Inuit people, one of the indigenous Arctic cultures. Jessica, a patreon patron of Myth Matters, suggested this intriguing topic. The option to request an episode on a topic of interest to you is one of the benefits of being a patron. Thank you for your support Jessica and for Sedna. 

As you may surmise from my opening comments, there are many variations of Sedna’s story across Alaska, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, and Greenland. I’m going to sketch out some of these variations for you and invite you to think about how they add layers to the reality behind Sedna. I’ll also tell you a version of one of the often-told variations of her myth. 

First, let’s consider the physical environment that inspired this myth. The physical reality of a place and the way that people have adapted to live in that place is important to reflections on the myth, and the Inuit world is very different from mine and probably from yours too. Theirs is a barren world of ice and snow and sea, of extremes in light and darkness, a place where the margin for survival is–or has been– relatively slim. 

The myths are of a people who live as part of nature, close to the animals who understand human words, who may have been human in a previous life because everything has spirit, soul, breath. Everything.

In his collection of Inuit folktales, A Kayak Full of Ghosts, published in 1987, Lawrence Millman, a mycologist who has made more than 40 trips to the Arctic, writes of the snow, hunger, hunting, and the search for food. The Inuit will eat almost anything, he says, the green fermented juices of a walrus stomach and seal eyes, for example. Nothing goes to waste. And cannibalism is–or was– one of the harsh facts of life. Better to eat your young child then to starve alongside him, knowing that he will die anyway without you.

For many of us, the deprivation and harshness of the Inuit world sounds frightening and yet the people see these challenges as necessary to wisdom. Igiugarjuk of the Caribou Inuit expressed this to Knud Rasmussen, a Danish anthropologist and explorer who spent years with the Inuit on expeditions in Greenland in the early twentieth century. Igiugarjuk told him:

“All true wisdom is only to be found far from the dwellings of men, in the great solitudes;  and it can only be attained through suffering. Suffering and privation are the only things that can open the minds of man to that which is hidden from his fellows.”

The Inuit world has changed and is changing; Christian missionaries, technology, and climate change, for example, are all major impacts. And yet the myth of Sedna is not only a relic of the past. I’ll share some thoughts about this later. Let’s meet Sedna, who is known to the people by many other names.

In one story, Sedna was a child with a huge appetite. She was always hungry. One night, she tried to eat her father’s arm while he was asleep. The next morning, he put her in a boat, took her out to sea, and tried to throw her overboard but she clung to the side. Her father chopped off her fingers one joint at a time. When the pieces of finger fell into the water, they turned into whales, seals, and sea lions. Sedna sank to the bottom of the sea where she guards the spirits of the dead.

This story contains the primary themes and plot elements of Sedna’s myth: hunger, sacrifice, the emergence of food animals, the sea. Sedna’s fingers become sea mammals who are crucial to the lives of the Inuit. She controls them, has them appear or hide from the hunters, and thus controls the behavior of the people and punishes those who break her taboos. During the annual Sedna ceremony, an angakok (shaman) enters a trance and spirit travels down to Sedna. He negotiates with her to send plentiful food to the people, confesses the wrongs that had been committed, and appeases her by combing her hair. 

Sedna’s story often begins with her refusal to marry. She is beautiful and too proud. In some instances, her father tries to place her with a husband and is either tricked by the suitor–who misrepresents himself in some way, or encounters resistance from his daughter. The man claims to be a good hunter capable of providing a comfortable and secure home but he doesn’t. Or Sedna is dissatisfied with what he can offer. In some versions, her father discovers that his daughter is hungry or unhappy and initially comes to her rescue. She is always thrown overboard.

In one story that is often connected to the Sedna tradition, the young woman is forced to marry a dog. There was a girl who refused to marry because none of the suitors were good enough for her. Finally, her father was so angry he said, “You should have a dog for a husband.” Later that night, a dog in the form of a man came in and slept with the girl. When the girl became pregnant, her father rowed her out to a nearby island, but the dog swam after them and lived with the girl on the island. She gave birth to a litter of pups and human children. 

Her dog husband would swim back to the shore to get bags of meat that had been set out for them. But one day, the girl’s father placed stones in the bags under the meat, and the dog husband sank and drowned. The father then began taking meat to the island for the girl and her children. But she was still angry at him for making her marry the dog in the first place. She told her dog children to attack the old man the next time he came to the island. Her father was able to escape but was afraid to return to the island. 

Soon the girl and her children were hungry. They had no one to bring them any meat. She made boats out of the soles of her boots. She set the dog children in one boat and sent them off across the sea, telling them that they would be skillful with weapons. White men are descended from these dog children. 

She set her human children in the other boat and sent them across the water with instructions to go inland. These became the ancestors of Indians who lived to the south of the Inuit. Then the girl returned home and lived with her parents again.

Sedna is temperamental and proud. She’s often connected with dogs, who either eat or attack her father, and later guard the Adlivun, the underworld under the sea that is Sedna’s domain. Adlivun is a liminal space where the spirits of the dead live while their souls are purified, in preparation for travel to the land of the moon. The spirits of the dead, and the shamans who journey to Sedna on behalf of the people, have to get past the guard dogs.

Now, the most popular story of Sedna involves her marriage to a fulmar. A fulmar is an Arctic bird related to the albatross that looks like a gray and white sea gull. Here is the story of “The Woman of the Sea” as collected and translated by Lawrence Millman. I invite you to relax and listen to the story. Note the moment or detail that captures your attention as it could be a useful entry into your reflections about your place in the story.

“The Woman of the Sea” translated by Lawrence Millman

In the time of our earliest forefathers, there lived a handsome young woman known far and wide for her long dark hair. When she bunched this hair in a top knot, it was almost the size of the rest of her body. An entire week she would spend combing it. Also, she had nice fat hands, which many men admired. 

One day this woman was picking berries when a fulmar flying overhead happened to see her. He immediately who swooped down and said, “Marry me, my dear.” The woman laughed and said seabirds weren’t much to her taste. 

Then the fulmar went away and changed himself into a man. He put on a garment of the richest sealskin, a colorful tunic and some spectacles made from walrus tusks. Now he came back and appeared at the woman’s door. Once again, he put the question to her. “Well, you’re a fine piece of man,” she said, and left with him despite her parents’ objections. 

Now, the woman lived with the fulmar in a little rock hut at the end of the sea, and she was fond of blubber. Each day the fulmar would bring her a fresh seal. And she was fond of singing. He would sing to her while they made love. And so, they had a happy marriage. But one day the fulmar’s spectacles fell off and the woman saw his eyes. She said, “You’re just an ugly fellow like the others.”

All this time her parents had been paddling around in search of her. At every cove and headlands, they called out “Daughter, daughter, where have you gone?” They searched the shore all the way to the inland ice. At last, they arrived at the little rock hut at the end of the sea. They beseeched her to return with them. She agreed to go because she said, “I can’t stand my husband and his eyes anymore.” 

Now, the fulmar was searching for the woman himself. First he couldn’t find her. But then he put on his walrus tusk spectacles and saw the little boat in the sea below. Whereupon he flapped his wings wildly, more and more, and a terrible storm rushed over the water. Wind swept down the mountains. The boat looked as if it might capsize. The woman’s parents said, “You brought this on, you brought on this storm. If you don’t get out, we’ll drown. Out, out with you.” 

She protested that the storm was her husband’s fault. It did no good. Her parents tossed her overboard, but she got hold of the gunwale and clung to it. Her father took out his knife and cut off a few of her fingers. Still, she clung there, he cut off a few more. Still, she clung and then he chopped off both her hands. She tried to hold on with her stumps, but she had no grip and as a result, she slipped away beneath the waves. 

Immediately the water subsided and her parents were able to paddle home, relieved that they’ve survived even if it meant the sacrifice of their daughter. 

The woman sank to the bottom of the sea and became Sedna, Mother of the Sea. Her chopped off fingers came back to her as fish, whales, seals and walruses, all making their homes in her hair. But she couldn’t comb this hair as she’d been able to before. Try as she might, she couldn’t as she didn’t have any hands. All she could do was sit there at the sea bottom, legs drawn up to her chest and watch her hair get more and more filthy with each passing day. 

Thus, it is that the angakok, the shamans, must swim down to the depths and comb Sedna’s hair for her. In exchange, she offers humankind all the creatures of the sea. The bounty in her long spreading hair is endless. 

Friend, respect this woman.

This is harsh story, reflecting the harshness of the conditions and desperation when survival is threatened. Throwing a daughter overboard, chopping off her fingers– this is a mythic or archetypal description of the fundamentals of hunger, food, life, and death. Those of us who live in circumstances that insulate us from the basic realities of physical life have to stretch our imaginations to enter this story. Which leads me to wonder about the wisdom of such hard truths, a wisdom that I believe we need today, to meet what is coming, to change our ways of living. 

Lots of people talk about the need to restore an indigenous view of the world. Is this possible  without a major transformation in the collective relationship to food? Without sacrifice and suffering? How do you imagine this happening? Can you see yourself living in an ensouled world, kin to the animals, plants, and Others, listening to stones and the winds, cultivating rituals of reciprocity, concrete actions of mutual respect? How does this come about? How have you learned what you’ve learned? What motivates the learning?

I started this episode with some thoughts about the importance about variations in myths. A useful, living myth has to support a people’s current knowledge of the world and their outer circumstances. Variations reflect the need for mythologies to evolve, to reflect these changes in the outer world and changes in culture. The terrible war between Hamas and Israel, and the longstanding tensions and animosity in the Middle East and between believers of the great monotheisms everywhere, are the result of making literal doctrines from mythic material. Of fixing the myth. Of making a dogma out of metaphor.

The absence of a mythic sensibility is, in my mind, a much greater problem then a lack of good and useful myths.

Because the old myths are the foundation of our imagining. Through them we discover images that inspire us to imagine our way into the metaphors for today, to new possibilities. To what we need in today’s changing circumstances. 

We know something about the current state of the oceans and the life of sea creatures. Changing temperatures, destruction of habitat, pollution, overfishing, shifting wind and storm and wave patterns, multiple threats to life as we’ve known it. Is Sedna taking her revenge for the breaking of her taboos? 

According to the old stories, the goddess is available, reachable. The shamans go to her world and she listens. They offer prayers and make amends. There is honor, reciprocity, and caretaking action. They comb her hair and clean her body with fine sand, things that she cannot do for herself because she has no hands, because her sacrificed fingers are whales and seals. 

Sedna’s underworld domain is called Adlivun, which means “those who live beneath us.” This phrase suggests so much. In her myth, Adlivun is under the sea. I think of the movement of water above and below the ground, sea creatures and the tremendous powers of the oceans, the spirits of the dead, the ancestors– what they did on earth and how they act in the spirit realms, water as the source of life, as the source of order and rules, the home of what must be honored.

We’re all dependent on the oceans. And each of us can extend this notion, of life dependent on  “those who live beneath us” to the specifics of our place. What is beneath me here in Colorado? I spent some time in my yard the other day and turned over the soil, feeling the progress of fall, and there were the earthworms. Earthworms, agents of decay, the great recyclers, tunneling and aerating soil, fertilizing it with excrement, breaking things down, composting. A form of that purification in another Adlivun, perhaps? 

Well. Millman’s collection of Inuit folktales ends with a very short story that feels like the proper ending for this episode. First–

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In closing, the Inuit story Millman titled “What is the earth?”

 Three friends were curious about the size and shape of the earth. They were so curious that  they decided to go exploring. They had traveled for three days and two nights when they came to an enormous ice house. “Let’s go in,” one of the friends said. And so they went into the house, which seemed to be without end. They followed the walls in order not to get lost. Where was the passage through which they had entered? They walked for days, for months, for years. At last, they grew very weary. It was all they could do to crawl now. Then two of the friends could no longer crawl and they sat down and died. The third friend managed to find the exit passage. His kayak was exactly where he left it. He came back to his people as a very old man. And he told them, “The earth is simply a very big ice-house.” 

Then he died too.

If we have a better understanding of our need for myth, and all that our old stories offer, we can live more satisfying lives. We can inhabit a better story and create a more beautiful, just and sustainable world. 

Feel free to email me in response to this episode or post a comment on the Mythic Mojo website.  If you have questions about mythology, I’ll do my best to answer them.

And that’s it for me, Catherine Svehla and Myth Matters. Thank you so much for listening. Take good care of yourself and until next time, keep the mystery in your life alive.