Anguta- Inuit SpiritSpirit"Guide of the Dead"

The Kayak

Sedna was a young woman who refused all suitors. In the Greenlandic telling, a fulmar appeared in the form of a handsome man and took her for his wife. His home was a place of wind and raw fish. When Anguta discovered his daughter's misery, he came for her in his kayak, and father and daughter fled across the sea.

The fulmar pursued them. A storm rose. Waves pitched against the small boat. Anguta, terrified the kayak would capsize and drown them both, threw Sedna overboard.

She clutched the gunwale. He took his knife and cut off her fingers at the first joint. These became the seals. Still she held on, and he cut at the second joint, and walruses fell into the water. He severed what remained, and whales came into being. Sedna sank to the bottom of the sea and became ruler of the ocean depths and all the creatures born from her hands.

Sedna's Tide

That night, Anguta slept on shore. The tide rose higher than it ever had, crept to where he lay, and swept him into the sea. Sedna's tide. It carried him down to her realm at the bottom of the ocean.

There, his daughter did not destroy him. She put him to work. Anguta became the ferryman of the dead, carrying souls in his kayak from the world above to Adlivun, the underworld beneath the sea. The boat he had used to abandon her became the vessel of his service. He would paddle it forever.

The Ferryman's Work

When someone died, Anguta came for the soul. In Rasmussen's Iglulik accounts, the dead passed through his domain first, the last stop before Sedna's house. He stripped the flesh from their bones, a purification that mirrored what hunters did with their catch: returning the animal to its essential parts so the spirit could continue. The bones held what mattered. The rest fell away.

Shamans descending to Sedna's realm to beg for the release of game animals had to pass Anguta on the way down. Some found him approachable, a father who might intercede with his daughter on their behalf. Others found him silent, performing his work without regard for the living. Either way, he was the last figure a shaman saw before reaching Sedna's house, and the first obstacle between the living world and the deep.