Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Subcategories

Inuit Deities

5 of 731 entries in Deities. Click any to see everything it connects to.

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

The spirits and powers of Inuit religion across the Arctic from Alaska to Greenland, centred on the animals a community lives by and on the observances that keep that relationship in order. The sea, the weather and the great game animals each have a master, offended by a broken rule and approached through the angakkuq. Regional narratives differ widely and no single telling is authoritative, so a figure named here may carry another name and another story a few hundred miles along the coast.

Facts
Directory
Category
Deities 1
Learn More
Five Spirits Governing the Sea, the Weather and the Hunt

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Inuit Deities gathers five spirits from Inuit and wider circumpolar religion, together covering the sea, the land animals, the weather and the shaping of the world itself.

Sedna, the sea goddess, is one of the most widely attested and consistently central figures across the many regional Inuit and wider Arctic traditions, mother and mistress of the marine mammals humans depend on for survival, ruling the undersea realm Adlivun from a body left mutilated in the origin story that explains her power. Nanook, the spirit lord of polar bears, requires the same ritual respect toward killed bears that Sedna requires toward sea mammals, since a bear killed disrespectfully was believed to discourage him from allowing further bears to be taken, tying the two figures to the same underlying rule about how a hunted animal must be treated.

Sila is the great spirit of weather, air and the breath of life, an impersonal, pervasive cosmic force rather than a figure with a human like personality, understood as underlying the world's weather and, in some interpretations, consciousness and the moral order of the universe itself. Torngarsuk is a powerful patron spirit of hunters and of the angakkuq, chief among the tornait, the helping spirits, often approached by shamans seeking power, insight or aid, and described in early missionary accounts, not entirely reliably, as a kind of supreme spirit.

Raven, Tulugaq, is the creator and trickster of Inuit and wider circumpolar tradition, credited in various regional narratives with shaping the land, releasing daylight or creating the first humans, and behaving in other tales as a cunning, appetite driven trickster whose schemes shape the world almost by accident.

Sources
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.