Geography/Culture: America, North: Inuit (Eskimo).
Description: Goddess of the sea and marine life.

Titles/Variants, etc:
• Dialect or transcription variant, Arnaknagsak, *N*KN*GS*K.
• Compare with Nuliajuk, below.
• Some say Una-Kuagsak is a name by which the same Goddess as Sedna, Old-Food-Dish, (below), is known in some Inuit communities. Others, that this is a title of Sedna.

Geography/Culture: America, North: Inuit.
Description: Supernatural spirit; She Who aids anagakoks; She Who is especially concerned to hunt out those who have infrigned the rules of Sedna, Old-Food-Dish.

Titles/Variants, etc:
• Perhaps an anthopomorphic form of the single eye of Sedna, Old-Food-Dish, below.

Geography/Culture: America, North: West Coast Hudson Bay Inuit.
Description: Goddess of the sea; Controller of marine animals; She Who waits at inlets and river mouths to capsize those who flout Her food laws; She Who welcomes to Her warm heavenly land the spirits of suicides and kind people.
Perhaps Her warm heavenly land is to be identified with the Central Inuit Qudlivan (Qudliparmuit), the happy spirit-land of pleasures and games in the sky. Those who have fed the poor during life, known starvation themselves, been murdered, died in childbirth or been miserable enough to take their own life, all find joy in Qudlivan after death.
To Whom Sacred: walrus; talking walrus skull (used as a ball in the games played by ancestral spirits in the heavenly land); aurora borealis (which when visible is said to be the spirits playing ball).

Titles/Variants, etc:
• Transcription variant, Nuliayoq.
• Perhaps a variant form of Sedna, Old-Food-Dish, below.

Geography/Culture: America, North perhaps primarily Canada and Greenland: Central Inuit, especially the Iglulik and Netsilik. Her myth was first recorded on Baffin Island in the early 1880s.
Description: Gigantic one-eyed Goddess of the sea and marine life, especially the mammals; Great Mother of sea creatures whose migrations She governs; She Who is huge, voracious and vile tempered; She Whose appearance is awe-full to behold; Queen of the Arctic Ocean and its deeps; She Whose concern is the balance of food chains; She Whose arms and fingers are the teeming fish and mammals of the sea; She Who provides food for the Inuit people -- sending the shrimp to the fish, the fish to the seal, and the seal to the human hunter; She Who feels pain in Her arms and hands when Her bounty is mocked and Her laws ignored by human greed; She Who sends starvation and sickness (by with-holding the food supply) when She feels pain; She Who allows Her sufferings to be assuaged by the visit and propitiation of an angakok (angakoq, angekkok, the Inuit term for a shamanka or shaman); Ruler of Adlivun, (Adliden), Those-beneath-us, the abode of sustenance and a dwelling place of the tupilaq, (spirits-of-the-disobedient-dead), on the ocean floor where Sedna, Old-Food-Dish, has Her Big House; Mistress of life and death; She Who conjures storms if Her taboos are violated; She Who dislikes the deer and will have no deer-skins in Her home; She Whose black hair is knotted and tangled by the thoughtlessness and cruelty of human-beings; She Who did not wish to marry.
The appearance, to a mortal, of Her "father" heralds death. He carries all those who in life have disobeyed Sedna, Old-Food-Dish, to Adlivun where they must sleep by his side for a year while he pinches them. Murderers never leave Sedna's domain but when a year is up other tupilaq go to Adliparmiut, Those-farthest-below, where, then called Adliparmio, they experience relative peace and need never return to earth. The Davis Strait tribes say the tupilaq sometimes return to their villages in raggedy flapping clothes bringing disease and death. Perhaps they come as emissaries of Sedna, Old-Food-Dish.
To Whom Sacred: fulmar or stormy-petrel (the bird-form of the bird-spirit Kokksaut); loon (Kokksaut gave the cry of a loon when he lost Sedna); dog (Her guardian, though some say Her consort); sea-scorpion (which some say is Her consort); whale-ribs and stone (of which Her Big House is built); seal (which is called Her gift and is Her prime animal -- pregnant Iglulik women are strictly forbidden to touch any part of a seal); the left-eye (the only eye She has -- where a right eye would be there is a single black hair). She has a lamp which lights a great pool containing every species of sea-mammal {the sun shining on the sea?}. Seals are Her finger tip phalanges, walruses the middle phalanges and whales the third phalanges of Her fingers -- or some say Her fingers are fish and Her arms are whales. Sea mammal spirits remain in the body three days after death that they may bring Sedna, Old-Food-Dish, news of how they died.
Festival: The feast of Sedna is held annually in the fall. During the celebrations Funk & Wagnall say Sedna, Old-Food-Dish, is driven from the village by a powerful angakok, though others say Sedna is confined by paralysis to Her home in the ocean deeps. Rituals: 1) Sedna, Old-Food-Dish, must be invoked and propitiated before the hunting of any sea-mammal. 2) When making the trance flight to propitiate Her, heal the pain in Her hands and arms, untangle Her hair, seek forgiveness for eris people and plead for the return of prey, the angakok must pass through the region of the tupilaq, cross the abyss with the perpetually turning ice-wheel, pass by the cauldron of boiling seals, and persuade Sedna's guardian dog to stand aside that shehe may enter the knife-thin passageway to Sedna's Big House. Some say the angakok must then cross a second abyss on a bridge as slender as a knife edge after which shehe may still have to overcome Sedna's "father" before reaching the Goddess Herself. Some say hunters who've shown Her respect in life go to Her home at death. There they comb Her hair because She has no fingers. This version of Her myth differs from the Baffin Island myth.
Invocations, Pleas, Hymns and Other Homage to HER: Sedna.
Male Associates: consort Kokksaut, {Strange-Creature}, a bird-spirit who in some myths courted Her in the form of a handsome young man. Her "father" (attendant/servant/house-mate in Her Big House) is Anguta, (Angusta), Man-with-something-to-cut, (His-father). Some say She took a dog {Her guardian dog?} as consort, while others say the sea-scorpion.
The myths which portray Her consort as a dog suggest a parallel with the Great Goddess of the Chamacoco tribe, She Who mated with dogs and gave birth to dog-spirits.

Titles/Variants, etc:
• Perhaps the spirit Issitoq, Giant-Eye, (above) is Her eye anthropomorphized.
• It is said the Goddess is known in many Inuit communities under different names one of which is perhaps Nuliajuk, ----, above.
• Title or alternate name, Una-Kuagsak, Great-Mother, above.
• Compare with Finnish Vete-Ema, Water-Mother.