And Sedna’s father was stricken with fear. Terror of the bird-man gripped his heart. Terror of the offended powers of sky and sea nerved him to a bitter sacrifice. The raging waves demanded Sedna, and he must give her up, and repulse her struggling, and see her drown. He bent forward, and with one fearful thrust, cast his daughter out of the boat—so to propitiate the offended sea!
The wild, white face rose to the surface, and despairing hands caught at the gunwale. But the Terror was not to be defrauded, and the father, frenzied with grief and the desperate determination of his deed, snatched up an axe—a heavy thing of ivory and wood—and brought it down upon those pathetic, clinging fingers. The maiden fell back into the sea (and the first joints of her maimed and bleeding hands turned into seals). But, coming up again, [[192]]with agony in her eyes she made another struggle to catch at the boat. Three times the drowning creature came back; but she was the doomed victim of the sea, and the father must consummate the sacrifice. Three times he smote and chopped at her mangled hands. (The second joints became the ojuk, the ground seals; the third joints made the walrus; and whales sprang of the rest.)
Apropos of this reeking legend, it must be borne in mind that the Eskimo believe implicitly in Spirits and in their power to demand sacrifice. The father, believing the storm to be an expression of the anger of the Sea god (on behalf apparently of the sea-bird) and a demand for the daughter he had reclaimed, did not hesitate to give her up and to steel himself against her drowning agony.
At last Sedna sank, to rise no more.
And the storm sank, too. The boat presently came to land. The father entered his tent and lay down beneath it and slept a sleep of exhaustion and overspent grief. In the tent was fastened Sedna’s dog. But that night there was a high tide which washed up the beach, demolished the tupik, and drowned the two living creatures within. So that man and dog rejoined the maiden in the depths of the sea. There they have dwelt ever since, in some “house” or cave of Eskimo imagination. There they preside over one whole region—called Adlivun—where souls are imprisoned for punishment for a while or all time, after death. [[193]]
The sea creatures who owe their origin to Sedna belong to her and she controls them. She protects them, and causes the storms which bring wreckage and famine to the kyakers and sealers. Hence she is in Eskimo mythology inimical to mankind, the source of the worst evils they know, a spirit who has to be propitiated or quelled by ceremony, as the case may be.
She is considered to be of enormous stature, with two plaits of hair, each thick as an arm, and she has only one eye. The other was pierced and put out in her drowning struggle.
The writer has seen an example of this sort of sacrifice in actual life, and it redeems the story of Sedna’s father from the senseless selfishness of which it seems to be compounded by some narrators. Two boats containing a party of hunters were returning from sealing, when a squall struck them. Before sail could be taken in, one boat overturned and the men were thrown into the water. They all climbed back except one, who was numbed with cold and dazed with shock. He did not sink immediately, being held up by his deerskins. He even drifted close by the boat, and easily within reach. One man, indeed, did reach out and touch him with an oar, but when he failed to grasp it the general decision was to let him drown. He was “material for the Tongak” spirits, claimed by the Spirit of the sea—as was Sedna in the legend. He simply drowned in the sight of the others, and of the women on shore, who covered their faces [[194]]with their hoods and gave the death wails, i.e., began to shriek and howl in the frenzied manner proper to the circumstances.
It is possible that no better story than that of Sedna (with all its elements of phantasy, human emotion, poetry and savagery) could be found in illustration of a good deal Dr. Marrett has to tell us in his “Psychology and Folk Lore,” by way of reducing primitive folk-lore and primitive procedure (religious or medical, or both, arising out of it) to a science of primitive psychology. His masterly analysis of the outlook of the wholly untutored mind on the phenomena of cause and effect demonstrates quite clearly the sincerity and the obviousness of the “savage” rites and customs which seem to us so barbaric, irrelevant and monstrous.
The Sedna myth gives rise to the taboo, and the practices of the Sedna ceremony. The aboriginal theory of things (the origin of the sea creatures, the cause of storms, etc.), leads to aboriginal methods of dealing with them “On (close) acquaintance, such as perhaps is to be obtained only on the field,” says Dr. Marrett, “the savage turns out to be anything but a fool, more especially in anything that relates at all directly to the daily struggle for existence … common sense is no monopoly of civilisation,” although the educated application of it to the material and spiritual needs of life may easily be so. The interest of the primitive theurgist is a practical one, and the elements in his problem are only two, namely, [[195]]a supernormal power to be moved and a traditional rite that promises to move it. The special function of the conjuror or the medicine man among aboriginal peoples is to grapple with the abnormal, and “this ever tends to constitute for the savage a distinct dispensation, a world of its own.” There is in such a story as the Sedna legend some groundwork of common sense and verifiable experience; and in the practices which arise out of it, this has to be taken into account, together with some very real occult content (whether of suggestion or hypnotism, the most modern of sciences alone could say), and some conscious fraud no doubt on the part of the conjurors.