Cold winter: Tekkeitsertok
TEKKEITSERTOK
Category: Inuit mythology
If you search for Tekkeitsertok online... well you won’t find much. You will find a short Wikipedia article, and a lot of websites repeating ad nauseum the same Wikipedia article over and over again. Despite being a prominent god of Inuit mythology, he seems to be really kind of forgotten… All the love seems to go to Sedna X) I do not own books or studies about Inuit mythology per se – all I have are big encyclopedias that do describe Inuit mythology but go quickly over it and doesn’t add much…
Anyway, here are all the facts I could gather about this Inuit god. If you have more accurate or useful info, do not hesitate to share!
1) Tekkeitsertok, according to Wikipedia, is the most prominent and important of the hunting gods of the Inuit – while other websites call him THE hunting god of the Inuit mythology. Indeed, apparently it was traditional during the hunting season to give him a lot of sacrifices, it was the “high time” of his worship.
2) Tekkeitsertok is the master of all the caribous – and while some only describe him as lord of “caribous”, over extend his rule to all deer in general. I have to admit I do not know much about the Inuit fauna so… I don’t know if it makes a big difference X) There is also apparently a tradition in modern days to depict Tekkeitsertok as a caribou-headed man. I didn’t find any proof that it was how the Inuit saw him, but that’s how people like to depict him in recent decades.
3) The Wikipedia article extends his “lordship” over deers/caribous and his hunting functions as becoming some sort of master of all animals: according to it, Tekkeitsertok can actually bring aid to the creatures that enter his territory, or ban them from the area he resides in. Wikipedia also has a strange line about him being the “protector of any creatures that enter any parts of the northern sky”. Now I don’t know if they speak figuratively, the “northern sky” being a fashionable to say the Inuit territory ; or if they speak literally because in Inuit cosmology the skies are the regions in which live gods, spirits and ghosts, so… I don’t know, it is mysterious.
4) What Wikipedia doesn’t tell you however is that Tekkeitsertok is an earth god: many websites of good reference list him as an “earth god” and my own mythology books push it further by saying that Tekkeitsertok is both the god of “the earth and the land” (as in the earth, the physical earth, and the land as a social and cultural concept, the Inuit land and the earth you walk upon).
5) He is important. While the Wikipedia’s article make it seem like he is just “the most important of the hunting gods”, all my other sources make it very clear that Tekkeitsertok is actually the most powerful of ALL the gods, and the most important god of the pantheon (well, beyond the Inuit incarnation of the “Great Spirit”, that is above all gods).
And that’s it… I couldn’t find more and I don’t have any book about Inuit mythology to get my hands onto. If you ever have more info about this god, don’t hesitate to share – but this is all I could find for now. Despite him being so important for the Inuit society and religion (hunting is a BIG thing), he is… really kind of forgotten by people studying mythologies in general apparently.
