Inuit religious life was governed less by worship than by observance. The relation between people and the animals they killed carried obligations on both sides, and the rules, often rendered in English as taboos, covered how a carcass was handled, which land and sea foods could be worked or eaten together, and what a person had to do after a death or a birth. Breaking them was understood to be felt by the animals, who would then withhold themselves, so hunger was a moral condition before it was a meteorological one.
The figure who enforces this most directly is the sea woman, called Sedna in one region and Nuliajuk or Takannaaluk in others, who holds the sea mammals and withdraws them when offences accumulate. Sila, translated sometimes as air or weather and sometimes as the ordering intelligence of the world, is the wider power, less a person than a condition it is possible to be out of step with.
The angakkuq, the specialist who dealt with such breaches, was called on when hunting failed or illness persisted, and worked by locating the fault. The atlas describes that office and does not set out the initiation or the conduct of a seance, which are not published here. Bernard Saladin d'Anglure's work records a further dimension of the same system, in which naming, rebirth and a recognised third gender position run together.