Adlivun

Adlivun, "those beneath us", is the undersea realm of Inuit cosmology ruled by Sedna, the sea goddess and mother of marine mammals, where the souls of the dead are believed to reside for a period of purification and testing before being permitted to move on to other, more pleasant regions of the Inuit afterlife. Traditional accounts describe the passage through Adlivun as difficult and its ruler as strict, with Sedna herself, according to widely recorded origin narratives, dwelling there in pain after having had her fingers cut off by her own father during a storm at sea, an injury from which the various sea creatures, seals, walruses and whales that humans depend on for survival, are said to have been born, tying Sedna's ongoing suffering directly to the material abundance and moral obligations of Inuit hunting life. A soul's treatment in Adlivun and its eventual release depends in traditional belief partly on how well the living have honoured the taboos and respectful practices owed to Sedna and the animals under her care, connecting the realm's afterlife function directly to Inuit hunting ethics and practical survival.

What makes Adlivun distinctive among the realms in this atlas is how directly its theology connects to the practical, daily ethics of survival in an Arctic hunting economy: because Sedna both rules the undersea realm of the dead and is the source of every sea mammal Inuit communities depend on for food, clothing and tools, correct treatment of the dead and correct, respectful treatment of hunted animals become expressions of the same underlying religious obligation rather than two separate concerns, and traditional angakkuq, shamans, were understood to travel to Adlivun specifically to appease Sedna and untangle her hair, matted by human wrongdoing, when taboo violations were believed to be causing scarcity of game. This tight connection between a specific afterlife realm and the immediate material survival of the community is a distinctive feature worth noting alongside the more purely moral or judicial afterlife schemes found in many other traditions covered in this atlas, since Inuit religious practice historically treated Adlivun's condition as something the whole community's conduct could actively affect, rather than a fixed destination unrelated to the practical business of living.