Cetacean myths and folklore around the world

Cetaceans in the collective imagination

From Sedna, the Inuit goddess of sea animals, to the Polynesian Tangaroa, by way of the messenger whales of Brittany and the good-luck dolphins of the Greeks, cetaceans people the mythologies of every coastal culture. This overview runs through 18 cultural traditions around the world and recounts what whales, dolphins and killer whales have stood for in the collective imagination.

Maritime cosmologies: the place of cetaceans in myth

Cetaceans hold a singular place in the cosmologies of maritime peoples. Among the Inuit, the goddess Sedna, mother of the sea animals, keeps whales and seals at the bottom of the ocean, and the shaman must go and appease her. Among the Māori, the ancestor Paikea rides a humpback whale, a story central to the iwi identity of Ngāti Porou and to the film Whale Rider.

In Polynesia, Tangaroa, god of the sea, is associated with cetaceans. In ancient China, the baiji of the Yangtze was known as the “goddess of the river”. The myth of the pink boto of the Amazon, a seducer dolphin that turns into a man at night, still shapes Amazonian popular culture today. These stories offer a valuable ethnozoology, sometimes protective (hunting taboos), sometimes ambivalent.

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Cetaceans also people modern culture: cetaceans and human culture, feature films, musical works and quotations from cetology.