Tupilaq | The Greenlandic Killing-Thing Built From the Dead

追加: 2026-06-06

[00:00:02]Welcome to the Crazy Alchemist podcast, where alchemy, occultism, and strange history come alive.

[00:00:10]A man kneels on the far shore of a small island, where he thinks no one can see him. In front of him is a bundle of bones and skin and hair he has lashed together. He leans over it and lets the thing suckle at his own body, the way you would feed an infant, because that is how it grows. And as he feeds it, he says a name over and over. "Thou shalt take Nukek. Thou shalt take Nukek."

[00:00:39]What he does not know is that Nukek has followed him across the water and is standing right behind him. This is a tupilak, and the man making it is about to die by his own hands.

[00:00:52]Welcome to the Crazy Alchemist's Bestiary.

[00:00:56]The tupilak is the secret killing thing of old Greenlandic Inuit religion. It is a weapon, and somebody has to build it.

[00:01:05]The maker is an angakok, a Greenlandic shaman, and he builds it in private out of whatever dead material he can gather.

[00:01:13]Animal bones, sinew, hair, bird skin, driftwood, a knot of seaweed. In the accounts the Danish collectors wrote down, sometimes a piece of a dead child.

[00:01:25]He assembles the bundle, he sings over it, and in the descriptions the museum curators still repeat today, he lets it suckle at his genitals until it has grown to the size he wants. Then, he carries it to the water, names it after a person he hates, and sets it loose in the sea to go and find that person and kill them.

[00:01:47]No museum on Earth holds an original tupilak. Not one. The whole point of the object was that you made it in secret and sent it off at once, and it was built from things that wrought, so nothing survives. Everything we know comes from confession, Greenlanders telling Danish collectors decades later, "This is how it was done. This is what my uncle did. This is the one that came back." Because they did come back. That is the rule that runs through every single tupilak story. If the person you sent it after turns out to be a stronger shaman than you are, the thing cannot get through them, and it has to go somewhere, so it turns around and comes home, and it eats the man who made it.

[00:02:35]Knud Rasmussen wrote down the cleanest version of that line in 1921, "The creature, beaten, swam back at once to the man who had made it in order to eat him up."

[00:02:47]Go back to Niqquk on the beach behind the maker who never heard him coming.

[00:02:52]The man was so deep in feeding his monster that he never felt his enemy at his shoulder. The moment Niqquk grabbed him, the maker dropped dead on the spot, and the brothers who were with Niqquk found the tupilak still suckling at the body of the man who had made it. They stoned it, and they sank the monster and the corpse together into the sea, and for five nights after, Niqquk lay awake listening to a bubbling sound out in the water.

[00:03:22]Those stories come from a Danish geologist named Henrik Rink, who collected Greenlandic tales in the 1860s.

[00:03:30]And Rink noticed something the rest of us tend to miss. The Greenlanders did not think building a tupilak was automatically evil. The same kind of magic word that powered a tupilak, a thing they called a seraq, also powered an ordinary protective charm. What made a tupilak wicked was the secrecy and the intent behind it, not the act itself.

[00:03:54]This was a weapon in a feud, and it had rules. It was closer to a curse you could be tried for than to anything we would call simple black magic. And there was even a way out. If the maker publicly confessed what he had done, the binding broke and the thing lost its power. Rink's other tales show you the feud from the maker's side. A man named Kuyavarsik is hunted by his own uncle, who is furious about being handed the wrong cut of meat at a meal, and who builds a tupilak out of the bones of all kinds of animals to punish him. It comes for Kuyavarsik three days running, once as a seal, once shrieking outside the house at night, and it fails every time because Kuyavarsik refuses to look at it. In another, a grieving father called Merkusalik makes one after his son dies.

[00:04:46]He gathers animal bones, whitens them in a stream, ties them together with hairs pulled out of the skins of a boat, and then he watches the thing try on shape after shape, a small auk, then a diving bird, then seals, then dolphins. It keeps growing until it becomes a young whale, and only then does he say, "That will do. Now go and avenge us."

[00:05:10]That is the tupilak of Greenland, a made thing with a maker and a name. Travel west across the top of Canada and the same word turns into something else entirely. Knud Rasmussen on his great expedition across the Arctic in the 1920s found the word tupilak among the Iglulik Inuit of the Canadian north.

[00:05:32]There it is invisible and nobody builds it. It is the soul of a dead person who has gone wrong, gone restless, usually because some taboo around the death was broken, and only the shaman can see it.

[00:05:45]Instead of hunting a named enemy, it drives the game animals away from the hunters and the shaman fights it off with a knife. Travel further west still to the Copper Inuit and the early observers translated the word through a Christian lens as something close to the devil.

[00:06:03]One word. On one coast, it is a thing you build out of bones and send into the sea. On another, it is a hungry ghost you can never see.

[00:06:13]Even the name pulls in two directions.

[00:06:15]The dictionaries trace tupilak back to an old root that means to be startled, the feeling of an uncanny thing appearing in front of you. The version you will read on a museum gift shop label that it means ancestor's spirit fits the Canadian ghost better than the Greenlandic object and the linguists do not actually back it up. The word holds a fright and a corpse at the same time and which one you get depends on where in the Arctic you are standing.

[00:06:44]The museum tupilak begins with a question. No original survives, yet the glass cases in the airport gift shops in Greenland are full of carved tupilak figures, twisted little human-animal monsters cut from whalebone and walrus tusk. Where did they come from?

[00:07:06]They come from someone asking to see a thing that was never meant to be seen.

[00:07:13]In 1884, a Danish officer named Gustav Holm spent the winter at Ammassalik on the east coast of Greenland among people who had barely seen a European before. He asked them what a tupilak looked like and they could not draw one, so instead they carved one to show him.

[00:07:34]That was the first time the unshowable thing was given a fixed shape for an outsider.

[00:07:41]20 years later, another Dane, William Thalbitzer, went one step further. He wanted to bring tupilak home to Denmark, but there were none to collect. So, he asked a local shaman named Mitsivarniannga, whose specialty was said to be exactly this, the making of tupilak, to carve him three of them. Mitsivarniannga carved a human figure, a bird, and a harpooned dog. They sit in the Danish National Collections to this day, and every carved tupilak sold to a tourist since is descended from those three.

[00:08:20]And then, there is the son.

[00:08:22]Mitsivarniannga, the shaman who made killing things, had a boy.

[00:08:27]The son was born around 1890, and he lived through the whole conversion of Greenland to Christianity.

[00:08:34]Baptized, he trained as a catechist, a teacher of the new faith, and then he became the great painter of the tupilak, the man who put them on paper, dated and exact through the 1910s and 1920s, and into the 1930s.

[00:08:51]He worked with Rasmussen on his expeditions, and he even played a shaman in a Greenlandic film in 1933, not long before he died of tuberculosis.

[00:09:01]His name was Carl Andreassen. The father made the monsters in secret and sent them out to kill. The son drew the same monsters in daylight for the museum and the record. One family carried the tupilak the whole distance from feared weapon to studied artifact in two lifetimes.

[00:09:24]There is a museum in Nuuk that points out one last thing. The carved tupilak very often has its tongue stuck out, and the Greenlandic word for tongue, oqaq, is the root of the word for language, for having a voice. A thing that was once made in total silence and sent out to kill a named person without a word, now sits in a glass case with its tongue out. The killing thing has become a way of speaking.

[00:09:53]If you enjoyed this, the full article is on the site at crazyalchemist.com with the bibliography and the source documents listed for anyone who wants to read further. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts for more on the history of esotericism in the dark corners of belief. Thanks for listening.

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