Among the peoples of the Arctic the whale is a central sustaining animal wrapped in ceremony and taboo, and figures such as Sedna, the mistress of the sea-creatures in Inuit tradition, from whose body the sea-mammals are said to have come, govern the hunt; these belong to living traditions and are noted here from the outside. The whale's sheer scale and its life in the unreachable deep made it, across cultures, an image of the vast, the primordial and the mysterious. In the modern world the whale has become a moral emblem of a different kind, the great endangered creature whose protection stands for the care of the living ocean itself. Depth, power, death-and-return and the immensity of creation gather to the whale.
The blue whale, the largest species in the group, is also the largest animal known to have existed at any point in the earth's history, larger than any dinosaur for which a complete size estimate exists; a blue whale's heart alone can weigh as much as a small car, and recordings of its calls, among the loudest sounds produced by any living creature, can under the right ocean conditions travel for hundreds of kilometres, a scale of life that dwarfs even the vast sea-beasts of Job and the sagas.