Across countless religions and cultural mythologies, whales surface. It isn’t difficult to understand why that is; few animals are as humbling and otherworldly. To watch a whale is to witness life in all its unfathomable glory. Humans throughout history have recognized the sanctity of these beings, with their vast enormity and depths of mystery. They have been portrayed as emissaries of the divine and worshiped as gods that swim among us.

Whales are both ancient and powerful. They date back 50 million years ago, making them far older than humans. The blue whale is the largest animal that has ever existed, gentle giants capable of reaching 90 or more feet in length and weighing as much as 330,000 pounds (roughly the equivalent of 24 elephants). Thanks to sheer size, they have colossal strength—and yet they are merciful, only consuming krill. Other species are counted among the longest living mammals on land or sea; killer whales can live over 100 years, while bowhead whales can live twice that.

Gray whales are known for their pilgrimages. They make one of the longest annual migrations of any mammal, swimming 12,000 miles round-trip from their Arctic feeding grounds to breed in California’s Baja lagoons. They face perils on this journey, including ship disturbances and entanglement in fishing nets, but thanks to marine protections this Eastern Pacific population of gray whales is relatively strong; around 24,000 make the impressive voyage each year.

Much like humans, certain cetacean species are community-oriented. Killer whales in particular congregate in strong pods, including the endangered Southern Residents of the northeast Pacific. These families are matrifocal—centering around the mother—and they demonstrate philopatry, a rarity of the animal world in which offspring of both sexes stay with the pod they are born in. The Lummi people consider them kin too; they call them Qwe ‘lhol mechen, meaning our relatives who live under the sea. Whales reflect our humanity back to us.

Whale societies are bound by what may be their most mystical behavior: their songs. Cetaceans emit sounds in order to find their way and hunt for prey undersea—toothed whales with clicks and whistles, baleen whales with deep bellows—but their melodies serve a larger cultural purpose that has long been shrouded in mystery. Some whales sing to identify themselves, and to signify specific types of relationships, kinship, social ties, and hunting styles. Humpback whales sing complex songs that are upwards of 20 minutes and can be heard from miles away.

Whales and their songs have enraptured humans so much that we are now attempting to commune with them. Both the HALLO Project studying the Southern Resident orcas and Project CETI which focuses on sperm whales in the Caribbean are using machine-learning and language-translation algorithms to try and decipher what these animals are saying. Because whales are threatened by climate change and other human ecological interference, one aim of this research is to promote empathy by understanding that these are highly intelligent beings. 

I wonder if our attempts to communicate with cetaceans might reflect a deeper desire for dialogue with the divine mystery that has always enraptured our species. We search for meaning among the stars rather than let the sea and all its arbiters of wisdom drown us in it. Perhaps artificial intelligence will restore our faith in nature—or maybe we could learn to listen to a whale song, that oceanic hymnal, and know that it is sacred beyond words.