Animals & Totems
Octopus
Invertebrates
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Origin 1980 to 2000
The octopus is a cephalopod mollusc with eight arms, three hearts, blue copper-based blood, and a nervous system in which most neurons lie outside the brain, distributed through the arms, which is why it has become the standard example in arguments about how differently intelligence can be built. It changes colour and texture through chromatophores in the skin despite being, as far as testing shows, colour-blind. Symbolically it is thinner than its modern popularity suggests. Octopus motifs are common on Minoan pottery of the second millennium BCE, and the Hawaiian akua Kanaloa is associated with the he'e, the octopus. The kraken of Norse and later Scandinavian report is more probably a giant squid.
Facts
Disputed
Contested or Appropriated Modern UseThe words spirit animal and totem are used in popular Western practice for a personal animal ally. Native scholars and communities object to both usages, on the ground that they take the vocabulary and the authority of particular Indigenous traditions and apply them to a generic and commercial practice. 4 Suzanne Owen's The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality (Continuum, 2008) documents the objection Indigenous communities in North America raise, ongoing and in the present tense, against the commercial "spirit animal" genre. Owen's study examines how the practice borrows specific Indigenous terms and claimed lineages, presenting them as licensing a service sold to outside customers, and sets that use against the communities' own accounts of what those terms and practices mean within their traditions. What is disputed, on Owen's reading, is not that people generally feel a kinship with animals, a widely attested feeling that belongs to no one tradition, but the specific commercial borrowing of Indigenous vocabulary and claimed authority. The atlas records the animal, records that the modern commercial practice exists, and records that this documented objection is made, without adjudicating between the parties. Correspondences
Element Correspondence Origins
Origin Period1980 to 2000 1Tradition: Modern Western esotericism Origin of the NameOctopus comes from the Greek oktopous, eight foot, a descriptive compound of okto, eight, and pous, foot, reflecting the animal's most visible feature rather than any mythic association. 2 Identity
Creature Type Meaning
Symbolic MeaningIn Hawaiian tradition the octopus carries associations with Kanaloa, one of the four major akua, whose domain includes the ocean, and the animal's intelligence and shape-changing reputation have made it a recurring figure for cunning and adaptability across several Pacific and Mediterranean cultures alike. 3 Learn More
The Intelligent Shape-Shifter of the Deep
The octopus is a cephalopod of remarkable intelligence, able to solve problems, use tools and change colour and texture in an instant, and its boneless body can pour through any gap. Its many-armed strangeness made it a natural subject of art and awe: the octopus is one of the great motifs of Minoan and Aegean art of the Bronze Age, its curling arms spread across pottery and frescoes as an emblem of the living sea. Its ink, its grip and its uncanny fluidity gave it, across many coastal cultures, an association with mystery, adaptability and the hidden depths.
Octopus intelligence is now a genuinely documented field of research rather than an old sailor's impression: in a 2009 study the biologist Julian Finn recorded veined octopuses in Indonesia collecting coconut shell halves, carrying them stacked beneath their bodies across open sea floor, and assembling them into a shelter later, a sequence widely accepted as a rare case of tool use outside the vertebrates. Roughly two-thirds of an octopus's neurons are distributed through its eight arms rather than concentrated in its central brain, so each arm can taste, sense and act with a degree of independence unmatched by any other well-studied animal nervous system.
Kanaloa, and the Monster of the Deep
In Hawaiian tradition the great god Kanaloa, lord of the ocean and the underworld, is associated with the octopus (he'e) as one of his forms, a powerful and ambivalent deity of the deep waters. Other coastal peoples imagined vast octopus- or squid-like sea monsters, the Akkorokamui of the Ainu of northern Japan, and the giant cephalopods behind later tales of the kraken of the northern seas, expressing the ocean's power to seize and drag down. Across these settings the octopus stands for the sea's intelligence and its menace at once: a creature of the depths that is both wonder and threat, described here within the traditions that hold it.
Set against that intelligence is an unusually short life: most octopus species live only one to two years, and a female typically breeds only once, laying tens of thousands of eggs and then guarding and aerating them without feeding herself for weeks or months until they hatch, after which she dies, a single intense act of parental care that closes a short and solitary life; the combination of a famously clever mind and so brief and self-sacrificing an end has struck many of the scientists who study the animal as one of its strangest features. Species-level accuracy matters here: the octopus most often cited for this short, intense life cycle is the giant Pacific octopus, Enteroctopus dofleini, the largest known octopus species, with confirmed arm spans exceeding four metres, a scale that makes its single-brood death after months of unfed egg-guarding all the more striking.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Attested in Region
A Minoan and Mycenaean motif long before it is a Greek one, and read as the sea itself.
Kanaloa in Hawaiian tradition, and the octopus that holds the old world to the new.
Disciplines That Use This
One of the animal spirits gathered under this discipline. Where a tradition restricts this material, the restriction is recorded on the tradition itself rather than repeated for each animal.
Sources
1. Shamans and Religion: An Anthropological Exploration in Critical Thinking
Alice Beck Kehoe, Waveland Press, 2000ch. on core shamanism and its commercial forms
2. Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005s.v. sea deities and monsters, on the octopus's nameView the Source 2. Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005s.v. sea deities and monsters; the octopus in mythView the Source 3. Hawaiian Mythology
Martha Warren Beckwith, Yale University Press, 1940on Kanaloa and the octopusView the Source 3. Hawaiian Mythology
Martha Warren Beckwith, Yale University Press, 1940Hawaiian Mythology, on Kanaloa and the octopusView the Source 4. The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality
Suzanne Owen, Continuum, 2008ch. on the marketing of Native spirituality
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