Octopus Spirit Animal

Minoan Crete produced some of the most striking octopus imagery in world art history. The "Marine Style" pottery of the Late Minoan IB period (c. 1500–1450 BCE) features large octopi, their arms curving naturalistically around the shape of the vase, sometimes accompanied by fish and seaweed. The best-known surviving examples are in the Heraklion Archaeological Museum on Crete; the "octopus stirrup jar" from Palaikastro is the iconic piece.

The imagery is not narrative (we have no readable Minoan religious texts; the Linear A script is undeciphered). What survives is the depth of the artistic attention: hundreds of surviving octopus vessels, consistently sophisticated in their observation of real octopus anatomy and movement. Sinclair Hood's The Arts in Prehistoric Greece (Penguin, 1978) and J. Lesley Fitton's Minoans (British Museum Press, 2002) are the standard treatments.

Akkorokamui (アッコロカムイ) is a giant octopus-spirit of the Ainu tradition, associated with Funka Bay in southwestern Hokkaidō. The earliest extended English-language documentation is John Batchelor's The Ainu and Their Folk-Lore (Religious Tract Society, 1901), which records the Ainu account of Akkorokamui as a red cephalopod 120 meters long whose presence turned the bay's water red. Ainu tradition attributes both healing powers and disfigurement-powers to Akkorokamui, depending on the relationship.

The Akkorokamui image travels. It appears in modern Shintō practice at shrines including Ko-shinto shrine in Atsuta, and in contemporary Japanese pop culture (video games, anime) where it has been picked up alongside other yōkai figures. The Ainu context is the primary source; later Japanese adoptions are the secondary layer.

Kanaloa is one of the four major Hawaiian gods (alongside Kāne, Kū, and Lono), the god of the ocean, specifically of deep ocean waters, currents, and the voyaging traditions that crossed the Pacific. The Kumulipo, the Hawaiian creation chant, places Kanaloa among the earliest emergent gods. In some oral traditions, Kanaloa manifests in octopus form (he'e), though he is not primarily an octopus-god; his iconography is largely aniconic.

Martha Beckwith's Hawaiian Mythology (University of Hawai'i Press, 1940) and Mary Kawena Pukui's Nānā I Ke Kumu (Queen Liliʻuokalani Children's Center, 1972) document the Kanaloa tradition. The octopus (he'e) was an 'aumakua for specific Hawaiian families, separate from the Kanaloa association but sometimes overlapping.

Rokobakaniceva is the octopus-god of Kadavu Island in the Fijian iTaukei tradition, and the defeater of the shark-god Dakuwaqa (see our shark page). The foundational narrative has the shark-god Dakuwaqa approaching Kadavu waters to assert dominance; the octopus-god Rokobakaniceva wraps eight arms around him, pins him, and forces him to promise never to eat humans in Kadavu waters. The tradition is alive on Kadavu Island today.

A.M. Hocart's Lau Islands, Fiji (Bishop Museum Bulletin 62, 1929) and Asesela Ravuvu's Vaka i Taukei (University of the South Pacific, 1983) are the standard scholarly treatments. The Kadavu octopus-god is one of the clearest cases in Pacific traditional religion of the octopus depicted as a being whose intelligence allowed it to outmaneuver a larger and more fearsome apparent predator.

The modern "intelligence and adaptability" reading of the octopus is uniquely well-supported by recent cognitive science. Peter Godfrey-Smith's Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016) and Sy Montgomery's The Soul of an Octopus (Atria, 2015) document the octopus's genuine problem-solving capacity, tool use, and recognition of individual humans. The 2020 Netflix documentary My Octopus Teacher (Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed, winner of the 2021 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature) brought the subject to a wide audience.

This is the rare case where the pop-spiritual reading of an animal is aligned with the contemporary science. The octopus is, in empirical measure, an unusually cognitively complex animal. The Andrews 1993 intelligence reading is not wrong; it is just incomplete without the deeper traditions this page treats.

Andrews's 1993 octopus is the intelligence-and-adaptability figure, a reading that has only become better-supported by contemporary cognitive science. He gestures at the Minoan pottery briefly. The Ainu Akkorokamui, Hawaiian Kanaloa, and Fijian Rokobakaniceva traditions are absent. The resulting synthesis is not wrong but thin.