A Norwegian sailor in 1755 drew what he saw: a massive arm rising from the sea, thick as a ship’s mast, studded with suckers the size of dinner plates. He called it kraken. A Greek philosopher three centuries before Christ had described something similar, but smaller, more cunning, able to change its color and squeeze through a crack no wider than a coin. He called it polypous. The kraken and the octopus share a common anatomical blueprint but diverge completely in scale, habitat, and the kind of terror they inspire. One is a deep-sea leviathan that sinks vessels. The other is a coastal shape-shifter that fits in a tide pool.
The line between them is not merely a matter of size. It is a question of what a culture needs a monster to be.
Where the Kraken Myth Comes From
The earliest written account of a sea monster that matches the kraken description appears in the Natural History of Pliny the Elder (77 CE). Pliny describes a “polyp” so large it attacked fishing boats near Cartagena, Spain, dragging men under with arms thirty feet long. He treats it as a real animal, not a myth, and gives measurements.
The word kraken itself entered European languages through the work of the Danish naturalist Erik Pontoppidan, bishop of Bergen, in his The Natural History of Norway (1752-1753). Pontoppidan collected reports from Norwegian fishermen who described a creature the size of a floating island. When it submerged, it left a whirlpool that could pull a longboat under. The fishermen called it kraken or krake, an old Scandinavian word for a twisted, unhealthy tree branch. The name itself suggests something gnarled, ancient, and wrong.
Pontoppidan was careful to distinguish the kraken from the sea serpent, another creature his informants claimed to have seen. The kraken did not attack ships directly. It rose slowly, often mistaken for an island, and the real danger was the vortex it created when it sank. This detail matters. The kraken is not a predator that hunts humans. It is a force of nature that humans accidentally encounter.
The Swedish writer Jacob Wallenberg (1781) added the detail that the kraken’s excrement attracted fish, and that fishermen would deliberately fish above a kraken because the catch was better. This gave the creature an ambiguous relationship with the people who feared it. The kraken was dangerous but also productive. It made the sea fertile.
Modern cryptozoology has tried to identify the kraken with the giant squid (Architeuthis dux), first confirmed scientifically in 1857 by the Danish zoologist Japetus Steenstrup. But the giant squid lives at depths below 300 meters, rarely surfaces, and has no documented history of attacking ships. The kraken of folklore is something else: a creature of the surface, visible, deliberate, and large enough to be mistaken for land.
What the Octopus Actually Is
The octopus belongs to the order Octopoda, first described by the French naturalist Georges Cuvier in 1797. Cuvier placed it among the cephalopods, alongside squid and cuttlefish, and noted its most distinctive feature: eight arms, no shell, and a centralized brain that seemed to operate with unusual intelligence for an invertebrate.
The common octopus (Octopus vulgaris) reaches an arm span of about three meters. It lives in coastal waters worldwide, hiding in crevices during the day and hunting crabs, mollusks, and small fish at night. It has three hearts, blue blood (copper-based hemocyanin, not iron-based hemoglobin), and the ability to change its skin color and texture in under a second through specialized pigment cells called chromatophores.
The octopus is not a monster. It is a predator, but it preys on animals smaller than itself. It avoids conflict with larger creatures. Its famous ink cloud is not an attack. It is a screen, a decoy shaped to resemble the octopus itself, allowing the real animal to slip away while the predator attacks a cloud of mucus and melanin.
Ancient Mediterranean cultures knew the octopus well. Aristotle described it in his History of Animals (circa 350 BCE) with remarkable accuracy. He noted that the octopus could change color to match rocks, that it used its arms to carry shells as portable shelters, and that it sometimes crawled onto land to move between tide pools. He also recorded a belief that the octopus would eat its own arms if food was scarce, a claim modern biologists dispute but which persisted in natural history texts for two thousand years.
The One Feature That Separates Them
The most practical distinction between kraken and octopus is scale and habitat. The octopus is a coastal animal that fits within human experience. You can see one in a tide pool, touch one (carefully), watch it solve a puzzle in a laboratory tank. The kraken exists at a size that defeats human perception. You cannot see the whole kraken at once. You see an arm, a hump, a disturbance in the water.
This difference in scale produces a difference in behavior. The octopus is curious. It investigates objects with its arms, tastes through its suckers, remembers human faces. The kraken is indifferent. It does not notice individual humans because individual humans are too small to register. The danger is not malice. It is the same danger posed by a falling tree or a collapsing cave. The kraken does not hunt you. You are simply in the way.
The octopus has a beak, a hard chitinous structure at the center of its arms, used to crush crab shells. The kraken, in the accounts collected by Pontoppidan, has no visible mouth. Its arms rise from the water and drag things under. The creature itself remains mostly unseen. This is the oldest fear: not the monster you fight, but the monster you only feel.
Symbolism of the Octopus
In Mediterranean antiquity, the octopus was a symbol of adaptability and cunning. The Minoans of Crete (circa 1600 BCE) painted octopuses on their pottery with arms curling in symmetrical spirals, a design that suggests order imposed on a chaotic form. The octopus was not feared. It was admired for its ability to escape traps, change shape, and survive in multiple environments.
The Roman naturalist Pliny reported that the octopus could crawl out of the sea at night, enter coastal villas through drains, and steal food from kitchens. This gave the octopus a reputation as a trickster, a thief that operated at the boundary between sea and land. It was not a god. It was a clever animal that outsmarted humans.
In Japanese folklore, the octopus appears in the Tako no Makura (Octopus Pillow) story from the 18th century, where a giant octopus attacks a ship but is defeated by a clever sailor who cuts off its arms one by one. The octopus here is a test of ingenuity, not a force of nature. The hero wins by thinking, not by strength.
Modern occult symbolism treats the octopus as a creature of the subconscious. Its decentralized nervous system (two-thirds of its neurons are in its arms, not its brain) makes it a symbol of distributed intelligence, of knowing without thinking. The octopus does not decide to change color. Its skin decides. This resonates with practitioners who work with trance states, automatic writing, or any practice that bypasses the conscious mind.
Symbolism of the Kraken
The kraken carries the weight of the deep. It is not a creature of the shore but of the abyssal plain, the part of the ocean that no human saw until the 20th century. The kraken represents what lies below the reach of light, below the reach of knowledge.
In Norse cosmology, the kraken is sometimes identified with the hafgufa, a sea monster described in the 13th-century Konungs skuggsjá (The King’s Mirror). The hafgufa is so large that sailors mistake it for an island. They land on its back, light a fire, and the creature submerges, dragging them down. This is not an attack. It is a misunderstanding. The sailors did not know what they were standing on.
The kraken appears in alchemical texts as a symbol of prima materia, the raw undifferentiated substance that must be transformed through the Great Work. The kraken rises from the sea, the alchemical symbol of the unconscious, and must be confronted before it can be integrated. To meet the kraken is to meet the part of yourself that has no name, no shape, no limit.
In modern occult practice, the kraken is sometimes invoked as a guardian of thresholds, particularly the threshold between waking and dreaming. Its size makes it a gatekeeper. You cannot slip past the kraken. You must be recognized, judged, allowed through. This is different from the octopus, which slips through cracks. The kraken does not slip. It blocks.
How the Two Creatures Appear in Practice
The octopus appears in folk magic as an ingredient for binding and confusion spells. Dried octopus ink, ground to powder, is used in some Mediterranean traditions to cloud an enemy’s vision or to create a smoke screen that allows the practitioner to escape a situation unseen. The ink is not a poison. It is a veil.
The octopus arm, dried and carried, is said to grant flexibility in negotiations. The practitioner who carries it can change position, adapt to circumstances, find a way out of a bad deal. This is sympathetic magic. The arm that moves in any direction grants the same quality to the bearer.
The kraken appears in ceremonial magic as a name of power. The 17th-century grimoire The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage includes a list of spirits whose names are drawn from natural forces. Some modern practitioners substitute “Kraken” for the names of water spirits when working with deep-sea currents or with the concept of overwhelming force. The kraken is not summoned to be controlled. It is summoned to be witnessed.
A practitioner working with kraken energy might sit in total darkness, in a room without windows, and visualize a shape so large that no room could contain it. The goal is not to see the kraken. The goal is to feel what it means to be small, to be temporary, to be a speck on the surface of something that has no surface.
Common Misconceptions
The kraken is a giant octopus. This is the most common error. The kraken in historical accounts is described with multiple arms, but also with a body that resembles a floating island, not a cephalopod mantle. Some accounts describe the kraken as having horns or a mane. The giant squid is a closer anatomical match than the octopus, but even that identification is speculative. The kraken is not a species. It is a category.
Octopuses are aggressive toward humans. The opposite is true. Octopuses avoid humans. Bites are rare and almost always defensive. The blue-ringed octopus (Hapalochlaena maculosa), native to the Pacific, carries a neurotoxin that can kill a human, but it only bites when handled. The octopus does not hunt humans. It hides from them.
The kraken was believed to be real by all sailors. Pontoppidan’s informants believed it was real, but they also believed it was rare, shy, and not worth hunting. Many sailors treated the kraken as a tall tale, a story told to new crew members to test their gullibility. The kraken was never a universal belief. It was a regional tradition, specific to the North Atlantic, and even there it was debated.
The octopus has eight tentacles. It does not. A tentacle has suckers only at the tip. An arm has suckers along its entire length. The octopus has eight arms. The squid and cuttlefish have eight arms and two tentacles. This distinction matters in zoology and in occult symbolism. The octopus is all arms, all reach, no specialized appendage. It touches everything equally.
FAQ
Can a kraken and an octopus be the same species? No. The kraken is a folkloric category, not a biological one. No known cephalopod reaches the size described in kraken accounts. The giant squid is the closest living match, but it belongs to a different order than the octopus.
Do octopuses really change color to match their surroundings? Yes. Octopuses control chromatophores in their skin to change color, pattern, and texture in under a second. This is not camouflage in the passive sense. It is active, deliberate, and controlled by the same nervous system that moves the arms.
Is the kraken in the Bible? No. The biblical Leviathan is sometimes compared to the kraken, but Leviathan is described as a sea serpent or dragon, not a cephalopod. The kraken is a post-medieval Scandinavian tradition with no direct biblical source.
Can you keep an octopus as a pet? Yes, but it requires a specialized saltwater aquarium, a secure lid (octopuses are escape artists), and a diet of live crabs and shrimp. Most species live only one to two years. They are not low-maintenance animals.
The octopus hides in a crack in the reef and watches you pass. The kraken does not hide. It does not watch. It simply is, below the keel, below the sounding line, below the depth where light penetrates. One creature you might meet. The other you can only imagine. Both teach the same lesson: the sea has more room than we do.
For further reading, explore our guide to mythical creatures and the octopus symbolism entry. You may also find our guide to sea monsters in folklore useful for understanding how different cultures have mapped the same fear onto different forms.