On the Kraken, Mesolithic tribes, cephalopod-symbolism in consciousness-mirrors, and related topics, publ. on the 05/09/2026

Some of the most mysterious gods, deities, and spirits, are the ones that exist in their own definition of the divine. They are perhaps not gods in the way we understand them today. They are the beings and gods that seem to come from a World before, and often even indigenous languages and our deepest mythologies do not fully explain their story and place within our World. Some of these most mysterious of entities are connected to the sea, not in the sense of being aquatic humans, mermaids, mermen, seal-folk, rather in the sense of being beings that are far less human-looking, and far less comprehensible, although I suspect that Draugs and seal-folk are connected to them in some way. These beings also connect greatly to the phenomena of "floating islands". 

Draugr in Old Norse also meant a "log" or "tree trunk", which is likely of different etymological origin, but ultimately comes to associate draugr in the sense of an undead spirit being, with the idea of a "log" or "tree stump" as part of a dead tree, semantically representing that a draugr is a dead being. Whilst the draugar connect to this phenomena, and display almost cephalopod-like features sometimes (Norwegian drauger having seaweed instead of a head), Draugs are still largely of human form, unlike the Kraken. Interestingly, the word Kraken, from at least in terms of the Norwegian form krake, also meant a "stunted tree", implying perhaps that the Kraken is an inverse, warped form of a divine tree, and also illustrating a similarity with the Draugs and their semantically associated "tree symbolism."

Nowadays the Kraken is imagined just as large cephalopod, perhaps as an early account of the giant squid or of a larger squid species. But the actual folklore and mythology around the Kraken does not seem to imply this. The mythology seems to imply I think that the Kraken is a being of non-euclidean shape and geometry, something which people reported as "looking kind of like this..." whilst others would say "looking kind of like this (other thing)", as though the actual form of the being was not entirely observable, and that when describing it, people used the closest things to what their brains "created" when trying to see it, something that could perhaps happen when the human eyes and brain try to perceive something that is non-euclidean, and/or which our brain might interpret as looking vaguely "like" things that we know, yet fundamentally it being not like them. This might mean that our eyes and brain can only approximate the being's connection to and form within the shapes of light, objects and dimensions in our reality. Krake in Norwegian could also mean a "wooden anchor", whilst in some dialects kraka means to "drag an anchor" across the ocean floor. Ultimately the ideas of a crooked tree, and an anchor, are dimensionally related to the image of a squid or crab. All of these meanings seem to point in some way as to what the word was originally describing. The Kraken is sometimes described in Danish as a søe-trold - "sea troll" [søːˀ tˢʁ̥ʌlˀ] or [søːˀ tˢχʌlˀ], like the Draug, as I discussed in another unrelated publication on a different website.  We can also compare the Croatian word kraka - "crab limb", "branch of a river" among other meanings. 

Fundamentally, the Kraken was described as something much, much larger than any biological organism (except maybe a huge mycelium network) on this planet. Giant squid and whales are large animals, but the Kraken was the size of an island, and was variously described as having tentacles, many heads, or horns, making it akin in a sense to both a cephalopod, a crab, and to a starfish. The many horns and tentacled descriptions are in many senses akin to how the Finnish deity Iku-Turso is described, although Iku-Turso is a kind of god, a figure in the histories of Finnish creation, whereas the Kraken seems more often regarded as something that the Norse were aware of, but which did not have the same kind of central story for, in their own languages and beliefs. Does this perhaps imply that the Finns had more knowledge about these beings or archetypes than the Scandinavians did? I think it certainly implies that the Finns were more knowledgeable about these things and their place within the creation, as a part of their linguistic reality. And did the Finns associate Iku-Turso with the Baltic Sea, or with the Barents Sea, or even Norwegian Sea and Atlantic Ocean? As I have commented elsewhere, there is implication that "Finns" were in Iceland as well, or were connected to Iceland, that Iceland was a part of their world as well. Jonas Lie's fictional story Finn Blood, drawing on real traditions, also clearly implies a connection between the Finns, the undersea World, and the drauger, with a floating island also appearing in this story. I have discussed this story in a lot of detail elsewhere, but I do plan at some point to publish a thorough interpretation of the whole story, paragraph by paragraph, given alongside the English translation of the original story. Finns were also associated with floating islands in Shetland folklore, and I have written extensively elsewhere, many things specifically about floating islands themselves, and much more about the Finns too.

One of the other things that really sets the Kraken apart from cephalopods, and implies that it was something more, is its association with creating whirlpools. This, and its claws, or crab-like appendages, its horns, its size, and its behaviour, all of which are not cephalopod-like. By folklore traditions, basket stars were sometimes considered to be the weeer, smaller forms of Kraken. If basket stars were associated with the Kraken, then it may imply that the tentacles of the Kraken were far more numerous than those of a cephalopod, and may have been more horn-like, and branching. Sometimes the central body of a brittle star in a sense resembles that of a crab, too. This is not to say that the Kraken is a brittle star, but rather perhaps that brittle stars might resemble them more closely than other biological beings. 

Once I met this lady, who told me of a dream in which she was swallowed by an enormous sea monster, and that she "became" a part of the being, she could hear its voice, and the voices of other people in the mind of the sea being, all the same consciousness, but different voices within it, existing as aspects of its consciousness or mind, spiritually unique spirits as part of a larger spirit. This links into things I have said elsewhere, but is this perhaps akin to how a cephalopod thinks, with multiple brains, communicating with each other and with the outside world through what feels like telepathy? The person said that during the dream they were "encouraging others" to join the collective organism.

On the website: pathoftheancestralmothers.com, there is a page titled: Walking the Path of the Anncestral Mothers a creative journey around the wheel of the year. Under the title Seal Skin Moon is a comment about the ancestral mother "Cee-al", connected to Mesolithic Scotland and to the Oronsay Shell Middens. This is something I have also written about before in detail, but I did not identify these goddess figures with a particular name. I do not know the origin of this name "Cee-al". Apart from my own work, the only other reference to this topic I came across was a website and (I think) book advertised several years ago, where the writer was discussing the existence of a truly ancient one-eyed sea goddess or cailleach of Irish folklore, who was depicted as a one-eyed cephalopod-like being, somewhat akin to one of the dalek creatures from Dr Who. I wonder if Cee-al is Cíocal or Ciochol Gricenchos, a Fomorian god from Irish tradition, the Gric- part of the second name is somewhat akin to the *krak- root in "Kraken"; and Gricenchos might be something like "crooked-foot", again showing similar archetypal themes to those implied by the etymology of Kraken. Whilst the elongated skull phenomena is not connected to anything other than variation in human genetics, and perhaps alterations in the hormone genes found in Denisovans and Neanderthals - there is symbolic meaning too, as I have discussed, and this symbolic meaning also perhaps extends towards metaphysical similarities with cephalopods. The following section also relates in a different way to the blog post on this website before this one on this page, and it also relates to the blog post on this page but is only in this blog post on this page. I have discussed some aspects of it elsewhere including in yet another unrelated blog post on this site before the aforementioned one. 

For example, the Apkallu (discussed in Sumerian tradition) are depicted as having fish heads attached to their own heads, the Apkallu being sages and magicians, their fish heads also exemplifying the idea of an elongated skull. Into the realm of Cthulhonic tentacled beings, and the connection between this and our nervous system, as aspects of the same archetype perhaps. In which case I wonder if symbolically the mythological idea behind some of these longer heads and hats might relate in some way to a concept of the head also being inhabited by some kind of other consciousness, more akin to a cephalopod in terms of its communication/language, and I wonder if this is what is implied when the Ancient Egyptians depicted individuals with the Wadjet or Uraeus coming out of the front of their head. These things, hypothetically, do not I think imply that a cephalopod or "other" tentacled nervous system type being occupied the head, but rather they could I think in some way imply that, if the head is a "receiver" or "time mirror" in a sense, then an expanded skull/time mirror that mimics a cephalopod/squid shape might act as an extension of the individual's consciousness, in a way more akin to a squid - for instance. I am speaking here in purely symbolic terms, and when I speak of cephalopods here, I am in terms of concepts and archetypes that are not in the physical but rather in the archetypal and metaphysical, dream-world expressions of reality. In this more abstract, archetypal reality, squids, octopuses and humans, whilst completely different, do share a number of similarities, and in a sense it is interesting how in Dr Who - the fictional series, it is implied that a human head surviving death would "evolve" into a squid-like being, as its neurological system in essence "becomes" its whole body. Whilst daleks are not real, and whilst there are no actual biological cephalopod elements to humans, I do wonder if the Sumerians for example associated the Apkallu, their fish/aquatic heads and the "enlongated shape" in human forms with a similar kind of mirror/consciousness interface that might biologically exist in squid for example, something connected to the way the nervous system works within this "bell" shape? The Uraeus seems to connect this fundamentally to the Third Eye, the concept of the Seat of the Soul, and is could essentially be that perhaps people with longer heads had super-developed third eyes, with implications by some (including me) that they could have particular linguistic and sound abilities, telepathic abilities. They may have for example had less dissonance between the analytical and imaginative sides of the human mind, so to them, "numbers" and calculation might exist as a biproduct of their cosmic awareness, allowing them and their minds to interface with reality in a way which was biological but also "computer-like" due to its seamless integration with time, and with imagination and physical reality. This lack of "dissociation" between analytical and creative sides of thinking, might essentially be why they were apparently able to "tap into" reality in a way that produced strange stone structures, other anomalies etc, if we consider that they may have been literally able to "edit" physical reality with a language code, connected to our languages, but also cosmic, musical, and perhaps connected to light and telepathy as well as to sound. These ideas are very speculative, and of course there is no real evidence for much of the philosophy in the last paragraph - it is nevertheless interesting philosophy. When people go to these ancient sites and try to say "people from another star system did this" or "they used advanced technology", there are for sure other possibilities. Note that some of the aforementioned topics connect with an unrelated blog post on this website which I published a couple of days ago, and with an upcoming Silly Linguistics article. 

As I also commented in a different Silly Linguistics article published earlier this year, I have also dreamed of a deity who might well be archetypally the same as "Cee-al" or connected to her, although again I do not know the source on this. I have had a lot of dreams of this nature which I have described in different places. I did not previously identify it with "Cee-al" nor did I mention her name in the other publication, and will discuss it differently here. Essentially in this dream, I was in a cave, perhaps the cave on Staffa, and on the wall to the right, was an area without basalt columns, a smoother surface, dark purple coloured, glinting with damp. On that surface was the stone form of a goddess, who had a lot of octopus-like tentacles, a kind of ghostly human face of a pretty woman, with tentacles instead of a mouth, and the centre of her body had something like an eye or orifice. It was difficult to fully "see" what she looked like, and her presence in the rock felt alive. It was like I could only look at one part of her at one time, she appeared very geometric, akin to a psychedelic depiction in a way. 

The people of the Pacific Northwest seem to have a lot of folklore around octopuses and with connected beings. As I have discussed in another blog post on this site recently (the unrelated one that came before this), the Northwest Pacific peoples are I believe strongly connected to their Mesolithic ancestors. I will add more here, essentially I think there are possibly linguistic connections between them, and other coastal, shell-midden building peoples we identify as Mesolithic in Europe, Africa etc. These people are of course connected to the area around Staffa, Oronsay, and to their Mesolithic shell middens in general, and in particular to those parts of the Argyll coastline. I have also commented a lot elsewhere on these possible connections, especially those linguistic, but much more too. There are I think many lexical similarities and even phonetic similarities between Argyll Gaelic, Afro-Asiatic and some Northwest Pacific languages. Sometimes the Haisla language (a Wakashan language) sounds to me to have a similar prosody, at times, to Scottish Gaelic prosody (in certain dialects of Scottish Gaelic). This is not to mention the Haplogroup X connection, although as I implied in the unrelated blog post before this one, this Haplogroup does not seem connected to shell midden builders per-se. Also as I have commented elsewhere the shell midden is connected to this goddess figure, to the idea of a divine womb coming out of the ocean, the golden ratio, the emergence of time. I have written about this extensively elsewhere, including many dreams connected to it, and it connects into this subject of time mirrors which I have discussed in other blog posts and publications in different ways recently. 

In the Northwest Pacific there is an entity known to the Kwakwaka'wakw, and to the Nuxalk, called Kumugwe. This undersea king is connected to copper (arguably like Väinämöinen), and seems to be sometimes understood as appearing octopus or cephalopod-like. He is connected with seals, and is said to have a head so big that it appeared as an island, which reminds me of Kraken mythology. That Kumugwe is said to be the master of seals, is perhaps akin in some way to the Draugs being connected to seals, and the selkies, Fin-men, Finfolk etc, and selkies, also connected to seals, and the way in which selkies are clearly connected to shell middens, owing to an archaeological find in Scotland of a seal flipper bones and human bones placed together, showing ancient archaeological evidence of the totemic selkie, draug archetype. As I have discussed elsewhere, the "shellycoat" of Scots mythology is I think also connected to these shell-, snail-, cephalopod-goddess archetypes

I hope that this article/blog post was a fascinating read. It is written in honour of cephalopods, of Kumugwe, the Kraken and Cee-al, Cíocal/Ciochol Gricenchos, and of the drauger, Fin-folk, selkies, Fin-men, the Apkallu, and of the indigenous peoples mentioned in this article. The Tlingit also have a female deity with an Octopus-like aura, I do not know her name, but wish to honour her with this article too, and the Tlingit.