O. & Taningia,
Well, I've stumbled onto another piece of this puzzle. Turns out, the process of sustaining the octopus' vile reputation was helped along by Adolf Hitler himself, in the pages of
Mein Kampf: "If our people and our state become the victims of bloodthirsty and money-thirsty Jewish tyrants, the whole world will be enmeshed in the tentacles of this octopus." I'd been aware of Nazi propaganda illustrations depicting "International Jewry" as an octopus, but I was surprised to find that the association had been made by Hitler himself, in his ideology's founding document. Surprised, and struck by the suggestive proximity of the word "bloodthirsty" to his cephalopod metaphor.
Vampirism and cephalopods have a peculiar relationship in the popular imagination. In "The Toilers of the Sea," Victor Hugo endowed his "devilfish" (an octopus that attacks the hero Gillatt in a watery grotto) with vampiric attributes, explaining that octopus ingest prey by first liquefying them. Illustrations accompanying Hugo's text commonly show the devilfish's arms leaving bloody welts where the suckers had fastened onto Gillatt. It's not hard to imagine an ignorant man assuming that the suckers on a cephalopod's arm might be feeding structures of some sort, akin to the mouth-parts of leeches and lampreys. Even those schooled in biology and zoology might make the momentary visual association between the superficially related structures of an octopus sucker and a leech's mouth. Carl Chun owns the dubious distinction of having established a formal connection between cephalopods and vampires: in 1903, he first described
Vampyroteuthis infernalis, the "Vampire-squid from Hell."
If Hitler read Hugo's novel, he might have appreciated the metaphoical possibilities of the vampiric devilfish. Where Gillatt stood for the particular working-class associated with the sea, and the devilfish for the system that exploited them, Hitler might have imagined the hard-working German
volk parasitized by conspiratorial Jews. For Hitler, a man obsessed with the pseudo-science of racialism and eugenics, the notion of a parasitic appendage would have carried a potent psychic charge. Multiplied eight-fold, it provided him with a potent image. That it was abysmally wrong made it no less effective: the visual association made between sucker and mouth, between octopus and vampire, occurred faster than judgment and did not need to be rationally sustained. It was one of numerous bestial metaphors in the anti-semitic bag of tricks, and Hitler had an audience willing to suspend its critical faculties.
Below is the frontspiece to an 1883 edition of "The Toilers of the Sea."
Mon dieu.
Clem