Radio Sutra #8-- Militant Octopodianism

A Militant Octopodian has eight flexible arms, which trail behind us as we swim. Most of us have no internal or external skeleton, allowing us to squeeze through tight places, like slightly cracked windows and under most doors. Octopodians also have hard beaks, and are unafraid to use them. Our mouths lie at the center point of our eight arms. We are highly intelligent, and are arguably the most intelligent invertebrates. We do tensor calculus for fun. For defense against predators, we hide, flee quickly, expel ink, or use color-changing chromatophores in our skin to camouflage ourselves, leaving all you 'one-skinned' retards in the dust. Octopodians are bilaterally symmetrical, like other cephalopods, with two eyes and four pairs of arms. We are absolutely not radially symmetrical, like those slacker Octopodian-wanna-be sea stars.

Octopodians have an unacceptably short life expectancy, with some of our most unfortunate sisters and brothers living for as little as six months. Larger species, such as the North Pacific Giant Octopus, may live for up to five years under certain circumstances. However, reproduction is a cause of death: males can only live for a few months after mating, and females die shortly after their eggs hatch. They neglect to eat during the (roughly) one month period spent taking care of their unhatched eggs, but they don't die of starvation. Endocrine secretions from the two optic glands are the cause of genetically-programmed death (and if these glands are surgically removed, the female Octopodian may live many months beyond reproduction, until she finally starves). In an effort to combat this incredibly irritating design-flaw, we have establised the Militant North Pacific Giant Octopodian Think-Tank, and are currently conducting top-secret gene-splicing research in aquaria world-wide at this very moment.

As Octopodians, we are very proud of our uniquely flexible brains, which in each Octopodian is wrapped around his or her esophagus. Our brains are deeply whorled and ridged and we each possess a very complex visual cortex. The visual cortex is of extreme importance to Octopodians, as we apparently coordinate the movements of their two legs and six arms by sight only. Octopodians also have three hearts. Two pump blood through each of the two gills, while the third pumps blood through the body. This means that once we get the life-expectancy snag worked out, it's going to be real hard to kill us.

Militant Octopodians also support all shell-less, multi-armed molluscs in finding their path to the Sea Goddess. However, we do not recognize hormonally or surgically altered fish as octopoids, and therefore exclude these fish, or fish who self-define as octopuses, cuttlefish or squid, from our tradition. Octopodian Mysteries cannot be understood nor experienced through chemical or surgical alterations to piscene bodies. As octopoids, we honor the ways that we are informed by our eight-armed physiology, cellular memory, and work power from our ink-sacs outward. Even if an octopus has had her ink-sac removed later in life, her body of wisdom has been informed by her physiological experiences of mollusc-hood and tentacle-hood. She will continue to work power from the Divine ink-sac in her center all her life.

The Militant Octopodian tradition focuses on rites to heal octopoids from the effects of personal and global oppression as we deal with growing up multi-armed and shell-less in invertibrate-hating cultures worldwide. The depth to which icthyarchy has shaped and impacted our lives as octopoids cannot truly be understood unless one has experienced it from birth. In light of these bases of our tradition, it is simply not appropriate for hormonally/surgically altered fish to attend our events. Our tradition is simply not about them, and does not address nor include their unique experiences. Exceptions to this exclusion are those nudibranchs, anemones and sea-cucumbers who have been raised Octopodian in our culture. The vast majority of other mollusc-oriented traditions do not share this fundamental requirement, and most often welcome transmolluscs as participants. Octopodian-born-octopuses who self-define as fish, crinoids or scallops would, by their own definition, exclude themselves from Militant Octopodian ritual.

The Militant Octopodian tradition is committed to an octopodist paradigm of true sexual liberation. We are working to free ourselves and our ocean from the effects of icthyarchal culture that equates sexuality, sexual expression, and eroticism with sadism, masochism, dominance and death-by-optical-glad-secretion due to gender-dedicated egg-tending. We will neither support nor condone sexual practices which are de-tentacle-izing, and whose purpose it is to cause pain, humiliation or death-by-predation during coitus (in the case of cuttlefish and squid), whether consensual or not. Consistent with an Octopodian paradigm for an egalitarian and peaceful world where power shared means empowerment for all, we support nothing less than a revolution from within and without, in the ocean in general and in the currents of the Octopodian (or Decapodian) spawning-school.

The Hawai'ian creation myth relates that the present cosmos is only the last of a series, having arisen in stages from the wreck of the previous universe. In this account, the Octopus is the lone survivor of the previous, alien universe.

We are not composed altogether of flesh and blood. We have shape...but that shape is not made of matter. When the stars are right, We can plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars are wrong, We cannot live. But although We no longer live, We never really die. We all lay in stone houses in Our great city of R'lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth will once more be ready for Us.