Before the giant squid was officially discovered in 2004, She was known as a sailor’s nightmare. For centuries, mariners whispered of a tentacled horror rising from the deeps. No one knew when a tentacle would suddenly wrap itself around a hapless ship and pull everyone down into the briny darkness.

Before Japanese oceanographers photographed a giant squid, the proof of her existence were shapeless blobs that washed up on beaches. Occasionally, people would find squid beaks in the stomachs of sperm whales. Others did notice the scars on sperm whales, where a giant squid must have grabbed them with hooked tentacles.

The belief of a huge tentacled menace lurking so deep where no light penetrated sparked horror in sailors. Furthermore, the giant squid encapsulated the many existential fears that humans possess. Alfred Lord Tennyson illustrated this in his poem, “The Kraken.” Later H.P Lovecraft took this a step further, and wrote about the Great Cthulhu, a hideous primordial being.

What is this mollusk that fills humans with dread? Like all squids, the giant squid has eight arms and two tentacles with hooks on the suckers. This squid has eyes, the size of dinner plates to see in the inky blackness. She possesses a razor sharp beak to kill prey with. The difference between Her and the other squids is her immense size.

Perhaps the animal herself simply unsettles people. In the mid-1800s, Professor Japetus Steenstrup (Denmark), the leading expert on squids at the time said, “Squids on the whole make a grim impression on all those who are not accustomed to seeing them more frequently. Those animals aroused still greater astonishment in earlier times.”

Imagine seeing a bloated body of a giant squid washed up on shore. A person can easily understand why Jules Verne would feature a man-eating squid in his novel “20,000 Leagues under the Sea.” The ocean is vast, and the giant squid lives at its tremendous depths.

The Giant Squid plunges people into the depths of their fears. She symbolizes the darkness that we wish would disappear. The Giant Squid gathers up our metaphysical horrors and tortured fantasies that we endeavor to hide. She thrusts them into our faces. No matter how much light we shine into the depths, She remains just out of our sight. All we can do is accept what the Giant Squid shows to us.

Below the thunders of the upper deep,
Far far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides: above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumbered and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant fins the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages and will lie
Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by men and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.

Alfred Lord Tennyson