Ursula: Loving the Sea Witch
This is the story of Cecaelia, half-witchy-woman and half-undulating-octopus. She appears all over the world, in many forms, but her most famous adaptation is that of Ursula, the sea witch.
There are so many ways to move through the waters. Just watch Cecaelia, the sea witch, carrier of underwater chaos, master of mimicry, sand-stirrer. She balances her human head and shoulders atop an undulating lower half: the ass and tentacles of a juicy, sensual octopus. In the world of finfolk and mermaids, she carries a different kind of weight. She is a strategist, an instigator, an unrelenting protector of her underwater home.
Her legacy undulates, too: Cecaelia is found everywhere from First Nations traditions of the Pacific Northwest islands, to the depths of the Disney underworld, to the seapunk fans of Tumblr and Reddit, and the wiki users who gave her the name. Ursula is calling for a little more attention; let’s linger with her, in the negative spaces–the murky pockets of stillness–in which she thrives.
The Octopus Spirits of the Pacific Northwest Isles
the Haida and Tlingit peoples of the Pacific Northwest often call her Devil-fish with great reverence. Here, she is said to hold power over human sickness and health. She is one who guards the environment and demands respect and stewardship. She is a watcher, a healer.
In these traditions, hybrid human/sea-creatures are not sort-of spliced together in the mid-section the way many other mermaids are. Devil-fish transitions effortlessly and wholly between her human and animal forms, fluid and ever-changing. The Chinook Salmon spirit and Miq’Maq half-fish Sabawaelnu do the same: they transpose from one shape to another, mediating between the human and natural worlds. The Haida represent the Devil-fish as a cunning, improvisatory, resourceful element. She can regenerate her body and environment when they have been harmed: a sorcerer. In human form, she keeps the others in line, as in this 19th-Century tale from the Bancroft collection.
One morning, as the tide went out, the old people came to sit and watch the ocean. As they sat there, they saw a woman walking along the beach. Her hair was long and strung into eight braids. Her name was Octopus… "Look," one of the old people said, "Here comes Raven. He is going to bother Octopus." "Ah" another of the old people said. "That is not a good idea. You shouldn't bother Octopus!"
In the lands now called British Columbia, interspecies friendships between women and octopi are so common that National Geographic produced a documentary, narrated by Paul Rudd, about people who think of themselves as “octopus whisperers”. Friends of the Devil-fish bond with her as if she is their beloved pet, or they hers. They rendezvous daily in the tide pools to share treats, head scratches and cuddles. The Devil-fish is always engaged, aware, and able to navigate tricky negotiations with the land-lubbers. She has a good time with it.
The neat line between human and animal becomes entangled, long sticky tentacles and braided tendrils of hair, all bound together in the in-between space where sea meets land. Befriend the Devil-fish, and an entire world opens to you. All wrapped up in each other, it’s hard to tell who is who. A different kind of mermaid.
Naw Naagalang: The Octopus Houses of Haida Gwaii
Terri-Lynn Williams-Davidson is a native Haida lawyer, an environmental activist, a musician and multimedia artist who depicted herself as a series of supernatural beings for her groundbreaking exhibition, Out of Concealment: Female Supernatural Beings of Haida Gwaii. She inhabits the legend of the Devil-fish, elegantly guarding the well-being of the oceans. She tells us:
Naw Jaada is in a state of transformation. In nature, octopuses become red in colour to signal aggression. Her red colour indicates her willingness to engage in battle. Seemingly peaceful and calm, she asks us: “Do Canadian citizens really want their governments to continue to deny legal recognition of Indigenous Title?” Naw Jaada reminds us to focus on future generations as we re-conceptualize how to manage human use of the land and sea.
Williams-Davidson’s work is, like the supernatural beings within, hybrid, fluid, and confrontational. It deserves close attention and amplification.
For thousands of years, the Haida have constructed shelters called Octopus houses, places of protection and nurturance, for thousands of years, and their indigenous history of the region is intertwined with the legend of the octopus and her sisters. The project Naw Naagalang: Octopus Houses of Haida Gwai is a partnership between anthropologists, archaeologists, native historians, and spiritualists. It documents the ways in which Devil-fish and humans have cultivated interdependence in the coastal ecosystem.
As with any other gathering and use of the natural world, our kuuniisii taught that yahguudang (respect) for all things was and remains the most important principle governing our relationships with nature. For example, we are taught to ad kyanang kunGasda (to ask first and explain why the various beings were being asked to give their fibre, life and space for us to continue our way of living) and to say Haawa.
Gathered together, the Haida Gwaii Octopus stories and rituals reflect a collective desire to return to the folds of the sea, not to dominate it, or to leave it behind for human civilization. In the “The Devil-Fish’s daughter,” Haida storytellers tell of a two-legged village chief who marries an octopus and brings her to live on dry land with their children, but misses their life underwater. One day, suddenly, the couple returns to the sea to live happily:
Eventually the Devil-fish wife pined for her watery world. Then one day while she and her husband sat in her father-in-law's house, her spouse began to melt. At the same moment the Devil-fish wife disappeared through the gaps between the floor planks. Her husband then took on the form of a Devil-fish and his soft shiny body followed his wife between the floor planks. They both returned to the realm of the Devil-fish and her father.
The agency that comes with the ability to transition, the agency to return, the power to slip through the floorboards at will into the waters below, the power to double and regenerate, to live in many worlds at once. The Devil-fish is a sorceress. She may find herself in exile, but her most important power is that of return.
Ursula and Ariel: Partners in Immortality
In 1989, the release of Disney’s epic, underwater princess fantasy, The Little Mermaid, was met with more than 6 million in opening weekend gross. Kids everywhere strapped seashell brassieres over their pajamas, fastened waist-length ginger wigs to their hairlines, and pinched their waists with lavender sashes hung with iridescent scales. They learned Ariel’s songs of longing for their Girl Scout pageants, held their proms under the sea.
And they were electrified by the figure of Ursula, the sea-witch, whose unbridled hips carried the action of the film. Caressed by the ghostly eels who do her bidding, Ursula is also, somehow, hideous in her sexuality, threatening in her gender non-conformity, dangerous in her extra-ness. She remains a feminist truth-teller, a queer medicine woman: terrifying but so compelling.
Disney’s treatment was based on Hans Christen Anderson’s folktale of the same name. She is a complex character, both a hideous crone and a contender for the throne-she claims it was stolen from her by King Triton. In the film, Ursula is an antagonist to Ariel. She takes the maiden’s voice as a fee for helping her grow legs and seduce her prince. Then she cloaks herself in a human body and steals the prince from Ariel.
The men up there don't like a lot of blabber They think a girl who gossips is a bore Yes, on land it's much preferred For ladies not to say a word And after all, dear, what is idle prattle for?
Come on, they're not all that impressed with conversation True gentlemen avoid it when they can But they dote and swoon and fawn On a lady who's withdrawn It's she who holds her tongue who gets a man
Diseny’s Ursula, based on the camp of ‘70s Baltimore drag artist Divine, is repulsive and fascinating, a star. She’s less a villain than a sorcerer: a medium who let eels fondle her face as she speaks, to hide in her bosom. In the Anderson tale and the traditions that feed it, the Sea-Witch (who is nameless, archetypal) enables the little mermaid (who is also nameless, archetypal) to grow “hideous” legs, not because she loves the prince, but because she intends to manipulate him into falling in love with her, thereby transforming her into a human who can possess an immortal soul. The Little Mermaid’s grandmother has told her the secret: mermaids live for 300 years, but when they die, they die forever. Humans have souls.
The Little Mermaid becomes obsessed with the idea of eternal life and eagerly begs the sea-witch to cut out her tongue, to mix it with droplets of witch-blood, and use the potion to send her to shore as a human. Every step on these stump-legs, the witch warns, will feel like knives cutting into her torso. Who would want to live on dry land, to keep quiet or the sake of men, to push against one’s full weight against the dry earth? What she wouldn’t give to be immortal, as desired by her grandmother.
“We have not immortal souls, we shall never live again; but, like the green sea-weed, when once it has been cut off, we can never flourish more. Human beings, on the contrary, have a soul which lives forever, lives after the body has been turned to dust. It rises up through the clear, pure air beyond the glittering stars. As we rise out of the water, and behold all the land of the earth, so do they rise to unknown and glorious regions which we shall never see.”
In the tale, which has zero dialogue from any underwater or landlubbing males whatsoever, the sea-witch, the mermaid grandmother, the five mermaid sisters and a team of air spirits are the main characters. The sea-witch works as part of this team of feminine transformation, and the air spirits eventually resurrect the Little Mermaid from the sea form to grant her eternal life. The Little Mermaid’s coming of age is a group effort.
What’s fascinating about the character of Ursula is her continued ascendance as as a hero, shoulder-to-shoulder with the Ariels. More attendees of the annual Coney Island mermaid parade sport purple faces and octopus booties rather than the sleek, fishy variety. Instead of Ariel’s songs of longing, they chant the sea-witch’s lines of empowerment:
Now I am the ruler of all the ocean The waves obey my every whim The sea and all its toils bow to my power!!!!
Ursula’s objective was never to win the heart of the prince, but to steal the trident of the sea king, and to rule. Do not mess with an Octopus, a sea-witch, a devil-fish, a woman in-between. This is the lesson we learn from a world of Cecaelia lore.
Cecaelia as Digital Folklore
The origin of the term Cecelia is murky, emerging from internet fandom boards in the 21st century as a way to describe Ursula-adjacent beings: an alternative to the clunky term, “octo-mermaid.” She has proliferated on fantasy and cosplay forums, hentai sites, and digital art archives. As a folklorist, I see this pattern as an emergent hunger for the kinds of wisdom–ecological, queer, resistant, radical– that the Cecaelia has to teach us. As a counterpoint to the delicate Ariels, we turn to the powerful Haida stories of the Devil-fish, and also to global sea-witch traditions from Morgana to Atagardis to the Ningyo of Japan, to the flesh-hungry sirens of the ancient Mediterranean. The call for the Devil-fish is clear, and it comes from many directions.
Let’s give the Devil-fish some space; let’s build her a dwelling, and cultivate it as a matter of sacred order, as the First Nations people have done for thousands of years. She’s ready to emerge, to take a look around, and to guide us into some new ways of relating to ourselves, our bodies, our very nature. Let’s get tangled in her textures, visit her home in the bottoms, invite her to dwell in our homes.
Pat Carroll, the accomplished actor who voiced Ursula in the Disney film, said that she’d be happy for her legacy to be entwined with the persona of sea-witch long after her death. A different kind of immortality: a hybrid one, eternal life with a sense of humor, a belly laugh, and a crackling willingness to try new environments, knowing there will always be a return.
References:
Philip Hayward (2017) “Becoming Ariel, Becoming Ursula”, in Making a Splash: Mermaids (and Mermen) in 20th and 21st Century Audiovisual Media, John Libbey Publishing Ltd, →ISBN, page 37: “The entity’s name appears to derive from a single source text, a short pictorial story published in Vampirella magazine entitled ‘Cilia’ (Cuti and Mas 1972) that became the basis for the more general figure of the ‘cecaelia’ some time in the late 2000s.”
Sarah Allison (2020 April 27) “The Cecaelia: a Modern Twist on Mermaid Myth”, in Writing in Margins.
NAW NÁAGALANG - OCTOPUS HOUSES OF HAIDA GWAII
https://www.seagardens.net/naw
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