by Terry McCombs
Terry McCombs maintained the "God/dess of the Month Club" on soc.religion.paganism for several years, producing monthly profiles of deities drawn from across the world's traditions. His approach was comparative and eclectic, treating each deity as a window into a shared human experience rather than the exclusive property of any one culture.
His January 2009 entry takes a different approach from his usual single-deity profiles: a holistic survey of Spider as deity across many cultures simultaneously. This is not a repeat of his August 2003 Spider Grandmother post — it is a wider meditation on why the spider, a creature most people find intrinsically creepy, achieved such remarkable cosmic significance across the world, and on what it might mean that we read it on a web.
Preserved here from the Usenet archive as a document of early internet-era comparative paganism.
Names: Spider Grandmother or Spider Woman (Navajo, Pueblo, Tewa, Kiwa, Hopi, and Cherokee), Areop-Enap (Micronesia), Biliku (India), Arachne (Greek), Anansi (African), Nareau (Gilbert Islands, current Kiribati), Tule (Sudan and Zaire), Uttu (Sumerian spider goddess of weaving and of clothing).
Symbols: The web, in many traditions. The loom is also common.
Usual Image: Dependent on culture. Some traditions show Spider in the more common eight-legged form; many show her as a human female.
Holy Books: Ovid's Metamorphoses, the Anansi stories, Perdido Street Station by China Miéville, Silk by Caitlin R. Kiernan.
Holy Days: N/A.
Relatives: Varies. Many, such as the African Anansi, seem to be singular entities. Spider Woman of some Native American tribes — who invented weaving — had a husband, Spider Man, who invented the loom. In Micronesia, Areop-Enap was called one god but was also known as Old Spider and Young Spider, though their exact relationship is unclear.
Synodeities: See Names above.
This entry is a departure from the usual format, since Spider as deity is not from a single culture but represents a recurring image across the world — an attempt at a holistic overview.
Many people will find it difficult to attribute divine attributes to a creature they find intrinsically creepy. Yet many ancient peoples found much of the divine to admire in spiders.
While almost everything you can think of has at some point been given godly characteristics, the spider's prominence across different cultures is genuinely interesting. The sun, moon, fire, water, love, and war are understandable when they appear as major deities. That the little spider should have climbed to similar heights is a surprise to arachnophobes.
In the West, the most famous divine spider is probably Arachne of the Greek mythos — but she might best be thought of as a cautionary tale. In other cultures, Spider has played a far more prominent role. All plant life was said to have come from sex between the Mesopotamian god Enki and Spider. Spider Grandmother plays a vital part in the cosmologies of a large number of Native American tribes.
It is worth considering such things as Odin's eight-legged horse, or the large number of Hindu gods and goddesses who have six arms — with two legs making eight limbs. While this is done as a visual representation of divine attributes, one has to wonder if, at least on a subconscious level, there might also be a link to Spider.
The Web
The main thing that draws metaphysical attention to Spider is the web — truly one of the most amazing things to be found in nature. And speaking of webs: that is exactly where you are reading this. Mixing metaphors? Probably not. If words have power, and if we give any sympathy to sympathetic magic, then somewhere on some level there is more than a bit of a web to the Web we bounce around on every day. If that is the case, what and where is the Spider?
The place to look might best be in the minds of the humans who built this web. Among those modern spinners of myth and folklore — the writers of fiction — some very interesting Spider imagery can be found.
In Fritz Leiber's The Big Time, a group of humans spend most of their time in a place outside time and space, the pawns of a war between two powerful forces trying to change history for their own mysterious ends. While these forces are never shown, they are referred to as the Spiders and the Snakes. The hint is given that most people, unbeknownst to themselves, work for one or the other. The question being: if you have a fear of one of the above symbols, does that mean you work for the opposite team — or just fear your own bosses?
In China Miéville's Perdido Street Station, the Weaver appears as a very large spider — a creature that lives across a multiplicity of dimensions, never wholly in one place at the same time, and one of the most genuinely alien characters in fiction.
There are also Silk by Caitlin R. Kiernan and a series of "Spider Queen" novels worth considering.
Arachne Rising
Perhaps the strangest modern Spider book was published in 1977 by "James Vogh," titled Arachne Rising. Its theme was that there were originally 13 signs in a lunar zodiac — the 13th being Arachne the Spider, for people born between May 16th and June 15th (covering Taurus 26 to Gemini 23).
The book turns out to have been a hoax written by British science fiction author John Sladek, first as a way to make fun of astrology believers and then as a money-making scheme at which it failed. There are however a few people who have taken to Arachne as the 13th sign, knowing it was a hoax, saying that it might be a hoax but the man was still right.
McCombs was sympathetic: "I myself have always contended that just because something is not real doesn't mean it isn't true."
— Terry McCombs
Colophon
Written and posted by Terry McCombs to soc.religion.paganism on January 31, 2009, as part of his monthly "God/dess of the Month Club" series, which profiled deities from across the world's traditions. A companion piece to his August 2003 entry on Spider Grandmother; where that post focused on the Navajo/Pueblo figure, this one surveys the archetype as a whole. Original Message-ID: [email protected].
Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.
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