From Eric Neumann The
Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype:
"The primordial mystery of weaving and spinning has also been
experienced in projection upon the Great Mother who weaves the web of life and
spins the threads of fate…."
From Susanne F. Finscher Creating
Mandalas For Insight, Healing, and Self-Expression:
"The web is an archetypal symbol of the weaving that brings form
into being."
From Robert Johnson Ecstacy:
Understanding the Psychology of Joy
"The spider and her web is a rudimentary mandala and represents
the energy source from which an evolved mandala springs"
From Joan Kellogg The
Meaning of Color and Shape in Mandalas
"If the web in your mandala
is complete and firmly attached to the circle of the mandala, you have the
necessary resolve to carry through on your latest initiative"
“What might we see, how might we act, if we saw with a webbed vision? The world seen through a web of relationships…as delicate as spider’s silk, yet strong enough to hang a bridge on.”
Catherine Keller, Theologian From a Broken Web
It's almost my birthday, and I find that my thoughts keep going backwards, following the threads of this journal to where it began in 2007. And it began with my long time "calling" from "Spider Woman", the Native American Goddess who weaves the great web, who instructs the young and the uninitiated when they are ready to hear and see, whose hand weaves patterns along with the great rug weavers, who as "Thought Woman" creates the world with the stories She tells about the world. It's time to revisit this work, because for me Spider Woman continually speaks of what we need to re-member. ** So for any who may so generously find my journal of interest, bear with me as I trace back some of Spider Woman's threads, seeking pattern. The ubiquitous Spider Woman archetype touched me in many ways for years before I was given an Aldon B. Dow Fellowship at Northwood University in the summer of 2007, rendering an opportunity to more fully pursue my fascination. Ultimately that fascination became three community arts projects, the first at the Midland Arts Center in Michigan. In the ancient stories of the Spider Woman I see a very contemporary vision of ultimate unity, on our planet, in our human experience, and in the unfathomable vastness of the universe.** And just as "Spider Woman" sits in her room "thinking up good stories", so has she endowed us as well with the same imaginal creative gifts. We also create the world with the stories we tell, we are also the artists whose telling can become manifest. So what stories are we telling, and why is it crucial to understand those stories?
"Tse Che Nako, Thought Woman the Spider is sitting in her room thinking up a good story: I'm telling you the story She is thinking.".............Keresan Pueblo proverb
When I began to work with Spider Woman, I tend to think She also began to work with me! As I pursued my private investigation, trying not to disrespect or co-opt traditions of the Native Peoples of America where She is found in so many places,......I began to find that synchronicities continually followed my fascination. Synchronicities are perhaps the ultimate personal experience of the mysterious entanglement of consciousness.........and for me, they became touchstones along with way.
Spiders would do strange things, like when a tiny spider dropped a thread from the ceiling and hung over my computer as I was working on my book about the project. I would meet people who would tell me stories about magical spiders. People would send me emails out of the blue, or offer me materials unsolicited, that somehow were perfect for what I was envisioning. For example, when I hit the road to travel to Michigan I camped at a hot spring in New Mexico, and visited a nearby petroglyph site with a man who told me about it there. He gave me photographs of spider petroglyphs he had taken there and elsewhere. I stopped in Winslow, Arizona and noticed a little jewelry shop - and there saw an amazing Navajo necklace depicting Spider Woman as a Dine` weaver with a web behind her. I stopped in Taos at the Laughing Horse Inn, and discovered a framed photograph of a Dine` weaver beside my door. I took a photo of it, and later was surprised by the thread-like reflections on the glass of the picture as well, something that inspired me to name this Blog "threads of Spider Woman". One of the funniest (and I am certain Spider Woman has a great sense of humor) occurred when I stopped for coffee on my way to the second Community Arts Project at the Creative Spirit Center in Midland in 2008 (in collaboration with artist Kathy Space). She had created a wall of "Icons" with some 30 participants, each holding a "thread" representing inter-dependancy that went around the walls and finally out the door, representing the "threads" that connect us to everything. It was only when I was pulling away that I noticed where I had parked!
I love "on the road" synchronicities, those that occur in that most liminal space of "being neither here nor there" but in transit. I guess that is my own kind of "moving meditation". The story below is one of those synchronicities, and occurred a few weeks after I completed my "Spider Woman's Hands" Show and community project at the Midland Arts Center in Michigan. I went to Paducah, Kentucky on my way back home, because I was curious about the arts community developing there, and chanced to notice that there was a Native American historical site very close to Paducah, which inspired me to stop there on the way out of town. And this is what I was doing a decade ago
August 15, 2007
"Sun Circle" and "Spider Woman's Cross" on gourd (and "the threads" reflections the glass case seems to have also created in the picture)
I have always felt that my imagination is most open to the ubiquitous, syncronistic voice of the Divine when I'm on the road. In other words, like many Americans who grew up in cars (and were probably conceived in one as well), I do my best thinking when I'm behind the wheelrr. Travelling puts me into the creative liminal state of "between"- free from all the demands and paradigms that "destinations" impose ( the people, duties, reality tunnels, and potent unconscious imprints that "fix" the mind into "place"). Travelling is one of the ways I can hear the "conversation" ...... it turns down the noise for me. I went to Paducah, Kentucky, on a lovely bright day full of vast green oaks, and later, heading south, decided to take a detour and visit Wicklife Mounds, an archaeological site that was once the home of a tribe of prehistoric Mississippian Native Americans. Going back as far as 1,000 years, these people built ceremonial areas, chief's houses, and burial houses on earth pyramids and stepped rectangular mounds. Over time, the mounds grew in elevation as houses were destroyed and rebuilt. Art, pottery, and religious and tribal iconography belonging to these diverse peoples are found throughout the Southeast, with iconic associations as far as Central Mexico, the Southwest and the Gulf of California, and as far north as Canada. I didn't expect to find Spider Womaneverywhere! But there She was! I guess I'm not really surprised though - the first thing I encountered as I walked into the little visitor's center was the "Spider Gorget" above. Later, I thought of my "Spider Woman's Hands" piece when I saw the ubiquitous "Hand with Eye", also found on ceremonial jewelry (gorgets made from shells), and pottery. No one really knows the specific meanings of these symbols to the peoples who once lived, warred and traded throughout the Southeast. Yet within them, I personally find a continuing beauty, a familiarity, a continuing trail. The cross is ubiquitous, the symbol of the balance and ultimate unity of the the 4 directions. The Sun Circle is also completely ubiquitous. I find it interesting that the cross is found on the back of Spider in their (presumably) ceremonial gorgets - perhaps why, when it occurs in Navajo rugs (much later and among a very different people who migrated into the South West) it's still called "Spider Woman's Cross". Yet here as well as in the religious symbolism of the peoples of the South West, it seems that Spider is associated with the Earth Mother, and with creation. To me, the "Spider Gorget" will always be profound. At the center is the weaver "Tse Che Nako", "Thought Woman" to the Keresan Pueblo peoples. Spider, spinning the world into being with her imagination, in partnership with the illumination of the Sun, spinning and weaving all things together with her "silky essence". From her very own body, from her own substance, she spins and creates. The cross represents (to me) divine balance within an ever expanding and infinitely interconnected web of life. The Hand with Eye may represent the Divine manifestation, as well as consciousness itself. I was amazed to see objects with this Hand in circles (and I think of my own obsession with "Spider Woman's Hands". Here is a quote from an anthropologist who studied Zuni petroglyphs in the South West, among them the occurrence of "hand" symbols. (I apologize for the use of "primitives" in the description. A more ethnocentric era.). ".......when hands were so at one with the mind that they really formed a part of it.......to reconstitute the primitives' mentality, he (Cushing, in the 1880's) had to rediscover the movements of their hands, movements in which their language and their thought were inseparably united.......the Zuni who did not speak without his hands did not think without them either." 1And so the Hand with Eye is a symbol of active consciousness (?) Perhaps, to create (weave) with active intention. Here's another little synchronicity I found in the course of following this thread, one that is a kind of personal poetic, as I am always fascinated with words and their origins. "Wickliffe" might become "Wick - life", which I have little doubt is it's origin. "Wick", from which we get "wicker ware", "wicca", "witch" and "wick" as in the wick of a candle (this association is with an English word that meant both "weave" and "alive").. ...... so, I'll take WICKLIFFE to mean "Weaving Life" with a double affirmative! What really matters is the necessity, profoundly so now, to understand that we are all intimately interconnected, entrained, entangled, and woven together into World, interconnected within the processes of manifestation. We absolutely must develop a webbed vision now. And that's what artists can do, provide potent and lasting vision.
"We are in the midst of a global crisis of perspective. We have forgotten the undeniable truth that everything is connected. PLANETARY is a provocative and breathtaking wakeup call, a cross continental, cinematic journey, that explores our cosmic origins and our future as a species."
"What is the new mythology to be, the mythology of this unified earth as of one harmonious being?"
Joseph Campbell
I've recently been reviewing several of the projects I' ve been doing in the past 10 years (Spider Woman's Hands, Numina, The Masks of the Goddess) and felt like taking another look at "where I've been" as I try to figure out where to "go from here". Although, "coming" and "going" are increasingly a strange idea to me. The whole process of examining my bodies of work is like, in retrospect, reviewing my dreams, my meditations, and reminds me, again, of how seamless everything is, the vast and yet intimate Web interpenetrating all. I hear Grandmother Spider Woman chuckling, the vibration carried on some near strand. Perhaps some other weaver draws it slowly into a warp, somewhere, some when.............
All of the work I've done with Grandmother Spider Woman has been fraught with synchronicity, I feel like adding here. So much so that I never feel that far away from Her reminders, Her guidance and humor, and I've written about them quite often. One of my favorite synchronicities occured in 2008, when returning from the second show of "Spider Woman's Hands" at the Creative Spirit Center in Midland, Michigan, I decided to take a detour to visit Paducah, Kentucky. Just outside of Paducah I discovered a prehistoric Mississippian Mound, and it was there that I discovered just how ubiquitous the image of Spider and Cross was throughout that ancient world (the Gorget below, with Spider, Cross and Hands, is from that culture. I had no idea........ the story is in a post from September 2008. Perhaps the best synchronicities are visual. At Wickliffe Mound on that occasion I took a picture of an ancient gourd in their museum - developing it later, I was stunned to see that reflections from the floor had created an overlay of.........strands............that seemed to recede into infinity.
Here's another of those "Spider Woman" synchronicities, caught on my camera. This occurred when I stopped to get some coffee earlier that summer, en route to the Creative Spirit Center in Midland to see the show, which was a wall of "Icons" created by participants, each hand holding a "thread" that passed on to each other participant, and finally disappeared through the door and into "forever". I had to laugh when I saw where I had parked!
Below is a brief article I wrote about my 2004 to 2008 project about the ubiquitous "Legend of the Spider Woman".I have always felt Her hand in my life.
SPIDER WOMAN’S HANDS
A Metaphor for Our Time
By Lauren
Raine MFA(www.laurenraine.com)
“What might we see, how might we act, if we saw with a webbed vision?The world seen through a web of relationships…as delicate as
spider’s silk, yet strong enough to hang a bridge on.”
Catherine Keller, Theologian, From a Broken Web
(1989)
Years ago I was enjoying a panoramic view
of the Sonoran desert.I happened to be
sitting near a spider web, stretched between two dry branches.I realized, by shifting my point of view, I
could view the entire landscape through the web’s intricate, transparent
pattern…..alandscapeseen through the ineffable strands of an
almost invisible web.
What might our experience be, what kind of culture might we create, what would our priorities be, if, as Catherine Keller writes, we "saw the world with a Webbed Vision"?
Perhaps the World
Wide Web is Spider Woman's latest appearance.Pueblo
mythology tells that when each of the 3 previous worlds ended, it was Spider Woman who led the people through
the sipapu, the kiva (or birth canal) into the next world. As such She is the divine Midwife for each new age.............and perhaps now we can understand how Her message is necessary for this, the "5th Age", to manifest. With
so many people interested in the “2012 prophecy”, which reached epic
proportions through Hollywood, it seems strange that so few know of Spider Woman, the midwife/creatrix, who
plays a key role in this metaphor for our time.She's increasingly making visible the connections, the strands of the
Web of life, whether we speak of an evolving global human culture, ecology,
quantum physics, or synchronicity and integral psychology.“Spider Woman’s Hands” was my contemporary
exploration of this myth.
" The new myth coming into being through the triple influence of quantum physics, depth psychology and the ecological movement suggests that we are participants in a great cosmic web of life, each one of us indissolubly connected with all others through that invisible field. It is the most insidious of illusions to think that we can achieve a position of dominance in relation to nature, life or each other. In our essence, we are one."
Anne Baring
In Pueblo mythology, Spider Woman is also called Tse
Che Nako, Thought Woman. Thought Woman creates the world with
what she imagines, weaves with the stories she tells.We also participate in this imaginal power.
"The
question is not so much "What do I
learn from stories" as "What
stories do I want to live?"……… David
R. Loy, "The World is Made of Stories"
Navajo rugs often have “Spiderwoman’s
Cross” woven into the pattern.The
cross of Spider Woman represents balance - the union of the 4
directions.Spider Woman is at the
Center:the 5th direction is
a hologram, reflecting every other strand.The ancient Maya used stones called ‘spiders’ to map
the four cardinal directions required for ceremonies, and artists of the
prehistoric Mississippian culture often depicted a spider on shell gorgets with
a cross on its back.Among the Osage,
special women had a spider symbol tattooed on their hands, also with a cross at
its center. And among the Navajo, to this day, a bit of Spider Web is rubbed into the hands of female infants, so they "will become good weavers". Sacred and ubiquitous is the web, warp, and woof of Spider Woman, who it may be said has many names in many places and times.
As anthropologist
Carol Patterson-Rudolph has written, to the Navajo, Grandmother
Spider Woman ((NA ASHJE’II ’ASDZÁÁ) represents initiation into a mature way of
being.The "Web" becomes
visible within an integral, relational paradigm:a
"webbed vision".Spider Woman thus is a bridge between the mundane, mythic, and sacred
dimensions of life.Like a spider web,
her transparent, circular strands exist on multiple levels of meaning.
In his book on Hopi
religion, John Loftin writes that:
“Spider
Woman was the first to weave. Her techniques and patterns have stood the test
of time, or more properly, the test of timelessness.…..…..Weaving is not an act
in which one creates something oneself – it is an act in which one uncovers a
pattern that was already there.”
I believe Spider
Woman has profound meaning for our time, offering a "Webbed Vision" in a world that urgently
needs to see life as a shimmering web of relational interdependency and fundamental
unity.My own need to need to explore and "re-member" over the years became public web-weaving rituals, the creation of many masks, with the hope of collaboration, for ritualists and theatre, community art projects, and sculptures. In 2007 I received an Alden B. Dow Fellowship
which allowed me to create a community art project called “Spider Woman’s
Hands” in Michigan, and in 2009 I created “Weavers”
for Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C.
“Tse Che Nako,
Thought-Woman, the Spider is sitting in her room thinking up a
story now
I'm telling you the story she is thinking. “
Keresan Pueblo saying
May we all rub a bit of Spider Web into the palms of our hands.
"When we form
heart-centered beliefs within our bodies, in the language of physics
we're creating the electrical and magnetic expression of them as waves
of energy, which aren't confined to our hearts or limited by the
physical barrier of our skin and bones. So clearly we're "speaking" to
the world around us in each moment of every day through a language that
has no words: the belief-waves of our hearts. In addition to
pumping the blood of life within our bodies, we may think of the heart
as a belief-to-matter translator. It converts the perceptions of our
experiences, beliefs, and imagination into the coded language of waves
that communicate with the world beyond our bodies. Perhaps this is what
philosopher and poet John Mackenzie meant when he stated, "The
distinction between what is real and what is imaginary is not one that
can be finely maintained ... all existing thing are ... imaginary."
Gregg Braden
I enjoy the quote above by philosopher and New Mexico visionary Gregg Braden........except at the end of the last quote, I might change "imaginary" to "imaginal". Because, as Braden himself so fully argues in his life work, that's really where we are collectively now - at the "imaginal threshold" of our species evolution.
I began this journal almost 6 years ago, as a journal for the evolution of my project "Spider Woman's Hands", which I received a Fellowship at the Alden Dow Creativity Center in Midland, Michigan to pursue. In 2009 I was resident artist at Wesley Theological in Washington, D.C., and continued the project. My fascination with ubiquitous myths and symbols of Spider Woman, from the Pueblo peoples of the Southwest, the Navajo weavers, the prehistoric Mississippian people, even the Maya......began with a deep realization of the significance of this metaphor of the Great Weaver for our time on multiple levels: ecological, social, spiritual, and quantum. We live in the participatory universe of Spider Woman, weavers and woven. One of the names for Spider Woman among Pueblo peoples is Tse Che Nako, "Thought Woman", because She made the world with the stories she told about it. There is a great Keresan Pueblo proverb that says,
"Tse Che Nako, Thought Woman, the Spider is sitting in her room thinking up a good story. I'm telling you the story she is thinking."*
Pueblo legends hold that it was Spider Woman who led the people through the cosmic Kiva at the end of each age into the new world. According to their calendar, the 4th World is now ended, and we are entering the 5th World........and I believe that once again, it is Grandmother Spider Woman who is showing the Way, offering us the opportunity to pass through the Kiva, the Birth Canal, into a new world, with the truth of Her great Web at the very center. We all know the Precipice we hang on as a common humanity. Our technology and technological connectivity will either be the end of our evolutionary promise, or we will become a truly global humanity. The new World, or "New Age", will be an age that puts into practice the great truth of unity within the great co-creative diversity of life. What I would like to pursue in future posts is not only how this is being demonstrated by science as well as metaphysics, but how we can, and are, putting the "New Paradigm of Connectivity" into pragmatic practice. Because that's ultimately the good news we need.
As I return to Spider Woman's Web, I find Greg Bradon, in "The Science of Miracles", makes an eloquent discussion of how Quantum physics and metaphysics now agree on a "conversant world".
“The act of focusing our consciousness is an act of creation.
I can't resist some of the free offerings on the Web. This one is www.slideshare.net, a free service that allows you to post power point presentations to the Web (it looks best if you make it "full screen") - so my experiment here is to post the presentation that I gave last year at the Conference at the Claremont School of Theology on Spider Woman. We're weavers all - so may we rub a bit of Spider Web into the palms of our hands in 2012!
Finally sent off my Guggenheim application..........whew, what a lot of work! But good for me to really review my 5 year project as it required, giving better form to what is meaningful to me, what "strands" I've been following. It's been a long trip!
"Tse Che Nako, the Thought Woman, Weaving the World into Being" (2007)
Among the Navajo, to this day a bit of spider web is rubbed into the hands of infant girls, so that they will become Good Weavers, and Grandmother Spider Woman will bless them. Weaving, as interviews with many traditional Navajo (Dine`) weavers have revealed, is a spiritual practice for them, a practice for creating inner and outer balance. To "weave a beautiful pattern" is a metaphor for weaving a beautiful mind, a beautiful life.
Two Talking Masks: "The River Face" & "The Bone Goddess"
May we all rub a bit of spider web into the palms of our hands.
I had a wonderful time at the Conference for Pagan Studies at Claremont College in California this past weekend. So many inspiring presentations! My gratitude to so many of the people I was privileged to meet there, and especially Kahena, who organized the event - I can hardly wait for next years conference.
A friend asked if I would post my Power Point presentation, and I'm most happy to, since I'm proud of the sequence of images that represent my 5 year project dedicated to Spider Woman. So here it is reduced to jpegs.
