On the Persistence of Butterflies, and the Emanation of Beauty

                   

Beauty above me, 

Beauty below me,

Beauty before me,

Beauty behind me,

I walk in Beauty.

Navajo (Dine`) Prayer

I am approaching my 76th birthday next week.  Wow.  I've had a long life.  And for some reason, perhaps the threads of synchronicity Spider Woman has been throwing me lately, I've been thinking about Butterflies.    

I love the painting above (which I did not create).  I don't know how I found it, and I have not bee successful in finding out who the artist is, even when I did an image search.  I loved it enough that I even made my own version of the painting - and if I ever find the artist, I would hope she or he would not see this as plagerism, but rather deep appreciation.

An old woman is walking, just a silouette in the distance, her name and identity unknown.  Or perhaps, with the passage of time and her long life walk, names just aren't important to her anymore.  The road, I imagine, is dusty.   Her back is a bit bent..... she is tired, it's been a long walk.  But........she keeps on walking.  Maybe it's a pilgrimage to her, or maybe a mission.  Maybe getting somewhere isn't important any longer - its the walk itself that matters.  

But as she  walks butterflies emanate from her out into the world.  To do their work of bringing  Beauty.  And to do their work of Pollinating the future.  

As an artist,  I think this is the legacy many of us would like to leave behind us as we progress on our own, often dusty, often long, roads.  We want to think our work has  flown forth, to bloom as it will,  in other's  imaginations, in another time perhaps.  Looking again at the painting, I think maybe that old woman doesn't think about such things.  She just keeps on walking.   But in the end, no one could ask for more. 

Pollen:  agent of new life, new hope, transformation. 

My prayer:  May we have butterfly minds, pollinator hearts.

Peace March against the war in Iraq, San Francisco, 2003

Peace March against the war in Iraq, San Francisco, 2003

The ancient Greek word for "butterfly" is ψυχή (psȳchē), which means "soul" or "mind".  And I have often found them mysteriously "soulful", as they seem to flit in and out of mystery and of synchronicity.  The picture above, for example - it was from the San Francisco Chronicle at the time of the great peace march against the incipient Iraq war, and shows three friends with their "soul icons".   Me in the mask of Sophia, Alan Moore, founder of the Butterfly Gardeners Association with his sign, and Nicole, an artist who created "Cosmic Cash".  Note that her icon, also,  occurred in this synchronistic photo behind her.  

Transformers, pollinators .......... they begin their lives as caterpillars, build a crysalis and generate imaginal cells.   Imaginal cells (what a fantastic name) are cells in the evolution of a butterfly from caterpillar to winged butterfly that activate within the Crysalis, and the butterfly literally becomes mush as it is deconstructed and changed.   As the visionary psychologist  Anodea Judith explains it:

"When a caterpillar nears its transformation time, it begins to eat ravenously, consuming everything in sight. The caterpillar body then becomes heavy, outgrowing its own skin many times, until it is too bloated to move. Attaching to a branch (upside down, we might add, where everything is turned on its head) it forms a chrysalis—an enclosing shell that limits the caterpillar’s freedom for the duration of the transformation.....Tiny cells, that biologists actually call “imaginal cells,” begin to appear. These cells are wholly different from caterpillar cells, carrying different information, vibrating to a different frequency–the frequency of the emerging butterfly. At first, the caterpillar’s immune system perceives these new cells as enemies, and attacks them, much as new ideas in science, medicine, politics, and social behavior are viciously denounced by the powers now considered mainstream. But the imaginal cells are not deterred.  They continue to appear, in even greater numbers, recognizing each other, bonding together, until the new cells are numerous enough to organize into clumps. When enough cells have formed to make structures along the new organizational lines, the caterpillar’s immune system is overwhelmed. The caterpillar body then become a nutritious soup for the growth of the butterfly."

from Imaginal Cells and the Body Politic by Anodea Judith Ph.D.

Photo from: http://www.fishersville-umc.org/classes/nac/Pics/week0401.htm

If we can see that our thoughts participate in  pollinating the future, we can  perhaps find ways of living with simplicity and honor, even in a time so very out of balance.  Regardless of where one is, there is a profound need to "walk in Beauty".  To be "on the Pollen Path".  

                                 

Without the grace of the pollinators, the butterflies and hummingbirds and bees, there will be no future.  This idea is fundamental to spiritual traditions of native peoples of the Southwest, including the Pueblo peoples, the Navajo and the Apache.  As shown above, when this young Apache woman came of age and entered into her fertile years, she was blessed by the tribe with symbolic pollen.  Imagine what it would be like if young women in our world were so honored.  

 "The Pollen Path" is a healing and initiatory ceremony/concept among the Dine` that variously enacts a mythic journey, and demonstrates a cosmology of non-duality.  "Pollen Path" art and sand paintings often show the union of opposites, such as red sun and blue moon, as well as the directions and associated stories, representing the cycles that form a whole.  

As I imagine the metaphor of a  "pollen path" for our time,  as I consider the "emanations of  beauty" in the painting at the top of this essay,  I reflect as well that some butterflies, like the Monarch or the Painted Lady, are migratory.  Monarch butterflies will migrate over very long distances, as amazingly frail as they seem.  Some travel from Mexico to the norther parts of the United States and into Canada, a distance of over 2,500 miles.  Tragically, because of climate change and loss of habitat, they are among the endangered species.  

Lastly, I always seem to return to one of my favorite storytellers, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, on the work of the Butterfly Dancer.  May we all, women and men, young and old, become Butterfly Dancers this May Day.

  "The (Hopi) butterfly dancer must be old because she represents the soul that is old. She is wide of thigh and broad of rump because she carries so much. Her grey hair certifies that she need no longer observe taboos about touching others. She is allowed to touch everyone: boys, babies, men, women, girl children, the old, the ill, and the dead. The Butterfly Woman can touch everyone. It is her privilege to touch all, at last. This is her power. Hers is the body of La Mariposa, the butterfly."

"La Mariposa" from Women Who Run with The Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Clarissa Pinkola Estes  tells the story of waiting to see the "Butterfly Dancer" at a ceremony.  Tourists, unused to Indian Time, wait throughout a long, hot, dusty day to see the dancer emerge, expecting, no doubt a slender, ephemeral Indian maiden, and they are no oubt they were shocked out of their patronizing cultural fantasy to see at last the grey haired  Dancer/Pollinator emerge, slow, not young, with her traditional tokens of empowerment.

"Her heavy body and her very skinny legs made her look like a hopping spider wrapped in a tamale. She hops on one foot and then on the other. She waves her feather fan to and fro. She is The Butterfly arrived to strengthen the weak. She is that which most think of as not strong: age, the butterfly, the feminine."

Because in the agricultural ritual these dances symbolize and invoke, call in, the forces that initiate the  vital work of pollination, this is no job for for an inexperienced girl, no trivial token flight for a  pretty child. It's a job for one who has lived through many cycles, and can seed and generate the future from a solid base. Again, I take here the liberty of quoting Dr. Estes again:

"Butterfly Woman mends the erroneous idea that transformation is only for the tortured, the saintly, or only for the fabulously strong. The Self need not carry mountains to transform. A little is enough. A little goes a long way. A little changes much. The fertilizing force replaces the moving of mountains.

Butterfly Maiden pollinates the souls of the earth: It is easier that you think, she says. She is shaking her feather fan, and she’s hopping, for she is spilling spiritual pollen all over the people who are there, Native Americans, little children, visitors, everyone. This is the translator of the instinctual, the fertilizing force, the mender, the rememberer of old ideas. She is La voz mitológica."

"La voz mitológica". The mythic voice.  The voice that shows us the place where the Butterflies go, the voice that sings the threads of synchronicity as they weave into our lives and become visible.   The Mythic Voice re-enchants the world around us, lending luminosity to each footstep, and pollinates, energizes, en-chants those who hear.   

   

Some of my own butterflies

Christine Clawley and NDE's

Christine Clawley is a good friend of mine, a fellow Board Member of the Southern Arizona Friends of Jung, a Counselor and Psychologist with a broad Practice, a frequent speaker at Conferences on Near Death Experiencers, and also a neighbor.  Christine has a Master's of Arts in Depth Counseling Psychology from the Pacifica Graduate Institute, and a  Bachelor's Degree in Philosophy & Psychology, Summa Cum Laude University of Colorado Boulder, and a thriving Practice here in Tucson.  

Christine is currently working on a Documentary about the phenomenon of Synchronicity (a subject near and dear to my own heart) with her husband and partner Tony Woellner (Circling Hawk Productions), called  The Tapestry of Time - A film exploring the meaning and nature of time through the lens of synchronicity.  The Documentary is still in production, but the Trailer, which features interviews with Robert Moss and Trish and Robb MacGregor, among others, may be viewed at Circling Hawk Productions website.  I look forward greatly to seeing the film completed, as I feel it's subject is important, the interviews are very insightful, and Christine and Tony have edited it beautifully.  

Here Christine has given me permission to share here an Interview she did with Jeff Mara about her own NDE experience when she was in an extended coma. Since this is the time of endings as the Wheel turns to winter, this interview seems appropriate.

 https://youtu.be/xuS2K8mg3UU?si=-bCOjO7_bU2CHrIB

Seamless Creativity

Untitled Lauren Raine  (1970)

"We slowly pull focus, lifting up and away from being embedded in our lives

 until we attain an overview.  This overview empowers us to make valid creative choices."

Julia Cameron, "THE ARTIST'S WAY"*

I have been thinking about the  trans-personal nature of creativity,  the way it can sometimes seem to express dimensions of perception that transcend time or even one's "individuality" as the vision or the poem dips its roots into the collective mind. 

I was recalling a group I used to belong to whose members were mostly practicing and  retired therapists. I often felt somewhat ill at ease in their company, being without the psychological vocabulary or training they possessed. In retrospect, sometimes I felt it was the way they, as therapists, tended to "pathologize" or generalize that  made me uncomfortable. It is, of course, understandable that they should do so, and that they might often  see  others through the lens of their training and practice a standard of mental health and normalcy. And yet..........something was missing for me. Perhaps what I missed was a  larger room, a room big enough for  the "Mystery".   At the time, I did not know how to articulate that.  

Untitled (1972)

There is a thin line between trans-personal, trans-formative, "non-ordinary states", and madness. Those separations, of course, can have something to do with the cultural matrix one is living in. But sometimes "madness" is also brilliant insight. Sometimes creativity arises  from a liminal zone that should not be "explained" too comprehensively or dismissed because it is outside of an "acceptable emotional or psychological spectrum". Just because we cannot see ultra-violet with our eyes does not mean it is not there. But we can imagine ultra-violet:  perhaps we could imagine what it sounds like, or how it tastes, or what it "feels" like. 

       

            Untitled Lauren Raine (1985)

Carl Jung, who formed the concepts of synchronicity and the collective unconscious, had "spirit guides" that he considered a source of  crucial insights. He described them as aspects of his  psyche which he could produce, but which could also produce themselves. Were they "Aspects" that had their own life? Or were they discrete entities themselves?  Among his "guides" were  the archetypal mentor figure Philemon, an ancient Vedic scholar, and Basilides,  an early Gnostic teacher in Alexandria., Egypt. Also one thing about Jung's background that is not well known is that his family was deeply interested in Spiritualism, and included members who were known locally as mediums. This would have pre-disposed Carl Jung to the possibility of "spirit guides" that could communicate with him and advise him.

untitled Lauren Raine (1985)

 "Inspiration may be a form of super-consciousness, or perhaps of sub-consciousness....I wouldn't know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness."........... Aaron Copeland

There is a continuing dialogue within the arts community about  artists as shamans. I both agree and disagree with this comparison. We are a culture that by and large has lost its shamans. I do not mean, of course,  to negate the work of  reclamation and innovation contemporary shamans, such as Sandra Ingerman (Soul Retrieval) or her mentor Michael Harner, who have studied universal traditions and evolved  new forms of contemporary shamanism, have contributed to today's world.

Artists have been marginalized and displaced in the contemporary world and seek meaningful identity and purpose in a society that at best patronizes them, and at worst disregards them altogether. How many times have people asked me what I do, and having told them that I am an artist, their response is "What's your real job?". I do not tell a lot of people I am an artist.  Claiming or seeking a meaningful identity as a contemporary Shaman in the arts is entirely understandable. 

Yet it is presumptuous for many artists to call themselves "shamans", thus co-opting a word and a primal practice associated with it that has a very long lineage indeed.

Traditional shamans, while their practices and symbol systems may vary widely, universally have a great deal of structure within which they work - they have cultural and tribal support within traditional systems that go back through many, many generations. They have  systems of "visioning" and healing, ordeals or initiations, rituals, and practices for cyclical auspicious occasions,  and means of psychic protection that have evolved for hundreds of years. They have visible and "invisible support" that provides a strong container within which their responsibilities and experiences are clear, honored, are  often hereditary, and they are generally expected to be mature and richly experienced before they can  begin practicing as shamanic healers. It is not a random, chaotic process at all (although certainly Heyoka or Trickster Shamans have their place in worldwide cultures). 

"In the case of the Sami, my Shaman teacher was trained in her culture for thirty-five years before she could practice hearing on people outside of her extended family. When I pondered this, given the fact that she was born into a prestigious lineage of Shamans and that her talents were obvious when she was a child, I wondered why she had to study for so long before treating those outside of her kin group............My Shaman teacher was not only a healer, but she was also a student of folklore. This is important, because she always insisted that the three principal sources of her shamanic knowledge were Sami folklore (tales, legends, and so forth); teachings from the ancestral lineage-from her father, who was her mentor, and from other ancestral spirits, who spoke to her from the spirit world; and teachings from spirit entities (what we might call "spirit aides" or "power animals."

THE PLACE OF SHAMANISM IN ECOFEMINISM,  by Gloria Feman Orenstein

I was once privileged have a conversation with one of the founders of Eco-feminism,  Gloria Orenstein.**  Dr. Orenstein is a Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and Gender Studies at USC in Los Angeles.  In the 80's she became friends with, and worked with,  a hereditary  Sami shaman.

I will  always remember the story she told me about the first time she went to visit her mentors' family in Finland. It was winter, very dark, and they had driven for many miles into the countryside, at last arriving at a house where she was given a room to sleep in. She said that she lay in bed wondering if she was crazy,  coming all the way from Los Angeles in the dead of winter. She tried to sleep but was disturbed by  voices speaking  outside the window. They seemed to be calling for  "Caffe, Caffe".  

In the morning she asked her hosts why people were outside in the freezing  night, asking for coffee!  They responded that this was a very good sign:  it meant she would receive help. It seems that in Sami land, like flowers and food offerings in Bali, or whiskey to the Orishas of Cuba, coffee was an offering acceptable to the spirit world.

'St. George and the Dragon" (1970)

Does the creation of truly visionary art make one a shaman? I do not believe so. However, art process - Flow - can be called shamanic within its healing and revelatory  capacity, the way it can reveal the seamlessness and timelessness  of our inner lives, and the way it can touch collective roots that extend far beyond our individual perception. There is a liminal dimension to the creative process one can hardly fail to notice.

Now in my 70's,  I am interested in the synapses and links as I review my long life. Going over some of my very old drawings, I was amazed to see within them a kind of "code" or touchstone that repeated over and over throughout the years. I  found the drawing above,  for example,  which I did when I was about 18 years of age,  of "St. George and the Dragon". I was copying part of the drawing from some old Masters photos - certainly the "St. George" with the sword was from some painting I must have been looking at.  At 18,  I knew nothing  about feminism, the Goddess,  or much about mythology either, although I had looked at various paintings depicting the slaying of dragons by St. George.

And yet I can read what became my life purpose, like hieroglyphics, in this little drawing, now, from the vantage point of age. 

Here is a divine female figure, which I symbolized with wings, who is naked and full breasted. She is no bound or chaste maiden in need of rescue from a dragon. She seems to have a snake around her waist and in her hand, she is turning away from the Hero, and appears to be falling.  As she falls she is merged with the rather tragic, sympathetic  looking figure of the dragon about to be slain by George (who looks nothing at all like a saint to me.  In fact, he looks kind of like my abusive boyfriend of the time.) This is a classic heroic tale - so why did I make "George" so un-noble?

Behind him is a barren, rocky land, in contrast to the depths below the dragon figure, with vegetation bubbling up from the dark earth, and even  something that looks like a dark moon shape as well.

The meanings I can now draw from these symbols represent many years of study and discussion and ritual and growth and collaboration with colleagues and mentors,  as we became feminists, and as we mutually evolved  Eco-feminism and Goddess theology. I have come to see over the years a new meaning of the myth of St. George and the Dragon:   wherein the "dragons" of the ancient pagan earth religions, and the sacred symbols of the ubiquitous snakes of the Goddess, were banished, slain, re-mythed and de-sacralized in the course of patriarchal religion and culture.

In 1970 Merlin Stone was researching and writing about the banished Goddess  and the development of patriarchal religions (her groundbreaking book When God Was A Woman was published in 1976**).  Around that time Marija Gimbutas was shaking up the archeological world with her vision of the World of the Goddess in prehistory.  But I was not exposed to these ideas until much later. Yet when I was, the work of the Goddess truly became my life work.

The drawing really is a kind of "future memory".

"Skin Shedder Mandala" Lauren Raine (1985)

 *Cameron, Julia:  The Artist's Way:  A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity,  March 18, 2002, JP Tarcher/Putnam NYNY

**Ornstein, Gloria: "Synchronicity and The Shaman of Sami land" in Uncoiling the Snake:  Ancient Patterns in Contemporary Women's Lives (A Snakepower Reader). Edited by Vicki Noble. Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1993

**Stone, Merlin:  When God Was a Woman  265 pages, Hardcover, First published January 1, 1976 Harper & Row, NYNY  https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/30858

A Spider Synchronicity..........

  

I've been feeling depressed of late, certainly uninspired, and troubled so often by those internal voices that say "why bother, no one cares about (art..........the environment.......my written meanderings.........me).  Those inner voices are sure a show stopper, and sometimes, it is very difficult to turn them off.  When that happens I usually just let my life be taken over by mundane chores.

In traffic yesterday I noted a car in front of me that had a liscence plate that said "ARACHNE3".  I reflected on all the years I "followed the trail of Spider Woman", the revised book I just finished called "Spider Woman's Hands".  All the synchronicities I've recounted over the years..............

When I moved into the turn lane that car moved into the turn lane too, right ahead of me, and I had plenty of time to look at that plate.  It preceeded me all the way to the small street I live on, at which point I had to turn.  I don't know what this means, but it seems encouraging somehow.

I reflect on this, from the previous post of a poem by David Whyte:

What we hate
in ourselves
is what we cannot know
in ourselves but
what is true to the pattern
does not need

to be explained.

A "Spider Woman" Synchronicity and a Poem

Petroglyph in New Mexico

When I began this Blog I was on the "trail" of  Spider Woman as an artist, and more importantly,  as a spiritual quest.  I began recording synchronicities along the way, and I often  think of them as "Spider Woman's threads".   Because the farther I explored that liminal zone of wondering and wandering, the more synchronicities seemed to occur.  So many that I imagined I was occasionally getting a glimpse of  the bigger pattern.  Sometimes they seemed like touchstones, sometimes like road signs.  Synchronicities are very personal,  and if one pays attention, they can inform, guide, and often confuse on many levels. I believe this is because they exist on many levels or dimensions of being. ** 

So this beautiful Synchronicity.......

I have felt out of touch with my spirituality, out of touch certainly with Spider Woman and the work I used to do.  All the daily demands of our lives, the "temporal density" of contemporary life that leaves one grasping, between items on the laundry list, little crumbs of soul here and there.  I used to have a ritual I did every day that was dedicated to Spider Woman - I would watch the sun rise, and make offerings of my morning coffee to the 4 directions, East, South, West and North.  Then I would pour some coffee in the Center, to symbolize the underlying unity of all things,  the ineffable center of the wheel.  

I remembered that ritual, and remembering, greeted the rising sun with it once again.  Afterwards I reflected rather sadly that I had pehaps  lost contact with the faith, and sense of divine purpose, that I used to have when I was on the trail of Spider Woman.

I support myself with an AIRBNB, tiny houses and rooms.  A guest had just left and I went in to clean.  She had left a poem on the desk - one of those poems  from the ubiquitous "take a poem" piles found at coffee shops in Tucson.  It was perfect.   Here it is:

on the rock overlooking the huddled rock-gorge

on the rock planted on rock for a wall

on the rock rusted with a rosy haze on it

on the rock children scrawl with chalk

         as though that were a way of making it talk

you can see circling about with a crazy velocity

as if the grain of the rock were reassembling

         for some unforeseeable purpose

red specks that are the tiniest spiders

                       if you look real close

                                          --------Cid Corman 

                      

 **I began this Blog in 2007 as I prepared for a summer long Aldon B. Dow Fellowship at Northwood University in Midland, Michigan.  My intention was to pursue my Visions of the Spider Woman, and in particular, I wanted to create a Community Arts Project that engaged others in that Vision of the Great Web.  Spider Woman is an ubiquitous Native American Goddess/Creatrix found throughout the Americas,  in particular, She has profound meaning for me as I learned about Her in the myths of the Pueblo Peoples, and the Navajo (Dine`).  I was very influenced by a book by anthropologist Carol Patterson-Rudolph (1997) called On the Trail of Spider Woman: Petroglyphs, Pictographs, and Myths of the Southwest   

I have also come to believe (no, perhaps sense or "see" is a better way of putting it) that synchronicities are all ultimately related,  they are flashes of the hologram, the weaving.....Spider Woman's Web.  

***And who is Spider Woman to me?  She is a guide and mentor, with a great sense of humor, and a whole lot of patience.  She is also my name for the Divine.

Exhibit of "Spider Woman's Hands" at Midland Art Center 2007

I did complete a Community Arts Project that summer of 2007 called "Hands of Spider Woman" at the Midland Arts Center, and then in 2008 the Project was renewed by artist Kathy Space at the Creative Spirit Center, also in Midland.  And in 2009 I went to Henry Luce Center for Arts and Religion at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C., where I again continued my "Hands of the Spider Woman" theme with a community Project and sculpture I called "Weavers".

details from "Weavers" at Wesley Theological Seminary 2009

Other manifestations include a number of spoken word performances, a book called "Spider Woman's Hands", and a few other shared "web weavings".  

"Spider Woman" from "Restoring the Balance" 2004

A Synchronicity.............

 

Back in the summer of 2000 I had moved to Tucson from California, mostly to be of assistance to my mother and brother,  and also a great deal because, like many others, I could not afford to continue to live in the Bay Area.   I rented an apartment and settled back in to living in Arizona, not without some ambiguity, as I had loved living in the exciting environment of Berkeley.

Some mail continued to arrive for previous tenants, and one day a card arrived for "Angel M Grace".  I was struck by the idea of having a "credit card" for "Angel M Grace" and thought of it as good luck - I put it in my wallet, and I've carried the thing around now for 20 some years!  

Yesterday I was cleaning my wallet out looking for something and I pulled out my "Angel Card".  I had never actually read the line that says "Must Activate by 09/08/00."  Then I remembered that exactly 20 years after that "activation date" was when I had my spine operation - September 8th, 2020.   

In July, 2020 I got shingles, and in the course of dealing with this seemingly painful but not catastrophic problem, the doctor had me get an MRI.   A few days after that I found myself with an emergency appointment with a neurosurgeon!  It seemed that I had some dangerous spurs on my neck/spine that could lead to paralysis if not corrected!  They wanted to operate as soon as possible, and I now am recovered, and have a bunch of metal pins in my spine.  

I guess that card got activated!

Spider Woman's Signature: the "Cosmic Spider"

"Spider and Cross", ubiquitous symbol of the prehistoric Mississippian culture

In 2007 I was an Aldon B. Dow Fellow at Northwood University, in Midland Michigan, for the summer, and was pursuing my fascination, indeed, obsession with, myths and symbols related to the Native American Spider Woman, but as She appears in my life, and in our contemporary world as well..  In time my obsession led me to travel across the country, to have many synchronicities

(one of those synchronicities led me to this building, which,

 now that I revisit it, very much looks like being under a giant Spider Web!)

and to create a community arts project I called "Spider Woman's Hands".  

The Project was continued at the Creative Spirit Center the following year (2008). As participants created "Icons" using casts of their faces, their hands (mind and creativity in manifestation), along with symbols of personal sanctity or significance to each participant, they wove a "thread" that unified all of their stories.  In each show that "thread" was "held" by each hand in each Icon, and ran right out the door.  I look back at that time, following the "threads" that Spider Woman cast me as an artist and a person, as infused with magic and guidance.  I do not know if I have fulfilled that quest yet, but I do know that the symbols of the Spider, the Cross representing the union of all directions, and the Great Web are profoundly important symbols not just from the buried past, but for our time now.

Lately I've been feeling the "hand" of Spider Woman weaving in my life again.  I do not know where She might lead me...........

So thinking about this I re-discovered a Blog post from 2015 I found fascinating, information kindly sent me from a gentleman named Eddie Bailey in the U.K. in which he pointed out that the Earth's  magnetic field in its appearance is very similar to the prehistoric spider and cross  symbol found among the Mississippian people of  ancient America (one that, interestingly enough, also occured in 2005 as a crop circle in Wiltshire, England.  I do not see that many people in Southern England, hoaxers or not, would even know about this symbol, and personally feel this is a genuine crop circle.) 

 The "Cosmic Spider".....a  motif, for me, that embodies the concept of Spider Woman as, once again, midwife for a New Age.  

http://geomag.usgs.gov/about.php

As Mr. Bailey pointed out, 

 "The truth will cease to be stranger than fiction when we get used to it."........ "I realise symbols work on many levels or fractally.  It is said matter is condensed light, and Light is an electro-magnetic wave or particle.  The electric field and the magnetic field are ALWAYS perpendicular to each other - like a Cross on a certain level."

2005 crop circle of ancient American spider motif, Wiltshire, England

He also kindly shared comments by Laid Scranton, who believes that the "primitive people" of Africa, the Dogon people, not unlike  the similarity between the  "cosmic spider" of ancient America and the Earth's magnetic field in relationiship to our sun, seem to have created or intuited a complex symbol language as well: 

"The Dogon symbols and concepts relating to atomic structure so thoroughly mimic their scientific counterparts that, if our purpose was to refute their basis in science, we would first need to explain in some believable way the following extraordinary similarities:

• The po, which is defined in terms similar to those that describe the atom
• Sene seeds, which are described in form and behavior as being similar to protons, neutrons, and electrons and whose "nesting" is recognizable as an electron orbit
• The germination of the sene, whose drawn images are a match for the four types of quantum spin particles
• The spider of the sene whose threads weave the 266 seeds of Amma, much as string theory tells us all matter is woven from strings. 

Likewise, there seems to be a relationship between Dogon cosmological drawings and the shapes of various Egyptian glyphs, yet among the Dogon, these drawings have never taken on the status of an actual written language.

Dada, the Dogon spider who weaves matter and whose name means "mother" in the Dogon language, exhibits many of the classical attributes of the Egyptian (and Amazigh) goddess Neith.  In fact, other ancient goddesses, like Athena, who are traditionally associated with Neith also are associated with spider symbolism similar to that found in Dogon cosmology. Such consistencies suggest that the Dogon system of myth could represent an early incarnation of the Egyptian myths."