The Butterfly Woman Mask

Another new  mask, this one based on the Native American (Pueblo) stories of the "Butterfly Woman".  She is often represented among the Hopi people as an older woman, solid and experienced:  because the work of a Pollinator is no work for an inexperienced, naive young girl.  It is the hard work of pollinating the seeds of a new year, a new generation, a new world.  

The story below is not really based on the wonderful traditions of the Hopi,  rather, it kind of emerged from me some 20 years ago, when much was changing in my life.  But wherever  "La Mariposa" disappeared to, I am certain she has joined her tribe in order to continue the great work of the Pollinators...............

LA  MARIPOSA

Once upon a time, in a dusty village like any other village, a  village with  three good wells,  fields of blue and yellow corn,  a white church, and a cantina, there lived a woman who was neither young, nor old.  She was brown of skin, and eye, and her hair was as brown as the sandy earth, and her clothes were  brown and gray as well. She was neither beautiful nor ugly, neither tall nor small, and she walked with a long habit of  watching her feet.

One day, she saw a tree alight with migrating butterflies.   Their velvet wings fluttered in the wind of their grace, and one circled her, coming to rest upon her open hand.  She thought that her heart would break for the power of  its fragile beauty, and she held her breath for fear of frightening it.  La Mariposa  was as orange and brilliant as the setting sun falling between indigo  mountains, as iridescent, as black and violet as the most  fragrant midnight.  At last the butterfly lifted from her hand to rejoin its nomad tribe, and its wings seemed like a whisper,  "Come with us, come with us..."

The next morning they were gone.  She held her hand out to the empty tree, as if to wave farewell, and saw that where the butterfly had rested, there remained a dusting of color, yellow, like pollen, the kiss of a butterfly wing.  And she thought  something had changed.

She went to the well to draw water, and saw her face reflected there.  She was not the same -  there were now minute lines, hairline cracks, along the sides of her face, at the corners of her eyes.  Later, she noticed  little webs of  light beneath the sturdy brown skin of her hands,  barely visible except in the dim  twilight.

This was a frightening thing.  She drew her  skirts more closely around herself, pulled her scarf over her eyes.  But as time went on,  there was something that kept emerging, something that would not be denied.  She was peeling open.  At first, it simply itched, like a rash, like pulling nettles.  As  weeks went by,  what had been easily born, could be endured,  became painful,  became an agony.  Try as she might, as tightly as she wrapped herself in her cocoon of shawls and skin and silence,  the comforting  routines of her life,  colors emerged from her hands, spilt from her mouth, colors and tears, deep waters that seeped from within,  washing away the dust of her life.

Soon, sleep became impossible.  Standing by her window one day, shivering,  she shook  with fear.   A beam of sunlight fell across the floor of her little room like honey.  "Please help me", she cried, "I'm not the same".   Then she noticed a beam of sunlight that fell across the floor of her little room like honey.  Motes of dust gathered in the golden light, becoming  a flurry of butterflies dancing through an open window into a sky as blue and vast as forever.   And La Mariposa  opened her arms, took the gift of wings, and rose.

When her neighbor came to walk with her that evening, she found only a dusty shawl and an old brown skirt upon the floor, the early stars glimmering through an unshuttered window.

Spider Woman's Hands.......

  "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…..a  landscape  seen 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 5^th 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. 

Spider Woman's Hands

View more presentations from laurenraine.

    References:

    Loftin, John D., Religion and Hopi Life, Second Edition, Indiana University Press

    Keller, Catherine, From a Broken Web (1989), Thames & Hudson

    Patterson-Rudolph, Carol, On the Trail of Spiderwoman, 1997, Ancient City Press

    Franke, Judith   A., The Gift of Spider Woman,  Dickson Mounds Museum, THE LIVING MUSEUM         …volume 61, No. 2, 1999

THREADS OF THE SPIDERWOMAN - some random notes

Ts' its' tsi' nako, Thought-Woman
is sitting in her room,  and what ever she thinks about appears.
Thought-Woman, the spider
named things and as she named them they appeared.
She is sitting in her room thinking of a story now:

I'm telling you the story She is thinking. 3

 

Keresan Pueblo Proverb  (3)

Native stories don't end after two hours in a theatre, or when we turn off the electronic box. Like the Hands of Spider Woman, they keep spinning and evolving, generation into generation, from the waking world to the dreamtime. Storytelling, in native traditions, is more than a way to pass on history and religious beliefs to the next generation - it is also a ceremony that acts as a link between the mythical beings and the people themselves, whose ritual life is based on the mythic cycles. This is the same way sacred masks, throughout the world, are regarded and used - as doorways into the realms of the deities.

Spider Woman appears in stories throughout the Americas, indeed, throughout the world. My inspiration is derived from her potent presence in the Southwestern part of the United States, where I live, which includes the rich cultural traditions of the Pueblo Indians and
the Navajo. The Pueblo Indians refers to many native peoples living there, from northern New Mexico to the Hopi mesas of Arizona, with many unique cultural differences. These people are believed to be the descendants of the vanished Anasazi who built cities, cliff dwellings, and ceremonial centers throughout the area.

In Pueblo mythology Thought Woman, Sun Father, and Corn Mother are the most important deities. These primal deities are each powerful, but they are also interdependent. Thought Woman/Spider Woman is the creatrix of the universe, which she sometimes initiates alone, and sometimes in partnership with the Sun. The creative impulse is something Thought Woman passes on, originating from the Web's center a generative process continually expanding through her daughters, sons, and a non-human pantheon of relations as well.

There are also tales (among the Hopi) that say Spiderwoman, with Sun Father, fashioned the very first people (which also included two-legged people) from red clay. When ceramic artist Kathy Space and I began our community sculpture project in Midland, Michigan (2007), we conceived of “prayer ties” to unify a mosaic composed of casts of participants’ hands and faces. This variation on Spider Woman Web seemed like another “thread“ to envision the telling. A Web of minds and hands, made of red terra cotta clay. Terra. The good red earth, the color of life, of blood, of vitality.

A "Spider and Cross" symbol is found, ubiquituous, among the prehistoric Mississippian people thorughout the South and Midwest, and a Spider Woman, who is also a variation of Mother Earth, is found among the Maya.  The Navajo (who call themselves the “Dine” which means “the people”) revere Grandmother Spider Woman ('Na'ashje'ii sdfzq'q) because she taught them how to weave.

According to cultural anthropologist Carol Patterson-Rudolph,

"The Navajo have their own version of Spider Woman. As with all metaphors, Spider Woman is a bridge that allows a certain kind of knowledge to be transmitted from the mundane to the sacred dimension.........they believe that an individual must undergo an initiation before he or she can be fully receptive to this kind of knowledge. Thus, to the eyes of the uninitiated, Spider Woman appears merely as an insect, and her words go unheard. But to the initiated whose mind has been opened the voice of this tiny creature can be heard. This is the nature of wisdom, c0nveyed through the metaphor of Spider Woman. 1"

Spider Woman (who lives, the Navajo say, on Spider Rock in Canyon de Chelly) is always available to help her descendants. She can best be heard in the wind (or on the transparent threads of synchronicities) - if one is quiet, and prepared to listen.

Navajo rugs often have Spiderwoman’s Cross woven into the pattern. The cross of Spider Woman, it seems to me, is another very important symbol for our time, because it represents balance - the union of the 4 directions or 4 elements. The fifth element is the unifying force, the mystery at the center. To “walk in beauty” is to be aware of a “moving point of balance” as we walk across the land, and walk through the circles of our lives and relationships.

Spider Woman has a way of getting around.

Although she can be found in the canyons and deserts and prairies and forests of the Americas (and stories about the Yellow Women, and “Born from the Water” and “Monster Slayer“, and Evil Katchina, and many others, are well worth the telling) - it seems her grandchildren traveled to many other places and times as well. Perhaps she was once Neith, the primal weaver of ancient Egypt. In Celtic lore she has her hand on the web of the Wyrd, and in India, there is the great Jewel Net of Indra, wherein each gem infinitely reflects every other gem. Among the Greeks she gave Theseus a thread to guide him through his labyrinth - a thread not unlike the same threads she casts to you, and to me, now and then, on our own heroes journeys.

And today? Well, there are many contemporary ways Spiderwoman makes herself known. Ecologists speak of the great Web of life, while physicists speak of entanglement theory. I like to think that the Internet is Spiderwoman's latest appearance. I have the feeling She’s working very hard now to make us pay attention.

Because the truth of Spiderwoman's Web is really very simple. All my efforts to make a more complex tale have failed, and I can summarize it like this:

We're woven into the world,
and the world is woven into us.

We’re weaving the world into being with the stories we tell, right now. 

A cultural paradigm is founded upon mythic roots - the "warp and woof"2 from which the ideas of a culture grow. So what are those threads? Do they show us how to “walk in beauty” as the Navajo teach? Because to "walk in beauty" is not just a personal practice. It's a blessing in motion for all our myriad relations. Each of us is holding a thread, a lineage, that goes back in time and extends far into the future, a weave we participate in with our thoughts, our dreams, and the manifest creative work of our hands. So perhaps the only real question is also an ethical question, as well as a creative one. “What are we weaving?”

I have found that Spiderwoman delights in all things connected, co-creative, collaborative, cooperative, communicative - all those “co” words. Warp and weft. May we all be conscious weavers, beautiful weavers. For our children, for all our relations, for the future.

My gratitude to:

The Aldon B. Dow Fellowship, The Puffin Foundation, Kathy and Steve Space and Space Studio, and you - for weaving this story with me.

Lauren Raine, 2007

Beauty is above me

Beauty is below me

Beauty is beside me

Beauty is before me

Beauty is behind me

 Dine Blessing Way Chant

1 Patterson-Rudolph, Carol, "On the Trail of Spiderwoman", 1997, Ancient City Press, p. 82

2 "warp and woof : the foundation or base of something." [ Old English owef "weave on" <>

3 Keresan Pueblo Creation Myth - Patterson-Rudolph, Carol, "On the Trail of Spiderwoman", Ibid.