Spider Woman Icon

 I seem to be getting a "hello" from Grandmother Spider Woman of late, in the form of synchronicities, visioning, and a visit by a friend who unexpectedly wanted to buy one of my Spider Woman Icons from 2009, as well as the only copy of my ten year old book "Spider Woman's Hands".  All of this led me to envision a new Spider Woman Icon developed around the style of my "Our Lady of the Shards" series (which I am proud to say was just published as an article in Feminism and Religion online magazine).  

And then, of course, because I no longer had a single copy of my (limited edition) book SPIDER WOMAN'S HANDS, I had to go back into the program and revise and add to the book so I can re-publish a new, better, updated copy!  Which, I am also proud to say, is almost finished.  It's not exactly a best seller, but the book is important to me, and archives and tells the story of my 5 year journey on the "Trail of Spider Woman".  I think some of the stories (and art) in there is beautiful.

So much so that I am taking the liberty of copying below the article I did on Spider Woman from my website.  I think I wrote it back in 2010 or so.  Below also is a photo from a performance called "Spider Woman Speaks" in which Morgana Canady wove Spider Woman's Web with an audience of about 300.  One of the most magical performances I have ever been privileged to participate in, from "Restoring the Balance" (2004).  

Why is the Great Web, and this rather obscure but very ubiquitous Native American  Deity important, especially for our time?  Because She represents the interdependency, the essential Oneness of everything! She is timeless, a great archetypal Presence.   This is the paradigm we, as a global humanity, need to evolve to.  

Sometimes I feel like one of those crazy prophets, wandering around repeating myself over and over.  Well, that's the problem with Visions and Visitations in a very fast paced world.......... you have to keep repeating yourself over and over, because they won't just go away.  So any who may read this, forgive me for being repetitious. But it is my continuing truth and inspiration.................

 SPIDER WOMAN’S HANDS

 A Metaphor for Our Time

“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, 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 a  web, a web that was an overlay of the landscape, the sky, of everything united in a great Weaving.  Seen, and then, depending on how I shifted my point of view, not seen, invisible again.   Spider Woman's Web.

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.   Now, according to the Hopi calendar,  a new  age has once again begun.  And surely, once again,  Spider Woman, the  midwife/creatrix   has returned to point the way.                           

"We do not need to invent a ground of connectedness, but only to realize it.  Inter-relatedness has been experientially grasped in myriad cultural contexts -  yet the force of modernity continually denies and degrades it."

Charlene Spretnak, The Politics of Women's Spirituality  (1993)

We have entered the "5th Age" indeed, the astonishing, fast paced, technological age of a  global humanity with unimagined promise, and also unimagined evolutionary crisis - the greatest being climate change.   I like to think that  the World Wide Web is Spider Woman's latest appearance.  Certainly she is making  increasingly  visible the inter-dependency of all life,  whether we speak of  ecology, quantum physics,  synchronicity and metaphysics, or the new frontier of integral psychology.   In Pueblo mythology, Spider Woman is also called “Tse Che Nako”, Thought Woman. Thought Woman is a Creatrix who  creates the world  with what she imagines, the stories she tells about the world.  We also participate in this imaginal power.   

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  "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" 

As cultural anthropologist Carol Patterson-Rudolph eloquently wrote in her book On the Trail of Spider Woman - Petroglyphs, Pictographs, and Myths of the Southwest  (1998)   to the Navajo (Dine`)   Grandmother Spider Woman ((NA ASHJE’II ’ASDZÁÁ) represents  initiation into a mature, integrated way of being.     Spider Woman thus  is a bridge between the mundane,  the mythic, and the sacred dimensions of life.  Like a spider web, her transparent, circular strands exist on multiple levels of  meaning.    Spider Woman is revered by the Navajo because she taught them how to weave, a sacred art to them, as it is to the Pueblo peoples,  that embodies important spiritual teachings.   In Navajo rugs, “Spider Woman’s Cross” represents balance.  To  this day, a bit of spider web is rubbed into the palms of infant girls, so she will become a good weaver.   Spider Woman is about initiation into wisdom - She is able to bridge the sacred and prosaic dimensions of life.  But for those who are not ready,  Grandmother Spider Woman will be invisible, appearing as nothing more than a tiny insect.  And yet, for those with eyes to see, her Web is everywhere.   The "Web" becomes visible within an integral, relational paradigm:   a "webbed vision". 

 Spider Woman is ubiquitous throughout the Americas, found among the Maya,  Pueblo and Navajo  mythology,  and  among the pre-historic "Mound builders", the  Mississippian cultures as well.  There is evidence that the earliest Spider Woman was found among the Maya, where she is identified as the Earth Mother.    I find this ancient myth a profound metaphor for our time,  a symbol that   can encompass ecology, community, theology, integral conciousness studies, and quantum physics.   

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​In his book on Hopi religion, anthropologist 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  – because  they have always been present.  It makes sense that one would follow the instructions of a deity who helped form the underlying  structure of the  world  in which one lives...........Weaving is, from that perspective,  not an act in which one creates something oneself  – it is an act in which one uncovers a pattern that was already there.” 

 From her very being, the Spider  spins silken, transparent threads that she organizes into the patterned symmetry of an ever-expanding Web.   Tse Che Nako weaves, sharing this precious  creative power with all of her Relations.   With contemporary resonance, science now  suggests that we live in a “thought universe” in which all forms of consciousness and living beings, as well as phenomena,  are infinitely interconnected, interdependent,  entangled, and responsive. 

“Tse Che Nako, Thought-Woman, the Spider,

is sitting in her room thinking of a story now -

I'm telling you the story  she is thinking. “   

Keresan Pueblo proverb**

 Among the pre-historic Mississippian culture many decorations and amulets have been found  of a spider, with the solar or 4 directions cross  on its back.     Some are surrounded by a circle of hands.  Another ubiquitous image is the Hand and Eye.   While we cannot know the exact meanings of this prehistoric iconography, they speak to my  imagination as metaphors for our time as well.   Like the Spider Woman, we conceive with our minds.  But we manifest the stories we tell about our lives, individually and collectively,  with the works of our hands -   Spider Woman’s hands are also our hands, all of us inter-dependant within the great ecology of the planet and each other.   Spider Woman offers an opportunity to remember that we are co-creators with that which is ineffable and ultimately  One.    

 A spiritual paradigm is founded upon mythic roots.  Following the metaphor theologian Katherine Keller has provided:   if we can find models that allow us to vision our world as it really is – a shimmering web of interconnected relationships – if we can see truly the world  "with a webbed vision”…….then how, indeed, might   we act? 

 Some Navajos still rub a bit of spider web into the hands of newborn female babies so the they will be blessed by Spider Woman and become good weavers.   May we all "rub a bit of Spider Web" into the palms of our hands as  well as we set to the tasks before us.

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In 2007 I received an Alden Dow Fellowship at Northwood University to pursue “Spider Woman’s Hands” as a Community Art Project at the Midland Art Center.  In 2008 the project was  continued with the Creative Spirit Center  and artist Kathy Space in Midland, Michigan.  In 2009  "Weavers" was a continuation of the Project when I was resident artist at the Henry Luce Center for the Arts at  Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C.   I continue the weaving.                                                   

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To hear " SPIDER WOMAN SPEAKS"  a Spoken Word Performance (2015) on Sound Cloud:                                   https://soundcloud.com/user-972033003/spiderwomanwithmusic3-2                            

 References: 

 Keller,   Catherine  Ph.D.:  From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism and Self  (1989), Thames & Hudson

 Loftin, John D.;        Religion and Hopi Life,  Second Edition,  Indiana University  Press, 2003

 Loy, David:    The World is Made of Stories,   Wisdom Publications, 2010   

 Patterson-Rudolph, Carol:  On the Trail of Spider Woman: Petroglyphs, Pictographs, and Myths of the Southwest,   1998,  Ancient City Press  (** quote from her book)
​
 Spretnak,  Charlene:  The Politics of Women's Spirituality:  Essays by Founding Mothers of the    Movement,  Edited by Charlene Spretnak,   Anchor Books, 1982

The Secret Life of Plants - Derrick Jensen, Cleve Backster and Deep Ecology

"Gaia" (2005)

“Even mainstream scientists are stumbling all over this bio-commu­nication phenomenon. It seems impossible, given the sophistication of modern instrumentation, for us to keep missing this fundamental attunement of living things. Only for so long are we going to be able to pretend it’s the result of ‘loose wires.’ We cannot forever deny that which is so clearly there.”

It was my pleasure to encounter the work of deep ecologist and activist for the Earth Derrick Jensen recently, whose passionate and "nothing held back" books should be required reading for anyone who hopes to live into the future of our world, particularly anyone who has invested the future with the children they love.  But sadly, very few people even know what Gaia Theory is, or the name of Derrick Jensen or James Lovelock. In the current presidential election one of the candidates, Donald Trump, "doesn't believe in global warming".  And the environment has not entered into the debates.

Yet I believe the truths Jensen, and Lovelock,  speak of may very well be the most important truths of our time.   Derrick Jensen kindly gave me permission to quote from him, and so I share here an excerpt from his site, from his most recent book.  I was so struck by this interview with Cleve Backster, who showed that plants, even micro-organisms, are sentient and responsive to the thoughts and intentions of life around them,  The interview below demonstrates what scientists like James Lovelock, and his biologist collaborator Lynn Margulis spoke of  in their Gaia Hypothesis - that the Earth is a living being, and all aspects of life on Earth are interdependent, self-regulating, and evolving.  Which includes us.  As Backster comments, “The implications of all this … are staggering."

What also excited me about  Mr. Jensen's excerpt was the way it revealed the mythic strands of Spider Woman, shimmering like the almost transparent, and yet infinitely strong, strands of the Great Web...........all life connected, interdependent, responsive, reciprocal..............part of the "Great Conversation".

Excerpt from :  "The Myth of Human Supremacy"

by  Derrick Jensen
www.derrickjensen.com 


Almost 20 years ago I interviewed Cleve Backster about plant intelli­gence. No, he wasn’t a botanist. He was one of the world’s experts on the use of polygraphs, or lie detectors. I know that sounds like an odd con­nection, but listen to his story, and the connection will become clear. Just after World War II he was a CIA interrogation specialist, and founded The Agency’s polygraph school. In 1960 he left the CIA and formed the Backster School of Lie Detection, to instruct police officers. This school is the longest running polygraph school in existence.

Backster could name the moment the focus of his life changed for­ever, from lie detection to plant intelligence: early in the morning on February 2, 1966, at 13 minutes, 55 seconds of chart time for a polygraph he was administering. He had threatened the subject’s well-being in hopes of triggering a response. The subject had responded electrochemically to this threat. The subject was a plant.  Here’s his story:

“I wasn’t particularly into plants, but there was a going-out-of-business sale at a florist on the ground floor of the building, and the secretary bought a couple of plants for the office: a rubber plant, and this dracaena cane. I had done a saturation watering — putting them under the faucet until water ran out the bottom of the pots — and was curious to see how long it would take the moisture to get to the top. I was especially interested in the dracaena, because the water had to climb a long trunk, and then to the end of long leaves. I thought if I put the galvanic-skin-response detector of the polygraph at the end of a leaf, a drop in resistance would be recorded on the paper as the moisture arrived between the electrodes. … I noticed something on the chart resembling a human response on a polygraph: not at all what I would have expected from water entering a leaf. Lie detectors work on the principle that when people perceive a threat to their well-being, they physiologically respond in predictable ways. If you were conducting a polygraph as part of a murder investigation, you might ask a suspect, ‘Was it you who fired the shot fatal to so and so? If the true answer were yes, the suspect will fear getting caught lying, and electrodes on his or her skin will pick up the physiological response to that fear. So I began to think of ways to threaten the well-being of the plant. First I tried dipping a neighboring leaf in a cup of warm coffee. The plant, if anything, showed what I now recognize as boredom — the line on the chart just kept trending downward.

“Then at 13 minutes, 55 seconds chart time, the imagery entered my mind of burning the leaf. I didn’t verbalize; I didn’t touch the plant; I didn’t touch the equipment. Yet the plant went wild. The pen jumped right off the top of the chart. The only new thing the plant could have reacted to was the mental image.

“I went into the next office to get matches from my secretary’s desk, and lighting one, made a few feeble passes at a neighboring leaf. I real­ized, though, that I was already seeing such an extreme reaction that any increase wouldn’t be noticeable. So I tried a different approach: I removed the threat by returning the matches to the secretary’s desk. The plant calmed right back down.

“Immediately I understood something important was going on. I could think of no conventional scientific explanation. There was no one else in the lab suite, and I wasn’t doing anything that might have provided a mechanistic trigger. From that split second my consciousness hasn’t been the same. My whole life has been devoted to looking into this.”

He called what the plant was doing “primary perception.” He found that not only plants were capable of this: “I’ve been amazed at the percep­tion capability right down to the bacterial level"........“Interestingly enough, bacteria appear to have a defense mechanism such that extreme danger causes them to go into a state similar to shock. In effect, they pass out. Many plants do this as well. If you hassle them enough they flatline. The bacteria apparently did this, because as soon as they hit the cat’s digestive system, the signal went out. There was a flatline from then on.”

Cleve continued, “I was on an airplane once, and had with me a little battery-powered galvanic response meter. Just as the attendants started serving lunch, I pulled out the meter and said to the guy next to me, ‘You want to see something interesting?’ I put a piece of lettuce between the electrodes, and when people started to eat their salads we got some reac­tivity, which stopped as the leaves went into shock. ‘Wait until they pick up the trays,’ I said, ‘and see what happens.’ When attendants removed our meals, the lettuce got back its reactivity. I had the aisle seat, and I can still remember him strapped in next to the window, no way to escape this mad scientist attaching an electronic gadget to lettuce leaves.

“The point is that the lettuce was going into a protective state so it wouldn’t suffer. When the danger left, the reactivity came back. This ceasing of electrical energy at the cellular level ties in, I believe, to the state of shock that people, too, enter in extreme trauma.  Plants, bacteria, lettuce leaves … Eggs. I had a Doberman Pinscher back in New York whom I used to feed an egg a day. One day I had a plant hooked up to a large gal­vanic response meter, and as I cracked the egg, the meter went crazy. That started hundreds of hours of monitoring eggs. Fertilized or unfertilized, it doesn’t matter; it’s still a living cell, and plants perceive when that con­tinuity is broken. Eggs, too, have the same defense mechanism. If you threaten them, their tracing goes flat. If you wait about twenty minutes, they come back."

“I met a dental researcher who had perfected a method of gath­ering white cells from (people's)  mouths. This was politically feasible, easy to do, and required no medical supervision. I started doing split-screen videotaping of experiments, with the chart readout superimposed at the bottom of the screen showing the donors activities. We took  white cell samples, then sent the people home to watch a preselected television program likely to elicit an emotional response — for example, showing a veteran of Pearl Harbor a documentary on Japanese air attacks. We found that cells outside the body still react to the emotions you feel, even though you may be miles away.  The greatest distance we’ve tested has been about three hundred miles. Astronaut Brian O’Leary, who wrote Exploring Inner and Outer Space, left his white cells here in San Diego, then flew home to Phoenix. On the way, he kept track of events that aggravated him, carefully logging the time of each. The correlation remained, even over that distance.”

“The implications of all this …”He interrupted, laughing. He said, “Yes, are staggering. I have file drawers full of high quality anecdotal data showing time and again how bacteria, plants, and so on are all fantastically in tune with each other. And human cells, too, have this primary perception capability, but somehow its gotten lost at the conscious level.”

“How has the scientific community received your work?”

“With the exception of scientists at the margins, like Rupert Shel­drake, it was met first with derision, then hostility, and mostly now with silence. At first they called primary perception ‘the Backster Effect,’ per­haps hoping they could trivialize the observations by naming them after this wild man who claimed to see things missed by mainstream science. The name stuck, but because primary perception can’t be readily dis­missed, it is no longer a term of contempt.

“What’s the primary criticism by mainstream scientists?”

“The big problem — and this is a problem as far as conscious­ness research in general is concerned — is repeatability. The events I’ve observed have all been spontaneous. They have to be. If you plan them out in advance, you’ve already changed them. It all boils down to this: repeatability and spontaneity do not go together, and as long as mem­bers of the scientific community overemphasize repeatability in scientific methodology, they’re not going to get very far in consciousness research.

“Not only is spontaneity important, but so is intent. You can’t pretend. If you say you are going to burn a plant, but don’t mean it, nothing will happen. I hear constantly from people in different parts of the country, wanting to know how to cause plant reactions. I tell them, ‘Don’t do anything special. Go about your work; keep notes so later you can tell what you were doing at specific times, and then compare them to your chart recording. But don’t plan anything, or the experiment won’t work.’ People who do this often get equivalent responses to mine, and often win first prize in science fairs. But when they get to Biology 101, they’re told that what they have experienced is not important.

“There have been a few attempts by scientists to replicate my exper­iments … but these have all been methodologically inadequate. … It is so very easy to fail. … And let’s be honest: some of the scientists were relieved when they failed, because success would have gone against the body of scientific knowledge.”

I said, “For scientists to give up predictability means they have to give up control, which means they have to give up Western culture, which means it’s not going to happen until civilization collapses under the weight of its own ecological excesses.”

I asked if there were alternative explanations for the polygraph read­ings. I’d read that one person suggested his machine must have had a loose wire.

He responded, “In 31 years of research I’ve found all my loose wires. No, I can’t see any mechanistic solution. Some parapsychologists believe I’ve mastered the art of psychokinesis — that I move the pen with my mind — which would be a pretty good trick itself. But they overlook the fact that I’ve automated and randomized many of the experiments to where I’m not even aware of what’s going on until later, when I study the resulting charts and videotapes. The conventional explanations have worn pretty thin. One such explanation, proposed in Harper’s, was static electricity: if you scuffle across the room and touch the plant, you get a response. But of course I seldom touch the plant during periods of obser­vation, and in any case the response would be totally different.”
“So, what is the signal picked up by the plant?

“I don’t know. I don’t believe the signal, whatever it is, dissipates over distance, which is what we’d get if we were dealing with electromagnetic phenomenon. I used to hook up a plant, then take a walk with a random­ized timer in my pocket. When the timer went off, I’d return home. The plant always responded the moment I turned around, no matter the dis­tance. And the signal from Phoenix was just as strong as if Brian O’Leary were in the next room. Also, we’ve attempted to screen the signal using lead-lined containers, and other materials, but we can’t screen it out. This makes me think the signal doesn’t actually go from here to there, but instead manifests itself in different places. All this, of course, lands us firmly in the territory of the metaphysical, the spiritual.”
I said, “Primary perception suggests a radical redefinition of con­sciousness.”

“You mean it would do away with the notion of consciousness as some­thing on which humans have a monopoly?” He hesitated a moment, then continued, “Western science exaggerates the role of the brain in con­sciousness. Whole books have been written on the consciousness of the atom. Consciousness might exist on an entirely different level.”

I asked whether he had worked with materials that would normally be considered inanimate.

“I’ve shredded some things and suspended them in agar. I get electric signals, but not necessarily relating to anything going on in the environ­ment. It’s too crude an electroding pattern for me to decipher. But I do suspect that consciousness goes much, much further. In 1987 I partic­ipated in a University of Missouri program that included a talk by Dr. Sidney Fox, then connected with the Institute for Molecular and Cellular Evolution at the University of Miami. Fox had recorded electric signals from protein-like material that showed properties strikingly similar to those of living cells. The simplicity of the material he used and the self organizing capability it displayed suggest to me that bio-communication was present at the earliest states in the evolution of life on this planet. Of course the Gaia hypothesis — the idea that the earth is a great big working organism, with a lot of corrections built in — fits in nicely with this. I don’t think it would be a stretch to take the hypothesis further and pre­sume that the planet itself is intelligent.”

I asked how his work has been received in other parts of the world.

“The Russians and other eastern Europeans have always been very interested. And whenever I encounter Indian scientists — Buddhist or Hindu — and we talk about what I do, instead of giving me a bunch of grief they say, ‘What took you so long?’ My work dovetails very well with many of the concepts embraced by Hinduism and Buddhism.”

“What is taking us so long?”

“The fear is that, if what I am observing is accurate, many of the theo­ries on which we’ve built our lives need complete reworking. I’ve known biologists to say, ‘If Backster is right, we’re in trouble.’ It takes a certain kind of character and personality to even attempt such a questioning of fundamental assumptions. The Western scientific community, and actu­ally all of us, are in a difficult spot, because in order to maintain our cur­rent mode of being, we must ignore a tremendous amount of informa­tion. And more information is being gathered all the time. For instance, have you heard of Rupert Sheldrake’s work with dogs? He puts a time-re­cording camera on both the dog at home and the human companion at work. He has discovered that even if people come home from work at a different time each day, at the moment the person leaves work, the dog at home heads for the door.

“Even mainstream scientists are stumbling all over this bio-commu­nication phenomenon. It seems impossible, given the sophistication of modern instrumentation, for us to keep missing this fundamental attunement of living things. Only for so long are we going to be able to pretend it’s the result of ‘loose wires.’ We cannot forever deny that which is so clearly there.”\

Excerpt first published at Utne Reader
copyright Derrick Jensen
http://www.derrickjensen.org/work/myth-of-human-supremacy/moving-goalposts-plant-intelligence/

"A Webbed Vision" ~ Reflections on Interdependency and Individualism

"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, "From a Broken Web"3

The quote above, from Theologian Catherine Keller, derives from the ancient and original root meaning of the name "Penelope", the "faithful wife of Ulysses".   It is likely that Penelope was originally a Fate or Oracular Goddess before she became demoted in patriarchal Greek mythology, and as such her name meant "with a web on Her face", one who "sees the connections".  I have never forgotten the significance of that.

It's been 5 years since the shooting of beloved Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.  Because I lived close to her former office, I saw a candlelit altar develop for her, with so hundreds of  wishes for her recovery and for peace.   Having been witness to this  tragedy in my home town  of Tucson,  which took the lives of 6 people including a child, and remember so many other atrocities committed by men with guns since,  I' ve been  unable to think in terms that are too abstract.  When confronted with the horror of violence, and the heavy pall of grief, the need to experience  inter-dependence, with-in our bodies and with-in the refuge of our imaginations -  is very real and immanent.   We want to know we are not alone, we want to believe we can support each other.

I was struck by  the  way "Together We Thrive" became a  theme echoed throughout Tucson at that time, and a motto that headed healing activities, from President Obama's call for unity, to spontaneous Shrines created throughout Tucson.  Does any of that moment remain?  Congress is trying to end Obama Care, which will end health insurance for millions of people, and one of the most arrogant of exploitative capitalist  billionaires, Donald Trump, is running for President.   As I watch the ongoing corporate greed that is eroding not only our former democracy, but the very life of our planet, and the unreasoned ideology of capitalist "individualism" that in many ways makes that possible in this country.............I don't know.  If I am not my brother's and sister's keeper, and they mine - who is?  Monsanto?  Walmart?  

Altar for Gabrielle Gifford at her office, January 2011, after she was shot 

We urgently need pragmatic ways to create community in today's world.  Could a strong community  have prevented what happened?  Unbalanced individuals will always abound, and lethal weapons are readily available - the American gun culture, and easy access to lethal weapons, ensures the violent deaths continue year after year.  Yet even so, the failure of community speaks to this tragedy.  If we weren't in so many ways a culture of "rugged individualism" where "good fences make good neighbors", and our technology increasingly allows us to insulate ourselves from the so-called "outside world" ... would this young man have received the attention he needed before he erupted in catastrophic violence in 2011?

"The Rugged Individualist" writes sociologist Philip Slater,1 "cheers when needy people are deprived of food, battered women are deprived of protection from brutal husbands, children are deprived of education, because this is "getting government off our backs. "   

This kind of thinking fails in every way to communicate that we live within a vast web of human and environmental inter-dependency, a web that is also very intimate. This is my ultimate Iconic Image, the Great Web of Gaia, the "Webbed Vision" that sees and recognizes the sacred links, the archetype of Spider Woman.  I know my art seems obscure to many, but that is what it derives from, in one image after another.  I can't seem to stop making them, because the Web underlies every aspect of our life.   A successful adult is so because of parents, teachers, community resources, and distant ancestors  that enabled him or her to mature.  And without a sense of belonging and contributing to that continuum as it reaches into future generations,  human beings end up feeling alienated and ultimately without a sense of purpose. They feel disposable, and perceive others as equally disposible.

Which is what an unsustainable, insatiable corporate consumer system, as a placebo for the pain of spiritual and communal isolation, feeds on.  And by the way, local free enterprise is not the same as the kind of souless capitalism we now have.  Within a healthy free enterprise system the wealth circulates within the community - if the baker does well, the   pharmacy does well, if the dressmaker does well, so does the restaurant, and so on.  In what we now have the wealth is removed from the heart of the community to the mega stores, like Walmart, on the outskirts, and all the jobs imported to slave labor overseas, to the loss of all except the very, very wealthy exploiting the situation.  

In tribal societies, survival depended utterly on cooperation, as well as the collective ability to  adapt continually to new environmental challenges, be it drought, invaders, or the exhaustion of resources.  The mythic foundation of any tribe (or civilization) is the template upon which they stand;  a culture with a rigid mythos that cannot adapt and change is doomed to collapse. Without a theology of co-dependency, which we have lost in the advent of mega global capitalism and its "individualism" which benefits only a very, very few individuals, that collapse is apparent.  Because the system, ultimately, cannot adapt, cannot become sustainable, cannot become viable.

"We live in a world today in which the problems we face are all planetary..........." Philip Slater  commented in his last book The Chrysalis Effect,  "the polarization and chaos we see in the world are the effect of a global cultural metamorphosis".   But that metamorphosis, I believe, is based up the profound realization of our inter-dependency in every single way, the "Great Web", a Webbed Vision.  We need this vision, updated and evolving for the challenges of our time.  

I call on artists and other "cultural creatives" to help to make a new mythology for the global tribe. 

Renunciate theologies (and mythologies) that teach us to renounce the world, the body, and the demands of relationships of every kind, either in service of some abstract "better place" (be it heaven, paradise, enlightenment or nirvana) or in reaction to teachings that degrade earthly life as "impure" or "unreality"..............will not help us, or those who must come after us.  If we're going to speak of "oneness", we need myths that include tremendous, creative diversity within that "oneness", that can include many gods and goddesses, many voices and languages, and many ways to the truth instead of simply eliminating the competition.  Further, our world myth can no longer be simply a human world myth - it must include many evolutions, many other beings within the intimacy of ecosystems.  If we're to survive into sustainability.

"The culture that is holistic is holistic because its reasoning structure is holistic." wrote artist Rafael Montanez Ortiz.  "The problem we have with holism is that our reasoning is fragmentary, dissectionist, it removes us from relating things, it structures things in separate compartments in order  to "have control".2  Ortiz maintains that if the logic of one's society is relational, you are in a construct that places you in  relation to all things, and thus, develop an  empathic response to all things.   In earlier societies, he believes,  the entire world mythos was about a living world, alive, entangled, conscious, animistic and full of Anima Mundi, the World Soul.  It's no coincidence that this "primitive"  worldview is very close to what science, from Gaia Theory to Quantum Entanglement, is discovering.

Myths, as the "narrative foundation" for  societies, become more meaningful through embodiment, through an actual enactment - through ritual that is engaging and potent.   Culturally in the West we have, by and large, lost our rituals, or they have become weakened through commercialism - witness the sad transformation of Solstice rituals into the meaningless commercialism of Christmas, or the diminishment of the important days of honoring the ancestors into "scary Halloween". 

Our minds aren't just in our skulls, but in  the entire body, which includes the aura and the etheric networks that exist between us and the rest of life.    Whether we're talking about a forest, or another person, abstractions can remove us from the  experience of communion, the immanent ability to sense what is going on.  Abstractions become what is going on.  I have experienced, and helped to create, rituals that were profoundly transformative.  My experiences of the Spiral Dance with Reclaiming, or with the Earth Spirit Community's Twilight Covening, or the Lighting of the Labyrinth at Sirius Rising......will always energize me when I remember them.  Within those magical circles, I entered mythic time and mythic space and mythic mind, and experienced, as Joseph Campbell put it, the "Thou" realm of existence.  That  does not end when you leave the circle.

In 2004, I directed "Restoring the Balance", a non-denominational event devoted to cross-cultural stories of the Great Mother.  Our cast wished to dramatize the need for healing the great Earth Mother.  We chose as our centerpiece the Inuit legend of Sedna, and the rituals of atonement and reciprocity the Inuit perform with their shaman when they believe they have fallen from balance with the life giving Ocean Mother.   Artist Katherine Josten (founder of the Global Art Project) danced the role of  Sedna.  In bringing up the event, she  observed that:

"The work of our group is not to re-enact the ancient goddess myths, but to take those myths to their next level of evolutionary unfolding.  Artists are the myth makers."

In this same spirit, another member of the cast chose to weave a web with the audience as  Grandmother Spider Woman.   Morgana Canady wove a web with 300 people.  In this performance biodegradable cords from “Spider Woman’s Web” were later distributed among cast members, and scattered throughout the desert, symbolically "extending our web".  As part of the Global Art Project an exchange was made with the AFEG-NEH-MABANG Traditional Dance Company, in Cameroon - a part of the weaving.  


 Among the Navajo, infant girls often have a bit of spider web rubbed into their hands so they will "become good weavers".  

May we all now rub a bit of spider web into our hands for the work ahead of us ..........and, like Penelope, may we all now see "with a web on our faces".

1) Phillip Slater, The Chrysalis Effectt (2007)

2) Rafael Montanez Ortiz Ph.D., interview with Lauren Raine for unpublished manuscript (1989)

3) Katherine Keller Ph.D., "From a Broken Web" (1989)

4) Katherine Josten M.F.A., The Global Art Project