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.   

---

  "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.   

---

​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.

---

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.                                                   

---

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

A "Webbed Vision" - Toward a New World Story

                   A "Webbed Vision" - Toward a New World Story

By Lauren Raine MFA 

 

"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: Separation, Sexism, and Self  1

 

The quote above, from theologian Catherine Keller, has been deeply important to me.   I first read her book "From a Broken Web" in 2008, when I was pursuing my "Hands of the Spider Woman" Community Arts Projects.  The first project  was at the Midland Center for the Arts (with the Alden B. Dow Creativity Center) in Michigan, then at the Creative Spirit Center, also  in Midland (with Kathy Space),  and last when I was a Resident Artist at the Henry Luce Center for the Arts and Religion in Washington D.C. 

 

Perhaps because I live in the Southwest, the "legends of the Spider Woman" have always fascinated me as I encountered Her in Native American art.  Spider Woman is a ubiquitous Creatrix found throughout the Americas, with her earliest known origins among the Maya of South America.  Spider Woman manifests among the Navajo and the Pueblo Peoples of the Southwest as the "great Weaver".    Among the people of the Keresan Pueblo she is also called Tse Che Nako, the "Thought Woman" who weaves the worlds into being with the stories She tells.  Within this metaphor of the "great weaver", Spider Woman waits at the center of the Web of life, within which we are all connected, interwoven and co-creating.

 

Ts' its' tsi' 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 from Carol Patterson-Rudolph 2 

 

My path on the trail of Spider Woman has been fraught with synchronicities, which I have come to think of as touchstones along the way.  Synchronicities, to me, are a mystical part of the overlay (and the foundational "under") of the metaphor Dr. Keller writes of.  As I write about   "A Webbed Vision", for example, I note that for the past weeks a spider has made its home on the ceiling directly above the keyboard where I write.  I have come to think of that spider as my muse - perhaps, fancifully, she is Spider Woman's envoy, weaving its patient web just above my head, reminding me each day of a vision I want to hold.

In her 1989 book Dr. Keller does not speak of the Native American Goddess Spider Woman, but she often references the Greek myth of "Penelope".  Penelope is a name with ancient origins that derive from an archaic Greek word meaning "with a web on her face".   It is likely that Penelope was originally a Fate or Oracular Goddess before she was later demoted in patriarchal Greek mythology to the faithful wife of Odysseus, weaving and un-weaving a shroud to avoid her suitors (it's always  interesting the way myths are transformed to suit the evolving mythos and power base of different cultures).   Yet within the earlier context of a more egalitarian society, "Penelope" would be one who could "see" and "weave" the beginnings and the ends of a life.  She might have been personified with a loom before her, or spinning a thread.  Taking the metaphor further, such a Goddess would "see" the inter-dependencies between all things, the Great Web spreading out across the landscapes of life.   

 

 

Pueblo mythology tells that when each of the previous worlds ended in catastrophe, it was Spider Woman who led the people through the sipapu, the kiva (or birth canal) into the next world.  As such Spider Woman is the divine midwife for the birth of each new age. According to Hopi cosmology, we have now entered the "Fifth World".  It is interesting that, in contemporary Neo-Pagan practices, there are 5 Elements that symbolize the "great Circle".   The Fifth Element is called "Center", and is represented with the color white, the union of all colors.  It is the last Element, and symbolizes the universal force or Aether that unites all the other Elements.  

I cannot resist imagining that the World Wide Web might just be is Spider Woman's latest appearance!   

 

"Spider Woman's Cross" motif in Navajo rug

 

“In Hopi cosmology 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.”

 

John Loftin 3

 

As we confront the universal catastrophe of climate change, it seems to me that this is a significant and appropriate metaphor.  Indeed, a significant Prophecy:  for what we now confront concerns not just a tribe or nation, but all beings upon planet Earth.  We must evolve a new, global paradigm for this Fifth Age if we are to survive.   Spider Woman, bringing a vision of the Great Web of life, once again must be the midwife as She makes visible the connections, the strands of the Web,  whether we speak of  ecology,  economy, quantum physics, or integral psychology.   In our essence, as Jungian psychologist Ann Baring has said, "We are one".

Petroglyph,  Southern New Mexico

 

"The new myth manifests through the triple influence of quantum physics, depth psychology and the ecological movement suggests that we are participants in a great 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, Awakening to the New Story   4

 

How indeed, as an evolving global society, would we think and act, if we saw, like Penelope (or Grandmother Spider Woman) "with a webbed vision"? Would we be able to change the catastrophic course of ecological destruction if we had such a theology based upon Relationship instead of Domination?  If our reasoning, and our way of seeing, was inclusive rather than dissectionist?  If instead of valuing competition and the "alpha" winner, we valued consensus? If instead of "fight and flight" in the face of danger, we instead pulled out the defense tactic found among female monkeys of "tend and befriend"?   If instead of renunciate, hierarchical religions that turn us away from nature and Earthly existence toward an abstract "heaven" or "nirvana", we saw ourselves as profoundly embedded in the sacred body and evolving soul of our living planet?

 

"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" 5

                      

 If each of us could, like Penelope, "see" ourselves holding a thread that originates with all of those who came before us - and touches all of those who will come after us - how indeed might we see, and act?

 

"The New Story coming into being is that the whole universe is a unified field. The world we experience is like a minute excitation on the surface of an infinite 

cosmic sea which sustains not only our world, but the entire Cosmos. 

We live within a cosmic web of life which underlies and connects all life forms in the universe and on our planet. Through a vast network of electro-magnetic fields We are connected to the earth,  the sun and the hundred billion galaxies.  

 So we are not separate from any aspect of planetary or cosmic life. "

 

Anne Baring, Awakening to the New Story 6

As I watch the ongoing corporate greed that is eroding not only democracy, but the very life of our planet,  and the unreasoned ideology of capitalism (as opposed to local free enterprise) that makes it  possible for this new monarchy of the 1% to arise, I wonder sometimes if there is any hope for the future at all.  If I am not my brother's and sister's keeper, and they mine - who is?  Monsanto?  Walmart?  A civilization, indeed the raising of a single child, is a grand collaboration among many, and it might be said from that "webbed vision" of societies that the exploiters and warlords pounding their chests and sitting like dragons on their stolen gold....... are the parasites of a civilization, rather than any appropriate leaders.

We urgently need pragmatic ways to create and envision expanding community, which can be simplified to a fundamental sense of belonging.   Beyond that, we need an ethos and mythos that supports the fundamental, and foundational, understanding of inter-dependency.    If America was not a culture that idealizes "rugged individualism" where "good fences make good neighbors"  what other kinds of values might enhance the quality of life for us (and perhaps the very survival of our species) along with an extended community of many other species we share our world with?

 

"The Rugged Individualist" 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.”

Philip Slater, the Chrysalis Effect: The Metamorphosis of Global Culture 6

 

"Alpha male" individualism fails in every way to communicate that we live within a web of human and environmental inter-dependency, a web that is unimaginably vast and also very intimate. This is the "Webbed Vision" that sees and recognizes the links that must be restored.   A successful adult is so because of parents, siblings, friends, teachers, community resources, the backdrop of nature and environment, global society.........and distant ancestors that enabled him or her to be born.  Without a sense of belonging and contributing to that continuum as it reaches into both the past and into future generations, human beings end up feeling alienated, disposable, and without a sense of purpose.   Which is what an unsustainable, insatiable consumer system, as a placebo for the pain of spiritual and communal isolation, feeds on.

 

In tribal societies, survival depended 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 ultimately the template upon which they stand; a culture with a rigid mythos that cannot adapt and change is doomed to collapse.   Without a significant mythos of co-dependency in the face of global ecological crisis, the coming collapse of our civilization is apparent.  

 

"The culture that is holistic is holistic because its reasoning structure is holistic.  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". 

 

 Rafael Montanez Ortiz 7

 

The Latin origin of the word "religion", religios, means to "link back".  To rejoin with the greater and divine whole in some way.  In my opinion, many of today's religions, at least in their institutionalized forms, fail in communicating  this ultimate "webbed vision" - in fact, as tribal social control mechanisms with millennia of often mutually contradictory doctrines behind them, they do exactly the opposite.  They separate, create discord and fear, and damn those who do not share their cultural or philosophical constructs.  Religions are essentially concretized mythologies - concretized communal stories.  

                            

What stories are so many people and institutions telling about the world we live in, the 21st Century world of global civilization? How do these sacred stories - most of them with their origins in ancient tribal societies existing in a very different kind of world - serve, or fail, the world of today?

Returning to "religios", the "linking back" to what is sacred, patriarchal  Renunciate religions 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 teachings that degrade earthly life as "impure" or "unreality"..............will not help us.  More importantly, they certainly will not help those who must come after us to live in a diminished world.   In the established and unquestioned   systems systems of patriarchal religions, divinity is placed "elsewhere", be it the literally conceived paradise that awaits the faithful, or a more elegant grand abstraction that teaches us "this is not real" but fails to describe what actually "is real".  This is a prime theme to be found in patriarchal religions, religions that have their origins in warrior ideology and warrior lifestyles.  It might be said, for an example, that the Old Testament God Yahweh, with all his punishments and rules, is a classic example of an authoritarian, warrior "sky god".  

And more subtly, the  New Age message that "this experience  is not real" which drives devotees to seek "the real world"  found in  some divine, other-worldly, perfected  abstraction once we are "purified" or "surrender" in order to have consciousness is raised sufficiently:  too often this "must happen"  through an authoritarian Guru or leader, with many of the attendant social abuses.  

To speak of "oneness",  to address creating a cohesive vision of holism that is appropriate to the world we live in today,  mythic systems that include  creative diversity within that "oneness" are needed.   Myths and symbols 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.   

"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".  Slater's view was ultimately hopeful - that we are witnessing the chaos of a new evolution.   That metamorphosis he spoke of, I personally believe, is based on the realization of inter-dependency with all life.  In his view, this is humanity's childhood's end.  We are called now to the world, each other, and the miracle of life, with a "Webbed Vision". 

As the New Year approaches, I personally would like to call on artists, writers, musicians, storytellers, and all other "cultural creatives" to help to make a new mythology for the global tribe.   The writer Ursula Leguin called them "realists of a larger reality".  Among the Navajo (Dine`) infant girls still 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".

 

“Hope now lies in moving beyond our past in order to build together a sustainable future for all the interwoven and interdependent life on our planet, including the human element.  We will have to evolve now into a truly compassionate and tolerant world – because for the first time since the little tribes of humanity’s infancy, everyone’s well being is once again linked with cooperation for survival.  Our circle will have to include the entire world. 

 

Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad, The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power 8

 

1)   Keller, Catherine, From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism, and Self,

       1988, Beacon Press

2)    Patterson-Rudolph, Carol, On the Trail of Spider Woman, 1997, Ancient City Press.

3)    Loftin, John D., Religion and Hopi Life, 2003, Indiana University \

        Press (first published January 1st 1988)

4)   Baring, Anne, "Awakening to the New Story", 2013, from her website: 

       https://www.annebaring.com/anbar14_comment.htm

 

5)   Loy, David R., The World is Made of Stories, 2010, Wisdom Publications

6)   Baring, Anne, "Awakening to the New Story", 2013, from her website: 

       https://www.annebaring.com/anbar14_comment.htm

7)   Slater, Phillip, The Chrysalis Effect: The Metamorphosis of Global Culture, 2008, 

       Sussex Academic Press

8)   Ortiz, Rafael Montanez Ph.D., interview with Lauren Raine, unpublished manuscript 

     (1989)

9)  Alstead, Diana and Kramer, Joel, The Guru Papers:  Masks of Authoritarian Power, 

       1993, Frog Books