Spider Symbolism: Resistance

Recently when I was feeling very stuck I had some imagery coming to me and I turned it into a poem (loose definition). I then made a drawing to accompany it. The spider and her web were apt symbols because of the association with danger and bondage but also creativity.

I am reminded of the classical myth of Arachne, a female personification of the spider. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses there is a weaving contest between a mortal woman, Arachne, and the goddess of crafts and wisdom, Athena. Not only was Arachne extremely skilful, but she also exposed the crimes of the gods through her weaving. The infuriated goddess turned her into a spider as punishment. As a remnant of her human gift, the spider still spins her web.

Shelob & Me

The mortal and the divine are both present in the story. I would contend that Arachne and Minerva are mirror images of one another. Suppressed creativity can turn into darkness, as symbolised by the lonesome spider. The feeling of oppression, although inconvenient, often would not leave us alone until we claim our creative gifts. My poem is called “The Resistance”.

The Resistance
Like a shadow of the night she comes
Enfolded in darkness
In her hand is a scythe
Gleaming in the moonlight
The door is closed, but she comes in uninvited
Takes a seat on my bed.
I pretend not to be afraid, but my throat constricts.
I ignore her, waiting for the sun to come up.
But time stands still. She is not going anywhere.
She makes me cry.
Why are you holding me back? I hear myself moan.
Why are you making me weak?
The room fades out as her presence turns into a nightmare

A spider she is, and I the moth stuck in her web
The sticky strands clamp wilfully around my wrists.
I try to scream, but my throat is tight
Blue fangs, red eyes
Coming in for the attack
She wants to prey on me, paralyse me
Turn me into an empty shell
Poison moves closer, the end is nigh
Her foul mouth leans in for the kiss
The red eyes connect with mine, become larger
They show me gaunt figures
Lifetimes of suffering
The unloved ones know not how un-alone they truly are
Despairing, they look as trapped as I feel
So many gifts going to waste.
I sympathise with the spider, and surrender
She bites, and my mind is lulled into a soporific sleep
A goddess is holding me, takes me up into the night sky
I sit on the moon and look down on a beautiful creation
A woven tapestry
Magical story created from the self-same strands that held me
This is why I won’t leave you alone, she whispers,
Know yourself.

We Are From the Earth

I read this today via a community healing page that I follow on Facebook. It connects with something my teacher of shamanism posted earlier this week suggesting that we are all made of the same organic matter and therefore not as special as we might think.

Whenever people ask me what I really want to do with my life, I just talk around it, saying I’m “more interested in the arts” or I “want to do some form of therapeutic work but not traditional psychology any more”. How can I tell them that I want to work with the earth’s energies, that I feel her vibrations talking to me on a level that is beyond the mundane? How can I tell them about this invisible world that I always perceive behind the veil, subtle and yet so powerful that it makes daily life as we know it seem completely futile? I cannot and I don’t, unless they can perceive what I see.

I was raised Christian and it made me think of a verse in the Bible in Ecclesiastes: we are all dust and to dust we shall return. I never understood this verse as a child (like many other things in the Bible) and I found it very depressing. This week everything came together beautifully. The message I get is that I shouldn’t be ashamed of being in touch with the organism that we live on. Maybe it is not so absurd after all that I feel her flowing through my veins. It is perhaps more senseless to think that she is a dead piece of matter, only useful for providing us with food and stability so we can maintain our position at the “apex of creation”.

We have lived close to nature for millennia. Being in touch with our imagination and the organism we live on was an integral part of our survival. Economy and civilisation as we know it are still very new compared to our ages old spiritual traditions. Yet they have become the gods of today – different, duller, unimaginative gods but gods nevertheless.

Maybe the writer of Ecclesiastes understood that the earth and everything on it is sacred and that the same life force flows through all of us. There is an entire Universe that is far too large for us to fathom. How unimaginably massive is that compared to our little structures of meaning.