Though the summer began with Wonder Woman, the first female superhero blockbuster, theatergoers have settled into more incarnations of Transformers, Planet of the Apes, and Spider-Man, all movies with mostly males trying to save the planet from the consequences of thoughtless human action. The Transformer movies embody our fear that the source of our ultimate destruction, "the Other," is hiding in plain sight. Planet of the Apes movies dredge up our fear that we are only deceiving ourselves that we are the superior life on the planet, that all of our sophisticated scientific knowledge only makes us more savage. We have to look to the animals we dominate to find our own humanity. All of Spider-Man’s superhuman agility and “Spidey” senses are still no match for adolescent hormones. All the heroes are fighting the unintended consequences of human acts of creation.
But, it is a story of a female who can both create and destroy the world that has my attention—Spider Woman. Her superpowers are weaving and storytelling. Among the First People of the American Southwest, she is the Creator, the Namer, the Wise One, the Weaver. The world she created is one of balance, harmony, and interconnectedness. Each person, each mammal and plant, each rock and river, each wind and lightning bolt is woven into the reality we experience, every thread in its proper relationship to every other thread in the weave. She teaches the Beauty Way to the people she created so that they experience the harmony of the world as she thought it into being.
So much of the body of Native American scholarship and media portrayals prior to the late 20th century impose a patriarchal interpretation of Native American culture. By doing so, these depictions obscure, denigrate, or discount the role of feminine power among tribal members. Recovering female deities helps us reinterpret not just Native American legend, but also helps us peel away the distortions of power that have shaped us all. Spider Woman is power. She is the source of all that is, at once life-sustaining and life-threatening.
Spider Woman, or Grandmother Spider, Thought Woman, or Old Spider Woman in some traditions, is a deity among American Southwestern First People. Her presence extends into South America, perhaps even as far as the Andes. Among the Navajo (Diné), she lives atop the tallest of two sandstone rocks that tower more than 750 feet from the desert floor of Diné tribal lands. She has lived there since before she created human beings. Among the Diné, Hopi, Kiwa, and Tewa tribes, she plays much the same role, though some details vary. For all of them, she is the source of Creation, creativity, wisdom, and healing.
Spider Woman chose the highest rock in Canyon de Chelly, Arizona. Elders told their children that if they did not behave, Spider Woman would let down her webbed ladder, snatch them, and eat them.
Through her weaving and her words, Spider Woman creates the world as human beings experience it. It’s that triangulation of the feminine, the text, and the textile at play again.
“It’s that triangulation of the feminine, the text, and the textile at play again.”
Spider Woman features prominently in Leslie Marmon Silko's novel Ceremony. Silko narrates the process of healing for a young Laguna veteran returning to his tribe, shattered from World War II. One of the events that propels his healing is listening to the storyteller which Silko describes in a poem:
I will tell you something about stories,'
[he said]
They aren't just entertainment.
Don't be fooled.
They're all we have, you see.
All we have to fight off illness and death.
You don't have anything
if you don't have the stories.
Their evil is mighty,
but it can't stand up to our stories.
So they try to destroy the stories,
but the stories cannot be confused or forgotten.
They would like that.
They would be happy
because we would be defenseless then.
[He rubs his belly]
I keep it in here,
[he said]
Here, put your hand on it.
See?
It is moving.
Why would stories be in his belly? Because, Spider Woman weaves the world into being from her belly. Just as woman creates life from her belly, so too must stories be born as they were first born from the Creator, the Namer. Lifeforce and words are inextricably interconnected in the world that Spider Woman wove into being. The storyteller must become a "woman-man." Unlike Eurocentric cultures that regard this kind of androgyny as weakness, the Southwestern American First People regard the "woman-man" as superhuman, a man with the power to create like a woman.
Spider Woman weaves us and the world together. The fabric she weaves is the interconnection among all of Creation. With the power to weave, she has the power to unravel. As the source of light, goddess of the moon, she has to power to wax and to wane. She breathed into the world life, and she can take that breath away. Her sister goddess brought her effigies of plants, animals, and spirits which Spider Woman’s thoughts brought to life. She gave women the “water of life,” menstrual blood that was held sacred. That blood was so imbued with power that lesser beings could not touch it lest they suffer grave consequences. As in the cycle of blood and birth, Spider Woman’s creativity is continuous. She continues to spin her thoughts in spirals like the threads on the Navajo spindle. She is the source of wisdom, teaching the proper harmony, the proper balance of all things. Silko's poem in Ceremony continues:
Ts' its' tsi' nako, Thought-Woman,
is sitting in her room
and what ever she thinks about
appears.
She thought of her sisters,
Nau' ts' ity' i and I' tcs' i,
and together they created the Universe
this world
and the four worlds below.
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.
Spider Woman continues to spin her thoughts in spirals like the threads on the Navajo spindle.
The power embodied in Spider Woman is foundational. The feminine is the power of Creation, the power of naming that Creation. To be touched by the feminine is to be touched by the organizing power of the universe. Native Americans legends recognize the same opposites as Eurocentric cultures, but they regard opposites as complements, not adversaries. If opposites like male and female continue to struggle in opposite directions, there is disharmony. They are in an unnatural state. To move within Creation as Spider Woman wove it into being, they move together as complementary forces like the tension between the warp and weft of the weave, threads moving along the four cardinal directions that Spider Woman wove into the world before she created male and female. The warp threads running up her loom fix the axis on which the world turns interconnect with the weft threads moving with the direction of the spinning earth, both holding in tension together as complementary forces, the fabric of the universe.
In the Hopi tradition, Change Woman brings the knowledge of weaving from Spider Woman to human women. Entering Spider Woman’s underground dwelling, she encounters her at the upright loom that her husband, Spider Man, has made for her from the juniper tree with its cross pole of sky and earth, poles that center the poles of the earth itself. Her warp sticks she uses to push the weft threads through the vertical warp threads are made of sun rays. The heddles (the bar that separates the warp threads for the warp stick to pass through) are formed from lightning and rock crystals. When the weft threads run through the warp, she uses a batten stick made of the sun’s own halo. The white-shell comb beats the threads, making the sound of a beating heart. Lightening forms the stick of her four spindles with whorls of black coal, turquoise, white shell, and abalone shell.
Few people now understand how fabric is sewn, much less understand how thread is spun or woven. Around the world before the 1700s, spinning thread and yarn was a ubiquitous activity. Spinning enough thread for weaving takes far more time than the weaving itself, so many hands were needed for spinning. Archaeological evidence suggests that spinning has been a technique for producing thread for at least 30,000 years. Spinning allows yards and yards of thread to be produced from short fibers either from plants like cotton or flax or from animals. The Southwestern First People first spun cotton but learned to spin wool after the Spanish introduced sheep. Both cotton and wool are incorporated in native weaving. Women of all ages participated in the process. Traditionally, when a girl is born, the shaman searches the area for a spider web. He builds a fire before the dawn after her birth and brings both mother and daughter outside beside the fire to keep them warm as they wait for the sunrise. When the first light strikes the spider web, the shaman takes the daughter's hand to pass into the web, thus imbuing her with Spider Woman's gift of weaving.
Unlike in more recent Eurocentric cultures, spinning and weaving were not means of confining women, nor is it accurate to say that they were means of empowering women. Rather, by engaging in the activity of spinning and weaving, women were the embodiment of power. The weaver, like Spider Woman, has the power to pattern and disrupt. From her thoughts she creates something where nothing was before. She brings opposites into harmony with her thoughts, her hands, and the fibers she spun. Tribes such as the Diné and Keres Pueblo Native Americans traditionally placed women at the center of the social order. They would not say that it was their doing, but rather Spider Woman's. Nothing comes into being without her thinking it into being. She is Ritual, and weaving is her ritual. This tribal world is gynocratic, but it is a world of proper balance, proper place, proper ritual, proper harmony. It is a world in which Spider Woman weaves the power of female and male in symbiosis, giving them stories that connect them within the fabric of the Universe.
I am, I am
In wisdom I walk
In beauty may I walk...
In beauty it is restored.
The light, the dawn.
It is morning.
Navajo poet,
Luci Tapahonso
Though Spider Woman’s comb is made of white shell, mortal women’s combs are made of wood, but the weaver's comb still makes the sound of a human heartbeat.
Diné women in the Arizona/New Mexico area between 1910 and 1925. Library of Congress photo archives. The weaver sits at her loom while the woman to her left spins more yarn on a traditional Navajo spindle. The girl in the foreground is carding wool to clean and straighten it for spinning. The woman on the right is weaving a belt.
For more information on Navajo textiles, click on some of the links below.
Parts of a Navajo Loom. These looms have existed in the American Southwest since around 1100 AD.
Spider Woman
The cross symbol on the back of the spider appears frequently in Southwestern Native American textiles.
Navajo Spindle
Clara Sherman
See video of her demonstrating how to use this unique spindle below.
As Spider Woman taught Changing Woman, so have grandmothers, mothers, and daughters taught their daughters all through the ages.
Sources
Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions, Open Road, 1992
Beverly Gordon, Textiles: The Whole Story, Thames & Hudson, New York 2001
Kathryn Sullivan Kruger, Weaving the Word: The Metaphorics of Weaving and Female Textual Production, Rosemont, 2001
Jude Todd. “Knotted Bellies and Fragile Webs: Untangling and Re-Spinning in Tayo's Healing Journey.” American Indian Quarterly, vol. 19, no. 2, 1995, pp. 155–170. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1185165.