The Charm of the Spider

“Noir World of Darkness”, 1887. Odilon Redon

The spider is undoubtedly a fascinating figure, full of abstract symbols as well as strong concrete emotions, capable of repelling us with disgust as much as attracting admiration. 

Even if I have already talked about it here, with regard to the Apulian popular tradition of the taranta, I want to go back to writing about the spider – this time in a freer and more extensive way.

I also have always been fascinated by it, in its double nature of fear and enchantment. It is one of the few living beings that immobilizes me, almost hypnotically, while observing it even with a shiver of fear if its dimensions are considerable, as happened to me in Asia. Not to mention the spider's web: that is truly an unattainable masterpiece of nature, few things can compete with its ingenious beauty.

I have used the spider as a metaphor many times in the past. Weave that marvel, stay hidden for a long time, observe the small prey get entangled in those threads until its agitation decrees its end, and then go and wrap it until it becomes a cocoon waiting to suck the marrow as food. Terrifying, but it lends itself to multiple interpretations, from psychological to dialectical: even words, if used with ingenuity like the threads of a cobweb, can wrap the interlocutor in a debate to get the better of it. Socrates was the supreme teacher in this. 

It is no coincidence that the word charm (fàscino) derives from the Latin fascĭnum, which means “evil; amulet”.

Here, the good spider expresses this double positive/negative nature. Since the beginning of history. In the mythology of the people. And everything that has a double meaning always strikes me. Anyone who has read me and has known me for a long time knows how much I love when white gets dirty with black.

 

In the West, certainly, the oldest and most famous myth is that of Arachne, a mythological figure from which the arachnid, the spider, takes its name. Ovid narrates his story in the VI book of the “Metamorphoses”, but it seems that the character, already mentioned in Virgil's Georgics, is of Greek origin.

Arachne lived in Colophon, in Lydia, what was Turkey and Smyrna. The girl, daughter of the dyer Idmon and sister of Falance, was very skilled in weaving, so much so that it was rumored that she had learned the art directly from Athena, the Greek goddess of Wisdom, while she praised herself for having even taught the goddess to cards, enough to challenge her to a duel.

Then an old lady presented herself to Arachne, advising her to withdraw the challenge so as not to cause the wrath of the goddess, but when she replied rudely, the old woman came out of her guise revealing herself as the goddess Athena, and the competition began.

Arachne chose the loves of the gods and their faults as the theme of her weaving, and her work was so perfect and sagacious in describing the tricks used by the gods to achieve their ends that Athena flew into a rage, destroyed the canvas, and struck Arachne with its shuttle.

Arachne, desperate, tried to hang herself, but the goddess turned her into a spider forcing her to spin and weave from her mouth all her life, punished for her arrogance in daring to challenge the goddess.

This myth refers to the theme of arrogance – hýbris – of human beings towards the gods, present in many stories, mythologies, and religions. A prime example is the fall of Satan due to his arrogance and pride towards God, or Allah, in Islam.

Indeed, the spider appears as a transversal figure in many religions.

In Islam, it gives its name to the twenty-ninth Sura of the Koran (“Al-'Ankabût - The Spider”), in which the spider's web is mentioned to compare its fragility with the consistency of allies that the unbelievers could have if they asked for help to other than to God:

“And those who choose allies other than God are like the spider who chooses a house, but the weakest of houses is the house of the spider if they only knew!” (Koran 29, 41)

Furthermore, when the Prophet Muhammad, fleeing from Mecca, hid together with Abū Bakr in a cave, a spider miraculously weaves its web in a few moments at the entrance to the cavity, deceiving the pursuers who believed that the cave had been abandoned for a long time.

This example clearly illustrates the ambivalence with which the spider has always been interpreted over time and in the beliefs of people. On the one hand, the ingenuity, the industriousness, the technical expertise in manufacturing the web, and on the other that very web becomes a symbol of cunning, perfidy, and wickedness.

The same happens in India.

The millimetric perfection of his web represents, on the one hand, the cosmic order as opposed to Chaos, and therefore the spider, in this case, is an ordering symbol.

In the millenary Vedic philosophy of India, the spider is depicted as hiding the ultimate reality with the veils of illusion. Indra's net is used as a metaphor for the Buddhist concept of interpenetration, which holds that all phenomena are intimately connected. Indra's net has a multifaceted jewel at each vertex, and each jewel is reflected in all of the other jewels.

As related in the book “Vermeer's Hat” by historian Timothy Brook:

“When Indra fashioned the world, he made it as a web, and at every knot in the web is tied a pearl. Everything that exists, or has ever existed, every idea that can be thought about, every datum that is true—every dharma, in the language of Indian philosophy—is a pearl in Indra's net. Not only is every pearl tied to every other pearl by virtue of the web on which they hang, but on the surface of every pearl is reflected every other jewel on the net. Everything that exists in Indra's web implies all else that exists”.

“Aracne”, 1868. Gustave Doré

In this case, the spider possesses a cosmogonic symbolism, as a weaver of the web of life: the spider's web in eternal renewal and in the shape of a wheel has been associated with the radiant Sun, the Sun which secretes its rays like the spider its threads.

 

However, in another myth, the veiled goddess Maya weaves the world of illusions with her substance and then reabsorbs it.

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, a great scholar of Hindu philosophies, made famous in the West in the nineteenth century what he called the Veil of Maya, or the illusion dictated by the senses that prevents human beings from experiencing the Truth, the absolute principle of reality.

In ancient India, Māyā originally meant “creation”. In the Ṛgveda (VI, 47,18) we can read “By the powers of his own māyā Indra presents himself in different forms”. Maya, therefore, represented the power to give form, from which came the material world, shaped by the gods. Over time, the multiplicity of forms made humanity forget the unique essence of things, the absolute principle of reality, plunging it into a “kaleidoscopic” world of forms and structures in which it ended up believing, forgetting its origin, its essence. Thus it was that Maya, or Creation, became synonymous with “illusion.”

Again represented by the deceptive web. Cosmic order against the deception of the senses. Reality and illusion.

There are still many myths, as well as readings given to the spider, in superstitions, not always negative. Indeed in China, as in Indonesia, the sight of a spider at home is a good omen. The same happens in Italy, with the saying: “Spider brings profit”.

 

However, if one were to imagine the spider and its web linked to photography, how could it be?

After reading so deep and multiple interpretations the game is interesting.

We could think of the cobweb as that long and laborious waiting work that every photographer carries out towards reality, where instinct, study, ability, readiness, and vision, weave invisible threads that allow his subjects to “get caught”.

Like the spider, the good photographer waits attentively ready to snap to make him the prey, trapped by his threads. Each photograph is an insect-fragment of reality that the photographer envelops with care to then suck the soul out of it. That same soul that then appears in his images.

Because every photographer knows where to place his web, each one for the different prey he feeds on.

And how wonderful to think of Indra's canvas, in which each pearl reflects what other pearls reflect up to contemplating the whole world, which is the utopian dream of every photographer to be able to give an image to what his inner world is, and order to the Chaos which is the life that rushes past our eyes.

And then Maya, the great illusion that deceives our sensitive eyes.

Reading the words of Joan Fontcuberta on the intrinsic lying nature of photography transforms that ancient myth into the lived present; because if it is true that Photography was born with the patent of truth, as a means of representing reality in an “evident” way, the Spanish critic continually repeats, proving many examples, how all of Photography is nothing more than “interpretation”, an inevitable joint between the subject who photographs, the one who is portrayed and the one who, as a third party, looks at the photo. The cut of the image you choose, the lens, the aperture, the tonality, the distance, and the editing, are all threads that in their intertwining affirm the Veil of Maya as an illusion of truth.

The world is my representation, which is a mere optical illusion that hides the true reality, the Noumenal one, wrote the German philosopher, for which we are unable to see beyond the phenomenal representation.

 

The Spider and his Deceptive Web.

Industrious creator of order from Chaos, from Cartier-Bresson to Alex Webb, but also mere illusion and astute deception, intent with his arrogance (hýbris) on wanting to duplicate reality, to re-create it, something that only the Gods can do.

 

But this, in the end, is just a dialectical game. Yet another spider trick, thanks to which words can trap the interlocutor like the spider's prey.

Italian vesion