When one looks at a spider, many describe the creature as creepy, scary, venomous or dangerous. On the other hand, many ancient cultures associated the spider with cunning, determination and creation. While scorpions and ticks also feature in a couple of ancient myths, they are not nearly as popular as spiders, with even the scientific name of the taxonomic class that includes all arachnids, Arachnida, named after a character from an ancient Greek myth (Arachne). Due to the emotional reactions that these creatures bring about, and the various metaphorical connotations (both good and bad) associated with them, spiders have been present in folklore in one form or another for millennia. Even in modern literature and movies they can still be found acting as antagonists or literary devices.
Humans have been fascinated by arachnids, and spiders in particular, since ancient times, with many early societies including spiders as important figures in their legends. The most renown of these is the Greek myth of Arachne. According to the poem Metamorphoses by the Roman poet Ovid, Arachne, a Lydian girl gifted in the art of weaving from an early age, eventually became a great weaver and boasted that her skill was greater than even Athena’s (the Greek goddess of wisdom, warfare and handicraft). She eventually challenged Athena to a weaving contest, where she made a tapestry featuring many episodes of infidelity among the Gods of Olympus, while Athena wove the scene of her victory over Poseidon that had earned her the patronage of Athens. Looking upon her rival’s work, Athena could find no flaw in Arachne’s weaving, but was infuriated by both her pride and depiction of the gods. In anger, Athena destroyed the mortal’s tapestry and loom with her shuttle and then cursed Arachne to live with extreme guilt. Unable to endure the sadness and guilt, Arachne soon took her own life by hanging herself. Seeing this, Athena took pity on the girl and revived her by transforming her into a spider, which would go on to spin webs for all time, as would her descendants. The myth not only served as a cautionary tale about hubris, but also explained how spiders got their ability to create webs.
Apart from cautionary tales, a number of cultures have creation myths that involve spider deities. Of note is Spider Grandmother, an important character in the folklore of some Native American tribes. She is often portrayed as either a timeless old woman or as a spider, who lends help when called upon, giving advice or medicinal cures. In the Hopi’s legend about creation, the First Tale, Spider Grandmother, who is seen as an earth goddess, and the Sun god Tawa co-create a number of lesser gods by separating themselves, afterwards creating the earth and its creatures. Later, Tawa conceptualizes the First Man and First Woman, with Spider Grandmother crafting them from clay, before they breathe life into their creations.
A popular Cherokee myth tells the story of how Spider Grandmother helped to illuminate the world. According to the tale, after the world and its creatures were formed, the sun resided on the opposite side of the globe, leaving the animals and the newly formed humans in darkness. To rectify the issue, the animals concluded that someone needed to steal some light from the sun and return with it. Possum and Fox decided to try, but failed and ended up with burns. Spider Grandmother then promised to also try. After forming a clay bowl, she used her eight legs to roll it to where the sun resided, creating a web as she went. She then gently caught the sun in her web, putting it in her clay bowl. Rolling the sun from east to west, she finally delivered it to the people as she vowed.
In Ojibwe culture (they belong to Anishinaabe peoples from the Great Lakes and the northern plains of North America), Spider Grandmother is also known as Spider Woman or Asibikaashi. According to one legend, dreamcatchers originated with her. The story holds that Asibikaashi acted as a protector of the people, and particularly the children, but as the Ojibwe nation spread across North America it became increasingly difficult for her to reach and protect the nation’s children. Thus, to safeguard their young, mothers and grandmothers would weave “spider web charms” or “dreamcatchers” using willow hoops and sinew, or cordage made from plants. Hanging these above infant cradles and children’s beds, they believed that the amulets would intercept any harm that might reside in the air just as a spider’s web catches and holds the spider’s prey.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamcatcher#/media/File:Sapn%C5%B3_gaudykl%C4%97.jpg
The Nauru people in Micronesia also have a creation legend revolving around a spider. According to the myth, in the beginning of creation only two things existed – the sea and Areop-Enap, an old spider. While searching for food in the darkness, Areop-Enap came across an enormous clam, which swallowed the old spider whole. While exploring the clam’s insides and after meeting two snails, the spider discovered a white worm named Rigi in the light of the glowing trail made by the smaller of the two snails. Areop-Enap proceeded to cast a strength spell on the worm, and persuaded it to pry the clam open. The clam resisted, as Rigi time and again heaved with his head set against the upper shell and his tail against the lower shell. Soon a pool of sweat started to accumulate beneath Rigi and, as he continued to try and force the clam open, the pool soon grew into a lake and then an entire ocean. The saltiness of the ocean was the clam’s undoing and ultimately the clam shell opened. Areop-Enap then advanced to creating the earth from the lower shell and the sky from the upper shell, setting the smaller snail in the west of the sky-shell to become the moon, and the larger snail in the east to become the sun.
Anansi, an Akan folklore character and one of the most important figures of West African, African American and West Indian cultures, is usually depicted as a spider trickster. He is associated with stories, knowledge and deception, and is best known for his ability to outsmart his often more powerful opponents through the use of creativity, cunning and wittiness. Depending on the story told, Anansi can take the role of either a ‘good guy’ or a ‘bad guy’. Since the original stories of Anansi were part of an exclusively oral tradition, the character became synonymous with skilled speech and wisdom. So prolific were these tales that Anansi became a familiar figure in the oral culture of the Ashanti people of Ghana. A myriad of fables, often containing a moral lesson and told to children, grew so popular that the trickster spider gave his name to a whole tradition, anansesem or spider tales.
One story explains why Anansi’s webs trap flies. Starving Anansi saw a fly eating kenkey (a fermented cornmeal dumpling) outside his house. Anansi asked the fly to share some of his meal with him, but the fly refused, instead offering to lead him to an area with an abundance of food. The fly then took Anansi to his home village in the forest, where other flies were making plenty of kenkey. The fly offered Anansi some of the kenkey, but even after eating a considerable amount, he was still hungry and asked for more. The fly denied Anansi’s request, and the angry trickster decided to lay a trap for the flies. After the flies went to sleep, Anansi wove webs around the village, covering them with a sweet-smelling substance. As the flies woke up one by one the next morning, they were lured to the webs and got trapped. After all the flies were trapped, Anansi raided their kenkey store, eating his fill. Afterwards gathering more of the flies’ kenkey, he climbed over his webs and went home. And so, that was how it came to be that spiders catch prey in their webs. The Native American Lakota people have a similar folklore character called Iktómi, who is also depicted as a spider trickster.
Focussing more on the predatory characteristics of spiders, the Japanese folklore include myths that feature two distinct spider yōkai, with yōkai representing a class of supernatural entities or spirits in the Japanese folklore. One of these tales portrays the Jorōgumo, a yōkai that can shapeshift into a beautiful woman. Its story originates from the Jōren Falls of the Izu, Shizuoka Prefecture, and speaks about the Jorōgumo Mistress of the Waterfall. The myth begins with a young man deciding to rest next to the waterfall basin, not knowing that a Jorōgumo resided in the waterfall itself. The Jorōgumo then tried to drag the man into the waterfall by casting webs around his leg, but luckily the guy succeeded in transferring the webs to a tree stump, which got dragged into the falls instead. After learning about the perils of the place, none of the locals dared to venture close to the falls anymore. Then a visiting woodcutter, unfamiliar with the dangers of the waterfall, mistakenly dropped his axe in the basin while trying to fell a tree. As he went to fetch his axe, a beautiful women appeared from the water returning the axe and telling him: “You must never tell anyone what you saw here”. After many days of keeping quiet, the burden of the secret became too heavy and the woodcutter, while drunk at a banquet, spoke out about his encounter with the woman of the waterfall. Later that night, unburdened and at peace, he went to sleep but never woke up again. In another tale, the Jorōgumo, in the guise of a charming young woman, seduces young men, luring them into her house. There she wraps them in her silken webs, restraining and slowly weakening them with her venom.
Tsuchigumo, another spider yōkai, is portrayed as a legendary and monstrously large spider. The term, meaning ‘dirt spider’, was originally meant as a derogatory name for renegade local clans, one of which lived in a cave. Later on, it became the name of spider-like yōkai in the Japanese folklore, and during the middle ages they began to be depicted as giant spiders. The Tale of the Heike, one of the earlier texts to depict the Tsuchigumo as a huge spider, tells the story of how Minamoto no Yorimitsu, a Japanese samurai and folk hero, killed the giant spider with his sword Hizamaru. After defeating the monster, he renamed his sword Kumokiri, or Spider-cutter.
Continuing the theme of giant spiders, Djieien, a monstrous spider from Native American Seneca mythology, was said to be unkillable as it had concealed its heart underground. Only after finding the spider’s hidden part could the hero Othegwenhda finally slay the beast.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsuchigumo#/media/File:Kuniyoshi_Utagawa,_Minamoto_Yorimitsu_also_known_as_Raiko.jpg (Public Domain).
Spiders also feature in a number of religious tales. The Islamic oral tradition tells how Muhammad, travelling with his companion Abu Bakr from Mecca to Medina, took shelter in a cave while being closely followed by Quraysh warriors. Allah then ordered a spider to spin a web across the entrance of the cave, resulting in the Quraysh warriors dismissing the cave, since the duo’s entrance would have broken the web. In the Jewish tradition, David entered a cave seeking shelter from his pursuer, King Saul. Once again, a spider built a web over the cave’s entrance, and King Saul and his soldiers left the cave alone.
While not as prolific as spiders, scorpions also appear in ancient myths. One such tale speaks about the origin of the zodiac constellation of Scorpius. The great hunter Orion boasted to Artemis, the Greek goddess of the hunt and nature, and her mother Leto how he would hunt every animal on earth. Artemis and Leto sent a scorpion to kill Orion and the arachnid succeeded. Afterwards Artemis asked Zeus, the supreme deity in the Greek pantheon, to raise Orion to the skies. Zeus acquiesced to her request, raising both Orion and the scorpion to the sky where they would remain as a reminder for mortals to curb their excessive pride.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorpius#/media/File:Sidney_Hall_-_Urania’s_Mirror_-_Scorpio.jpg (Public Domain).
A Native American myth explains how the wood tick became flat. In this Sanpoil tale, Coyote, a character common to many indigenous cultures of North America, found himself hungry and alone in his tent during winter. Wishing for even just a bag of bones to appear, he went to sleep and found a bag of bones outside his tent the next morning. Taking the bones he made some soup, and after the soup was done, he wished for some meat. The next morning, he heard a noise in front of his tent and found another bag of bones. Near Coyote lived a strange disfigured wizard with many limbs. He had heard Coyote’s wishes and brought him the bones. Coyote figured this out and followed the wizard to his tent, where he saw that the wizard had a rack of drying meat. Plotting to kill the wizard so that he could have all the meat for himself he followed the man to a pile of rocks, where he started to pound him flat and threw his body into a sage bush. Upon his return to the wizard’s tent, Coyote was surprized to find the meat and bones had recombined into deer that ran away from him. Unbeknownst to Coyote the wizard revived and as the last deer ran past him he grabbed onto its tail. As a final act of malice, Coyote turned the wizard into a wood tick, declaring that he would forever more live on the body of a deer.
Arachnids still feature in a variety of contemporary media, more often than not as antagonists. Notable examples include Shelob, a giant spider from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings novels; Lolth the half-spider goddess of cruelty from the popular Dungeons and Dragons table top role playing game; Aragog from the Harry Potter novels; and the countless nameless monstrosities from a myriad of horror movies and novels. Spiders are not always ‘bad guys’ though, as Charlotte the Barn Spider from the children book Charlotte’s Web helps a livestock pig named Wilbur from being slaughtered by weaving words such as terrific, radiant and humble into the webs she spins above Wilbur’s pen, ultimately persuading the farmer to let him live. And, of course, we must not forget about the genetically modified spider that gives Peter Parker his spider-like super powers in the ever-loved comic, Spider-Man.
These are only a very few handpicked examples of arachnids in folklore, both ancient and contemporary. With the advent of modern science, the need for myths has all but died, but the lessons these stories teach us remain as valid now they were back then.
References
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Eriksen, T.H. 2013. The Anansi position. Anthropology Today 29(6): 14–17. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8322.12072
Gallagher, D. 2008. The transmission of Ovid’s Arachne Metamorphosis in Jeremias Gotthelf’s Die Schwarze Spinne. Neophilologus 92(4): 699–711. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-007-9071-y
Kanaujia, A. & Rao, K. 2023. Spiders in mythology and folklore: An arachnophile’s interest. In Nakella, A.K. (Ed.), Folklore connect wildlife & biodiversity. Bharti Publications, pp. 141–150.
Lusty, T. 2001. Where did the Ojibwe dream catcher come from? Alberta Sweetgrass 8(4): 19. https://ammsa.com/publications/alberta-sweetgrass/where-did-ojibwe-dream-catcher-come-0
Schuetz-Miller, M. 2012. Spider Grandmother and other avatars of the Moon Goddess in New World sacred architecture. Journal of the Southwest 52(2): 283–435. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23337331
Turner, P. & Coulter, C.R. 2001. Dictionary of ancient deities. Oxford University Press.
Vecsey, C. 1981. The exception who proves the rules: Ananse the Akan trickster. Journal of Religion in Africa 12(3): 161–177. https://doi.org/10.2307/1581431
Jorōgumo: https://yokai.com/jorougumo (accessed 3.03.2025)
Mythological spiders: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Mythological_spiders (accessed 3.03.2025)
Tsuchigumo: https://yokai.com/tsuchigumo (accessed 3.03.2025)
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