Cover Image generated using ImageFX – Google Labs from the prompts “the earth with a key hole surrounded by a spider web containing a key and a spider with an American Indian grandmother face sitting on top of the earth”

Dr Philip Jamieson and Marianne Schmidt

This is a paper we prepared earlier in the year. All text and references were current as at 10 February 2025.

Thought-Woman … is sitting in her room and whatever she thinks about appears. …

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

Extract from poem from Leslie Silko’s ‘Ceremony’ recounting an ancient Pueblo myth

Spider Woman/Thought Woman/Grandmother Spider

For aeons, narratives and stories from our ancient forebears have placed the spider, with its intricately woven web, at the heart of our connection with the world around us. Such, for example, are the narratives of Spider Woman (also described at times as Thought Woman or Grandmother Spider), perhaps best known in the traditions of the North American Pueblo and Navajo. Amongst the traditions of the Pueblo Hopi Tribe in northeastern Arizona, she is not only a creator being, of the Earth and all that lives upon it, she is also a holder of wisdom and knowledge.

The Hopi are just one of several North American Indigenous cultures whose narratives and traditions portray spiders as both creators and wisdom keepers. Dr Judith Franke has commented that although beliefs differ from tribe to tribe, when one looks at Spider Woman narratives and traditions from across the Americas as a whole, “a relatively coherent image of Spider Woman emerges” – associated with both wisdom and weaving, she is also generally “a premier goddess of earth and sky – a creator being and a consort of the sun” who “connects the earth and sky and creates fire and food plants”.

Her association with weaving is an obvious reflection of the woven spider’s web. As Franke observes, it is not surprising that many Native American peoples have connected the spider with weaving and, by association, with women and a creator goddess. Indeed, in Hopi tradition, she was the first to weave and taught the Hopi the art. Nor do Hopi weavers express in their weave their own creation but, as Dr John Loftin has explained, the weave merely serves to manifest the patterns that are already present in the Spider Woman’s creation. Continue reading “Grandmother Spider: Unlocking the Mystery Behind Material Manifestation” →