September 30, 2022
Here in Ohio, although we are not yet out of September, the days have grown shorter and, at least for the moment, there is a touch of autumn chill in the morning air. And, as they do every autumn, spider webs have begun to appear everywhere, indoors and out. As always, I welcome them, and find myself musing upon the fear of spiders that seems so widespread, a fear that is completely irrational, since very few species of spider are actually dangerous and those species are rare if not non-existent in this part of the country. The source of arachnophobia, like all phobias, is inward, not outward: the key to it is not in nature but in mythology and art, the products of the imagination rooted in the unconscious.
The people in my life who have been most unnerved by spiders happen to have been women, although I am not sure that proves anything: men are not allowed to admit they are afraid of anything, especially not something tiny that everyone knows rationally is harmless. But in myth and art spiders do most often have feminine associations, and so do their webs, which actually have as much mythological significance as the spiders themselves. Of actual species, this is of course true of the black widow, with its emblematic-seeming red hourglass marking, mythologized as Marvel Comics’ Black Widow character, who began as a villain although she ended as a tragic heroine. Perhaps the most horrible spider in literature is the gigantic, female Shelob who nearly kills Frodo in The Lord of the Rings. We may think of spiders as hanging in the air, but mythologically they live, as Shelob does, in the darkness underground, which often has feminine womb/tomb associations. Shelob is primeval, older than Sauron, a demonic feminine power lurking beneath the masculine daylight world. She has her own Wikipedia article, which tells us that Peter Jackson based his version of her on the New Zealand tunnel-web spider, a harmless species that he nevertheless hates, although they are related to tarantulas, the other poisonous arachnid species with a mythological rep, albeit an odd one. I can understand those who say, “A spider should not be the size of my hand, and it should definitely not have hair.” However, in addition, the tarantula is said to be the source of the tarantella, a wild dance that supposedly mimics the frenetic spasms of its poisoned victims.
But more symbolically suggestive than the spider itself is its web, which has a vast webwork of variants and modulations. It is that webwork that is the real subject of this newsletter. I have no scientific knowledge of spiders, only practical observation, but the spider’s web seems to have twin functions of life and death. I assume that the webs are ubiquitous around my place in autumn because they are the matrix in which the spiders deposit their eggs, hopefully to survive until it is time for them to hatch. But what captures the popular imagination is the image of the web as the intricate, deadly trap, with the predatory spider sitting patiently, waiting, at its center. A modulation of such a web is the labyrinth, the most famous being that which had the Minotaur waiting at its center. The image of the sinister web has been expanded to cosmic dimensions. In making notes for the present discussion, I had one of those moments when a memory lost for decades suddenly returned as a result of some present association. When I was a senior in college, I won what I think was second prize, $75, in a contest to write a poem about some local artist’s painting titled “The Web of Fate.” The painting, of people struggling in a gigantic web, was crude, and I knew it was crude, but, hey, $75 is $75, not to mention the local fame. But the painting was a corny popularization of an age-old image so widespread and significant that the mythologist and historian of religion Mircea Eliade has two long articles about it in all its manifestations. One is called “Ropes and Puppets,” in which he says:
Images of the rope and the thread succeed in suggesting what philosophy will afterwards make more explicit: that all things existing are, by their nature, produced, “projected,” or “woven” by a superior principle, and that all existence in Time implies an “articulation” or “web.” (170)
Later in the article, he says:
“To live” is equivalent to being “woven” by the mysterious Power that weaves the Universe, Time, and Life…. “to live” is equivalent to being conditioned, to being dependent on someone else. This “someone else” may be God or an impersonal Principle, mysterious and difficult to identify, but his presence is felt in all temporal existence; in fact, each living being feels that he is the result of his own actions and of something else, of the fact that he is “woven,” that is to say indestructibly attached to his own past. He feels that he constitutes a “web,” and the “web,” at a certain point in Indian speculation, comes to be considered unbreakable…” (175)
Thus, the individual “cannot escape from his own past” (176). Many people know the famous couplet “O what a tangled web we weave / When first we practice to deceive” without knowing where it comes from—not from Shakespeare, it turns out, but from Sir Walter Scott’s poem Marmion. In addition to providing the kind of encyclopedic catalogue he is famous for, Eliade sums up his thesis about the imagery of webs, threads, ropes, knots, nets, and the like in a way that anticipates my own thesis, that, like all imagery, this symbolic cluster is a polarity, even if the negative instances appear more commonly:
The images of the thread, the rope, the bond and the web are ambivalent; they express both a privileged position (to be attached to God), to be related to the cosmic Urgrund) and a pitiable and tragic situation (to be conditioned, enchained, predestined, etc.). In both cases, man is not free. But in the first he lives in permanent communication with his Creator, with the cosmic Urgrund; in the second, he feels himself the prisoner of a fate, bound by “magic” or by his own past (by the sum of his actions). (176)
The negative connotations of the imagery are twofold, of deception and of binding or trapping, although these are often interinvolved. The popular phrase “web of deceit” may imply the weaving of a false appearance, “out of whole cloth,” as we say, a “cover story” fabricated to conceal the truth. In ancient Greek culture, weaving was the typical women’s task, not thought to be menial. Arachne, from whom arachnids get their name, was so proud of the artistry of her weaving that she foolishly challenged Athena to a contest and was turned into a spider after she lost. Penelope in the Odyssey uses women’s weaving and women’s deceit to deceive the suitors. She gets permission from the suitors to put off the decision of which one of them she will marry until she finishes weaving a burial shroud for Odysseus’s father, who is declining, but unweaves by night what she wove by day. By getting away with this for three years, she simultaneously proves the stupidity of the suitors and her own worthiness to be married to another deceptive weaver, Odysseus, except that what Odysseus weaves are stories, most of them lies. Although the Odyssey was an oral poem, this kind of oral weaving points to the fact that our word “text” goes back to the Latin textus, from a verb that means “to weave.” Compare the Sanskrit “sutra,” or “thread.”
The ideas of deception and control intersect in the idea of a “secret history.” Underneath ordinary appearance is a web of power systems that invisibly bind and control the world. Paranoid conspiracy theories of hidden organizations and cabals are all variations of this metaphor, including current looney-tune notions about the “deep state” and Satan-worshipping pedophiles. However, such paranoia cannot merely be dismissed. Our complex civilization is sustained by systems, and systems are webworks: administrative, economic, political, technological. Not only that, but we are aware that the various systems interlock in various ways, many of them invisible, so that we often have a sense of being caught in a network whose extent is uncertain. It is one of the things implied in the concept of “globalization.” The great novel about whether or not paranoid conspiracy thinking is justified is Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1965). Its answer is, ”Maybe, maybe not,” the equivocal response serving to exacerbate our paranoia.
In popular culture, the theme of a secret webwork of power spawned at least two iconic television series, The Prisoner in the 1960’s and The X-Files in the 1990’s. The truth is out there, but all we see of it is an ominous guy smoking a cigarette, representing some kind of secret control. We are as puppets whose strings are manipulated by hidden puppeteers. Pynchon’s novel dates from before the Internet, but it is dominated by the systems theories of cybernetics that in effect made the Internet possible. What would result was eventually the World Wide Web, from which was spawned “social media,” a webwork of misinformation and instantly-transmitted hysteria constantly manipulated by those who want to control and manipulate the systems of power. Pynchon touches upon the more philosophical ramifications of cybernetic information theory, however. There are—maybe—hidden organizations and institutions, and there is an electronic communications network that interfaces with those power systems. But, beyond that, all reality, including the evidence of our senses, is patterns of information. Real power would be to control people not just economically or politically but to control the very fabric—a metaphorically significant term—of their existence. Hence The Matrix, as well as the science fiction novels of Philip K. Dick.
Interestingly, this is a modern updating of the situation we find in Homer. The Iliad opens with a statement that “The will of Zeus was moving towards its end,” and in a famous moment of Book 8, Zeus boasts to the other Olympians that in a tug-of-war contest with a golden cord, he would win by pulling them all up and hanging them from Mt. Olympus. Later tradition elaborated this into something like what in Shakespeare’s age was called the Chain of Being. However, what we actually see in the Iliad is that an ultimate, invisible power, fate, or moira, has the final say. Although he is tempted to intervene, Zeus ultimately is forced to allow his beloved son Sarpedon to die on the battlefield because Sarpedon’s death has been decreed by fate. Later tradition personified Fate as three women called the Fates, who spun a thread, cut to the length of a person’s life.
Eliade has another article titled “’The God Who Binds’ and the Symbolism of Knots,” which draws upon the discussion in George Dumézil’s work on Indo-European mythology of the imagery of knots and binding. Knots easily become an image of intellectual complexity, as when we speak of a “knotty problem.” Even when the knot is literal it may a puzzle whose solution has real-life consequences, such as the famous Gordian knot invented by someone named Gordias. An oracle announced that whoever “solved” and unraveled the knot would rule all Asia. Alexander the Great simply shrugged and cut the knot, and then went on to rule the world. But according to Dumézil, there were gods, pre-eminently Varuna in Indian mythology, whose super-power, so to speak, was binding his enemies. This reminds some of us immediately of the golden Lasso of Truth wielded by Wonder Woman, the Amazon superheroine created by William Moulton Marston in the early 1940’s. Marston was a psychologist who helped develop the lie detector, and the Lasso compelled anyone caught by it to tell the truth. It also rendered them obedient, and Marston was fairly open about his interest, both personal and professional, in bondage, the “B” in BDSM. While Fifty Shades of Grey focused on erotic fantasies of pain, it is the bondage fantasies of control and surrender—ropes, handcuffs, masks, etc.—that are played out in the bedrooms of many otherwise conventional partners, admitted or no. Like any other products of the imagination, erotic fantasies are what you make of them, and can be harmless or abusive depending upon context. Some may be shocked and baffled by the appeal, but the appeal is hardly difficult to understand. The twin drives of the unconscious, the erotic pleasure principle and the will to power, are entwined, bound in an intricate knot. Power is erotic, and both control and surrender are capable of producing an erotic thrill. The ropes and cuffs are optional: the fantasies of power and submission are in play when someone shouts “Take me!”, and even C.S. Lewis in The Four Loves argues for the normality of love bites and scratches. But the practice can be subtilized and aestheticized, as in shibari, in which the partner is wrapped in an intricate webwork of coils and knots that are regarded as a kind of erotic work of art.
The discomfort derives from the fact that we live in an abusive culture, as #MeToo and the Jeffrey Epstein case have shown us. Power corrupts by tempting people to cross the line from fantasy to reality, and it is a real and terrible danger. One of the most celebrated fantasists of our time, Elizabeth Hand, has a horrifying story called “Cleopatra Brimstone” based on her actual experience when young of being abducted and raped by a man who kept saying to her, "Try to get away." The same thing happens to the protagonist of the story, who, however, is an entomologist who discovers that she has a certain paranormal power. The scene is Camden Town, the London setting of some of the English punk scene that Hand was part of when she was young: in other words, an anti-conventional environment attractive to people who wanted freedom from social norms. The protagonist gets serial revenge by luring young men back to her place for a kinky handcuff session, turning them into butterflies, killing them, and mounting them. While she is doing it, she says, “Try to get away.” Cleopatra Brimstone is an actual species of butterfly and, presumably, a great name for a femme fatale. Try to get away: this is why we admire Houdini and other escape artists. Somehow they can escape all those bonds. When you conjure a demon, you contain it within a pentagram, a five-pointed star that is a kind of knot. God help you, literally, if a corner of the diagram gets erased.
The negative images of webs, knots, and ropes are all ego-centric: that is, they represent the ego’s feeling of threat at being trapped in what is larger and more powerful than it is. But the Eliade passage quoted earlier about the ambivalence of this (as of all) archetypal imagery suggests the possibility of an ideal perspective, which, as again is typical of archetypal symbols, would be the ironic perspective turned inside out, passed through what William Blake called a Vortex of perception. "In such a view,” Eliade says, “Creation is not absolutely separated from the Creator; it is attached to him as by an umbilical cord” (175). He does not seem to notice the sexist implications of the phrasing, for an umbilical cord ought to imply a female Creator, yet the reference is to “he.” Where we ought to be headed is towards the image of the entire cosmos as the matrix, or womb, of a female creative principle. In such a perspective, we are fetal, waiting to be born into another reality. Arachnophobia is culture specific: in a number of Southwestern Native American mythologies, the Creator is Spider Woman. The female spider lays eggs, but she is also a creative artist: her beautiful and intricate web is spun out of her own body, just as eggs and babies are. In a Hopi Creation myth, Spider Woman creates the human race out of earth of four symbolic colors, in a series of phases marked according to three phases of colored light deriving from a solar Father deity according to what the myth calls “the perfect plan,” a lyrically beautiful narrative uniting earth and heaven, space and time, female and male.
The shift in perspective, from ironic to ideal, is a shift in attitude and values, from the ego’s self-centeredness to the inclusive Big Picture of a much larger identity. If we call that identity God, we should remain aware that it is a God who is not outside his Creation, sitting on his throne, transcendent and inscrutable. It is a deity who, whatever its gender, contains Creation, is its circumference rather than its ego-center or its top-dog monarch. Those interested in preserving orthodoxy will deem this “pantheism,” and reject it as heretical. What that means is that they wish to retain the traditional God who is ruler and power-principle, usually on the grounds of preserving order. But an immanent God who is of one substance with his Creation cannot be so simply dismissed as irrationalist by Western ethnocentrism—not any longer. Eliade quotes the Hindu god Krishna as saying, “All this Universe is strung upon Me, as rows of gems upon a thread” (173). An expansion of this image is the god Indra’s net in the Avatamsaka Sutra, which interested Northrop Frye because of its affinity to his concept of interpenetration. At each juncture point of Indra’s net is a jewel, and each jewel is reflected in all the other jewels, which means that the net, which is infinite, has no single, governing center, a fact whose importance will become clearer in a short while. The threads upon which the jewels are strung are the sinews of reality, so to speak, the strands of spirit or life force that bind all individual things into a living whole. Eliade says:
Indian speculation discovered that dispersion and disconnectedness are equivalent to non-being; that, truly to exist, one must be unified and integrated. And the most satisfactory images by which to express all this were the thread, the spider, the weft and weaving. The spider’s web brilliantly showed the possibility of “unifying” space from a Centre, by binding together the four cardinal points. (174)
The net of jewels, however, adds one more feature: that there is in full, apocalyptic vision no single center. Every point is a center, reflecting all the other centers. This is very close to a saying found in a number of texts in the Middle Ages defining God as “an intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” Eliade, the author of one of the most famous books on yoga, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, says that the word “yoga,” which means “binding” and is related to our word “yoke,” combines the ironic and ideal meanings in one polysemous term. On the one hand, yoga breaks the ties that bind us to the world of illusion and suffering, and so is “the most perfect means of freeing oneself from slavery which is the human lot.” But it does so by “achieving the perfect mastery of the body, the ‘subjugation’ of the organs and the psycho-mental facilities. It is a matter of joining, articulating and unifying the activity of the organs and the psycho-mental flux. The yukta is the ‘unified’ man; but he is also the man in a state of union with God” (177). It puts Humpty Dumpty together again. The person unified with God, moreover, is God, so long as we recognize that the “person” is not the ego, whose sense of godlikeness is only the kind of megalomania that Jung called “inflation,” but a larger identity that Jung called the Self. In Hinduism, the phrase “Atman is Brahman” means that we have a human spiritual identity, Atman, that is paradoxically identical to Brahma, the Creator of the universe. You will not learn of this identity in Psych 101 because it is not a scientific concept, not empirically testable. There is no time to pursue that line of argument here, so I will rest content with remarking that, since Kant, the validity of the “empirically testable” has been called into question as, ironically, untestable.
Eliade treats the unifying and governing Centre as an image of Creation, but contemporary philosophy and literary theory regards it as a sinister image of domination and coercion. French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s word “deconstruction” has become a kind of popular culture buzz term: Woody Allan even has a film called Deconstructing Harry. Deconstruction was the entering wedge of the movement known as “post-structuralism,” which attacked the very idea of structure as coercive. To postulate any kind of structure is a coercion, an intellectual act of violence that could very easily lead to social violence and coercion. Derrida became famous in the English-speaking world through his 1965 essay “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Sciences.” Its, ahem, central argument was that any structure is defined by its center: a centerless structure is a contradiction in terms, either mere irrationalism or deliberate “mystification." The years 1965 through roughly 1990 witnessed the free-for-all in the humanities sometimes called the “theory wars.” Just about any notion of structure, order, pattern was attacked as a sinister will to power, a manifestation of a Western culture bent entirely upon “hegemony,” domination and control by a centralized power principle. Western culture was a gigantic spider whose webwork of power went everywhere. The mood of the times vacillated between an anarchism that hoped to achieve at least a limited freedom by deconstructing every structure in sight and a kind of quasi-nihilistic despair based on the feeling that we are constituted by the webwork. Our identity is simply as part of the web, so that to deconstruct it is to deconstruct ourselves.
A possible way of thinking ourselves out of this impasse occurs, of all places, in a famous essay on medieval romance called “The Poetry of Interlace” by Eugène Vinaver, collected in his book The Rise of Romance (1971). This brilliant essay establishes a parallel between the visual style of some medieval art, especially Celtic illuminated manuscripts, known as interlace and the narrative structure of medieval romance. Vinaver is not claiming that the one style influenced the other, merely positing a resemblance based on a radically different conception of structure than the one subverted by Derrida and other post-structuralists. While he studiously avoids all speculation about the cultural and political implications of his ideas, no one publishing in 1971 could have been unaware that they existed.
Vinaver contends that the standard notion of literary structure is Classical, specifically Aristotelian. He refers to it as “the traditional belief that simplicity is a virtue and complexity a fault…the convention that requires any ‘good’ piece of writing to be structurally transparent and to develop, as it were, along a straight line with a minimum of deviation. The vast forest in which knights-errant seek adventures is a visual expression of everything that this convention condemns; it is the exact opposite of the Aristotelian idea of a work to be ‘embraced in a single view. In the words of C.S. Lewis, it is ‘something that cannot be taken in at a glance, something that at first looks planless, though all is planned” (70-71). Medieval romance and the interlace style of medieval art resemble each other in being based on an alternative notion of structure—one that is centerless or governed by multiple centers, one in which, to bring out some of the political connotations, unity is not achieved by means of the subordination of all the elements of the design to a coercive “center,” a unity achieved through the suppression of multiplicity in the interests of simplicity and sameness. If this sounds like program notes for the quasi-fascist takeover being currently attempted in the United States, that is exactly the point. And antipathy to such a program of coercive unification is why the radically leftist post-structuralist movement was determined to subvert the very ideas of structure and center, both intellectually and socially, even if the only alternatives were anarchism or nihilism. The excitement of Vinaver’s intuitive leap is the implication that another kind of structure is possible, and if it is possible in visual art and literary narrative, it might be possible in personal and political life.
Vinaver’s chief example of medieval romance is the huge prose Vulgate Cycle of the Arthurian stories in five "branches” (the source for Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur), of which he says that “no single section of the Cycle is self-contained….To achieve this the author, or authors, had recourse to a narrative device known to earlier writers, including Ovid, but never before used on so vast a scale, namely the device of interweaving a number of separate themes…it consisted of a variety of themes, all distinct and yet inseparable from one another. ‘Everything leads to everything else, but by very intricate paths. At every point the question, “How did we get here?” arises, but there is always an answer’” (71-72).
The reference to Ovid is to the Metamorphoses, which interweaves over 200 Greek myths together with no common center other than the theme of metamorphosis. Some stories are broken up and told intermittently; some are told out of chronological order—the story of Herakles is told in reverse; some are nested inside one another.
Why do this? Because narrative design is not some structural abstraction but a vision of life. “What could be more puzzling, not to say alarming? How could a structure consisting of a large number of themes without a common beginning, middle, and end, in other words a narrative devoid of unity in our sense of the term, be as impregnable as a composition revolving around a single centre and constructed like a well-made play? Had we not learnt from Aristotle that such a thing could never happen?” (72). Yet that is exactly the point: life is not a well-made play. It has no beginning, middle, and end. Nor would some of us want it to be. Visual interlace moves “not towards or away from a real or imaginary centre—since there is no centre—but towards potential infinity….At the same time both the artist and the cyclic romance writer see in their mind’s eye endless possibilities of further growth” (80). We are speaking not just of aesthetic values but of existential ones when we prefer “an art which surrenders the ‘restful’ kind of symmetry for the play of fancy in which both movement and depth are achieved by structural richness and infinite multiplication" (78).
Vinaver’s tone loses its scholarly detachment and takes on an emotional warmth when he says that “we have lost the art of perceiving the infinity of the great in the infinity of the small. The fascination of tracing a theme through all its phases, of waiting for its return while following other themes, of experiencing the constant sense of their simultaneous presence, depends on our grasp of the entire structure—the most elusive that has ever been devised” (81). This sounds musical, and in fact Vinaver notes that C.S. Lewis called it “polyphonic” (72-73), the technique of medieval music in which simultaneous melodic lines remain independent of one another instead of being subordinated to a unified harmonic effect, which means that it tolerates by necessity a good deal of dissonance. Bach’s fugues are sometimes surprisingly polyphonic, which accounts for some of their occasional weird and fascinating moments. Interlace technique survived beyond the Middle Ages in literature as well, in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Spenser’s Faerie Queene. No one can remember the plot of The Faerie Queene because it doesn’t have one: it doesn’t move forward; it exfoliates. In his book on romance, The Secular Scripture, Northrop Frye cites a line of Alexander Pope that exists in two versions. The original was “A mighty maze of walks without a plan,” which Pope revised to “A mighty maze, but not without a plan,” a retreat from the wandering of romance to the planned aisles of neo-Classical topiary.
Which raises a larger issue: those with a literary background might feel that Vinaver’s thesis is in fact an old one applied to new material: it is the old neo-Classical versus Romantic conflict come again, and there is an amount of truth to that. Shakespeare’s plays do not observe the neo-Classical “unities” supposedly derived from Aristotle, and Antony and Cleopatra seems to go out of its way to defy them, jumping back and forth repeatedly between Egypt and Rome, irritating Dryden in the Augustan age into rewriting it according to the rules. The irony is that the style matches the theme: Mark Antony sides with Egypt, a culture that, like the Nile, “o’erflows the measure.” Antony and Cleopatra anticipate Blake’s aphorisms “Enough! Or: too much!” and “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” But it is Octavian and his Roman discipline who will rule the world bringing it under the control of Rome, the imperial center of the webwork of the Roman Empire. Later, the Romantic writers recreated the genre of romance and its values of multiplicity and dynamic transformation.
None of this would have impressed the post-structuralist critics, who were consistently anti-Romantic. But there is one modern writer, admired by the post-structuralists, who would have appreciated Vinaver’s argument, and that is James Joyce. One of the greatest examples of interlace technique is the Book of Kells, an illuminated manuscript of the four gospels dating from around 800 CE. Joseph Campbell analyzes the intricate symbolism of its famous “Tunc” page in The Masks of God, volume 3. Joyce called the Book of Kells “the most Irish thing we have,” and used it as one model for his last work, Finnegans Wake. If there were ever an example of “infinite multiplication” moving towards infinity, it is the Wake, which has no continuous story line but tells all the stories of both the gods and the human race all at once in a polyphonic, polysemous language of puns within puns that self-deconstructs in every sentence. Derrida admitted that he was fascinated by it. It has no center because everywhere you are is a center that reflects all the other centers. At the same time, the Wake is a mandala, a crossed circle, the ultimate symbol of unity. It has four parts, and, instead of beginning, middle, and end, the text goes around in a circle, the fragmentary last sentence being completed by the fragmentary first sentence on the first page. What is a mandala but a stylized web, and what is a web but an image of gossamer beauty spun out of the body of a creature with a bad reputation but who in the end is an archetypal symbol of the artist herself?
References
Eliade, Mircea. “The ‘God Who Binds’ and the Symbolism of Knots.” In Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism. Princeton University Press, 1991 (originally published 1952). 92-124.
Eliade, Mircea. “Ropes and Puppets.” In The Two and the One. University of Chicago Press, 1965. 160-88.
Vinaver, Eugène. “The Poetry of Interlace.” In The Rise of Romance. D.S. Brewer, 1971. 68-98.
“Spider Woman Creates the Humans.” In “Portfolio of Creation Myths” in Dreams and Inward Journeys: A Rhetoric and Reader for Writers, 8th edition. Edited by Marjorie Ford and Jon Ford. 170-71.