Spider Woman, within the context of Native American culture, was the spinning deity from the Southwest who imparted her knowledge of weaving to humankind. In this motif, a great spider wove the universe out of her own body. This motif reveals reverence for women’s labor in such cultures. The Spider Woman can also refer to a trap-door spider living underground in a kiva from which it is said humankind emerged. In nature when the spider makes her web, its beauty reflects her nature; its instinctive beauty reflects the beauty of life. Spider Woman taught humankind how to spin and weave. Pueblo women wove cotton cloth before the arrival of the first Europeans. To the Hopi, Spider Woman, or Spider Grandmother, embodies justice and goodness as she makes the world inhabitable for humankind. In Hopi cosmology, she is one with the spider web in which everything is interwoven; Spider Grandmother is interconnected with all that she creates. Like the spider that creates the silk of her web, she gives her energy to an ever-evolving cosmos.
Emergence stories depicting Anasazi cultural origins were derived from the archaic Cochise culture, which was forged in harsh environmental conditions, lasting from about 7000 to 500 BCE. Lake Cochise covered a vast portion of the land where the Anasazi foraged; as it dried up, ancient peoples adapted to desert and cliff landscapes, taking shelter in caves and under ledges. They hunted and trapped small game and learned how to get nutrition from yucca, prickly pear, and juniper plants. Animal figurines thought to be religious offerings from this period have been found near the Grand Canyon in Arizona, along with clustered pictographs and petroglyphs found near springs and game trails, in caves and canyons, suggesting that early communities were based upon hunting associations. At around 3500 BCE, the Anasazi encountered Mesoamerican people who brought corn and pit house–making technology northward from Mexico. This cultural exchange brought the adoption of agriculture needed for a more sedentary lifestyle, longer-lasting dwellings, and the development of tools, arts, and crafts, specifically pottery making. The ancient Pueblo kiva (a subterranean “pit house”) is reflected in a creation story where a sipapu (small round hole in the floor) is present representing the portal from the Underworld through which ancestors first emerged.
Between 50 and 500 CE, these Native Americans mastered weaving food containers, sandals, and other objects from straw, vines, rushes, and yucca fibers. This period is also marked by the addition of pottery making by women as the ancient Pueblo peoples became settled and reliant upon horticulture. They began planting and cultivating crops in addition to hunting and gathering agave, cacti, mesquite, amaranth, minion, grapes, hackberry, walnuts, and yucca along with edible seeds, leaves, bark, and roots. The foundations for Anasazi culture began with small villages; population growth is marked by the emergence of semipermanent kivas that were used for seasonal food storage. Over the next 1,100 years, there was a slow transition from small-room, seasonal farmsteads to massive permanent fortress-cities. Pictographs and clay dolls made between 500 and 750 depict painted or woven attire.
The Hopi believe that humans emerged from the Underworld through an opening in the floor of the Grand Canyon. Twin War Gods (the children of the Sun and Water) act on behalf of the Hopi, and Spider Woman is the grandmother of the Twins. Many of the ancient roadways were not designed to connect physical locations, but like a spider’s web, were believed to be cosmological corridors linking ceremonial landmarks to topographic locations, horizon markers, and astronomical orientations used in measuring ceremonial cycles by the sun (Father) and moon (Mother). After about 750 CE, the semipermanent dwellings were eclipsed by radical changes in architectural technology known as pueblos. Portable female-gendered artifacts reflect periods when women were active in ritual trade, politics, and even textile production for subsistence before communities settled into long-term villages. Baskets dated between 900 CE and 1150 CE contained carved and painted prayer sticks that were used as shrine offerings, and by this time, men wove and painted textiles and women made pottery.
The Zuni emergence stories assert that they moved from place to place in search of a homeland and met many dangers from hostile enemies. This emergence story has Tawa (the Sun God) and Spider Woman (an earth deity) willing aspects of the world into being. Father Sun created the War Twins to help the Zuni overcome obstacles and hold a homeland. Winter solstice observances mark a time of world renewal: newly built homes are blessed, and masked kachinas appear in villages to hear prayers and to entertain with dancing. The War Twins are highly revered in Zuni religion for they can be benevolent or deadly in protecting the Zuni. Their intermediary spirits are kachinas. The War Twins are ceremonially recognized each year at the winter solstice and every four years for initiated members of the tribe.
Spider Woman (Na’ashjéii Asdzáá) is also one of the most important deities of Navajo religion, whose cosmology states that the universe is a grand system of interrelated positive and negative elements. The Navajo say Spider Woman taught them to weave; most likely, however, the Pueblo tribes introduced textile making during the seventeenth century. Unlike the Hopi Spider Grandmother, the Navajo Spider Woman was not considered the creator of humans; but rather, she was a constant helper, who appears in stories to save the people, protect the innocent, and restore harmony to the world. Spider Woman possessed supernatural power and advised the heroic twins Monster-Slayer and Child-Born-of-Water when the Navajo emerged from the Yellow World, where there was no sun, only two rivers and six mountains, into the Fourth World (or White World), which is this world. Spider Woman loved the people and enabled Monster-Slayer and Child-Born-of-Water to search for the Sun God, who was their father. He showed them how to destroy the monsters that roamed the land and killed many people.
Spider Rock
A sandstone pillar jutting like a finger out of Canyon de Chelly, a U.S. national monument within the boundaries of the Navajo Nation, Spider Rock is sacred to the Diné, as the Navajo people call themselves. According to the Diné, Spider Rock, which towers some 800 feet above the canyon floor, is the home of Spider Woman, a goddess of great importance to the Navajo, as well as to the Hopi and other Native peoples. Spider Rock is at the spiritual epicenter of the Diné world, and therefore visitors today may only approach this natural wonder and cultural icon with a Navajo guide.
C. Fee
Because she preserved their people, the Navajo designated Spider Woman as one of their most honored deities. Her home is atop Spider Rock, a red sandstone monolith in Arizona’s Canyon de Chelly National Park. She taught Navajo ancestors how to utilize a loom created by her husband Spider Man, making the cross-poles of sky and earth cords to support the structure with the warp sticks of sun rays that moved lengthwise to cross the woof. Weaving, within the context of the Spider Woman stories, enabled the Navajo to settle peacefully in one location and work out elaborate designs. They used cotton, yucca fiber, and hemp to weave all kinds of articles. The Navajo were so adept at weaving plant fibers that Europeans thought they used cotton thread.
Meredith Eliassen
See also Creation Myth of the Tewa; Culture Heroes of the Native Americans; Kachinas
Further Reading
Arnold, A. James. 1996. Monsters, Tricksters, and Sacred Cows: Animal Tales and American Identities. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
Mullett, G. M. 1979. Spider Woman Stories: Legends of the Hopi Indians. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
O’Bryan, Aileen. 1956. The Dîné: Origin Myths of the Navaho Indians. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.
Stephen, Alexander MacGregor. 1940. Hopi Indians of Arizona. Los Angeles: Southwest Museum.