Explicating the Spider

The spider has evolved multiple behaviors of hunting which can be split in two by their relation to the physical space in which they reside. Stationary spiders take on one relation, where they carve out for themselves a space with their spinnerets, settling into a home made out of their body. Moving spiders take on another, stalking, chasing, hunting, and in various ways catching, their prey as nomads.

It comes as no surprise then that symbolism of the spider comes in these two forms. Of the web, the spider is written as the weaver, the writer. Arachne challenged Athena to a contest of artistic creation and won, upstaging the vertical structure above her and for it, was punished to be a creation condemned to eternal integration with what she struck against Heaven with. The spider here crafts out of themselves the text, the home of meaning in which they live. The full system of the web, with its variously purposed threads, all point to the author at the center, where any alien that encounters it must deal with the author, from which it all descends.

Of the latter, the spider is written as the soul or its container. The spider is said to be the dreamer’s soul, wandering through the world at night, aimlessly roaming free of the body. As any who have heard the strange machinic noises of a large spider moving, a spider’s locomotion occurs by hydraulics. The human sees their own composition reflected here. The spider exists in two relations, one within themselves, as a field of flow to be manipulated, and the result of those manipulations, which is the spider’s movements in relation to their context. Such is the input/exput system of the human. The human exists in reception of the environment and the body’s Qi, which flows through the body and can then be manipulated by the intelligence (spider as web-spinner) atop the machine (spider as hunter). The human does this in order to move as a complete entity, changing the enclosed body’s relationship to space by changing the internal hydraulic mechanics.

The spider symbolizes the practitioner in this dual action. The practitioner must achieve intelligence in order to create for themselves the spider form. The spider form writes themselves the web of meaning which allows them a free space of interaction and further writing, within which they can achieve movement. Movement allows for breaking free and going higher, climbing the strands of webbing to heaven.