Spider Magick

For me, there are no poems or songs that can adequately express the beauty and grace of Grandmother Spider and the magick of the spider people. In almost all of the world's environment, there are spiders. When I went to Hawaii this past fall and was at the summit of Haleakala, the dormant volcano on Maui, the near-barren environment played host to only three or four creatures. One of them was a spider.

"Of course you're here," I thought with delight, knowing that She is everywhere in our world.

I first encountered this great goddess in Canyon De Chelley on the Navajo reservation in northern Arizona. At the end of the canyon is Spider Rock, pictured at right, one of her traditional homes, and her presence there was palpable.

Years later, at my first witch camp, I met her in a whole new way in the center of a labyrinth, and since that time, she has been one of my matrons.

Spider magick is, in many ways, a baseline for the work that I do. It's a way of sending energy, creating patterns of energy, traveling throught the Multiverse - all manner of energetic and ritualized experience.

As I see it and understand it, everything in our world is made up of the Web of Creation - air, water, rock, furntiture from Ikea. Everything we can perceive with our senses, as well as thought, emotion, intention, is made up of strands of energy - the web. With our intentions, we create.

In some early Southwestern myths, the Spider Woman thinks creation into existence. I find this fascinating because in some research on quantum phsyics our thoughts hook up to an actual point in space. (Recently, some people I know have been taken with "The Secret," a new book and video about the power of our thoughts and intention. In many ways, I see this book as spirituality for a secular culture, but as one person was going on about it to me, I couldn't help but think how earlier peoples held similar beliefs and that the Spider's web was a way of explaining how our intentions can travel in the world and manifest at their given destinations.)

I spin webs of intention and magick throughout the day. This can be for sick loved ones, people who need a little extra support and strength, or just random webs on the Metro. My webs in public places are ones of compassion, peace of heart, Queer Mystery, whatever. It's my understanding that people passing through the webs pick up on the energy and it begins to resonate in their own bodies - like attracts like. (One of my favorites is a web of beauty in the doorways of the gym - "May all beings passing through this web open up to seeing beauty in themselves and those around them" - so often, people at the gym are there to ease anxiety about their bodies instead of for reasons of health, feeling good, and the beauty of movement.)

For me, different web patterns have different purposes - some are better for healing than others, while the intricate pattern of an orb-weaver's web also has its own particular functions.

I see the strands of the Web of Creation in people's bodies and the world around me, and very often those strands are various colors that have different meanings - desire, anger, joy, depression, chaos, etc.

For those interested in exploring this, I would suggest paying a visit to Grandmother Spider, although be aware that she is not like the humanoid Mysterious Ones and doesn't quite have their viewpoint. Frankly, I find this to be a really good thing and one of the elements that I most enjoy about her.