Katarzyna Michalski - Spider

This book attempts to describe an animal whose importance lies primarily in the fact that it is much more than most of the animals presented in this series a cultural and psychological construct. The spider is at first sight a hauntingly real animal, never very far away from each inhabitant of the earth (save in the Arctic and the Antarctic), and strewn all over the world in almost 40,000 spider species and types, with some 500 new species still being discovered every year. Spiders might have appeared on earth around 200 million years ago. A sensational find on Englands chalk cliff coast at Hastings, Sussex in summer 2009 brought to light a piece of amber in which a spider was encased. It has been dated by its discoverers as being around 140 million years old: a sensational discovery that was publicized all around the world.

The fact that the myriad spiders on earth play an important role in the ecosphere devouring harmful insects is also generally appreciated. Nonetheless the negative attitude of most people towards the spider though tinged by a sort of admiration is conditioned by psychology and culture. But it is the spiders prime product, the web, that has served in modern times in an unrivalled way as a model for the organization of information and society. Earlier epochs did not see it that way.

Thanks to its domestic presence the spider was always known to virtually everybody. However, only a handful of aficionados, were able to build up something approaching a personal relationship with one of the eight-legged creatures. Needless to say, spiders sometimes played an important role in folktales and religious beliefs, but in Europe, in contrast to other animals, spiders did so without acquiring a distinct character of their own which might have led to a sort of anthropomorphization (although in West Africa and among the Native American tribes in North America the situation was a different one). As we shall however try to show in this book, the symbolic and psychological meanings of the spider have gained unexpectedly in stature during the course of the last century, in contrast to earlier symbolically significant animals like wolves, snakes or nightingales. All of these seem to have receded, if not faded, from the collective cultural imagination, from the imagination of their children and perhaps most importantly from their respective sets of animal comparatives. The very fact that the European Society of Arachnology annually bestows the title of a European Spider of the Year in 2008 the title went to the so-called common house spider (Tegenaria atrica), in 2009 to the triangle spider (Hyptiotes paradoxus) and that this information appeared on the front pages of major European journals, vividly demonstrates the spiders sudden rise to prominence.

The thousands and thousands of very different spider types do not lend themselves to a brief discussion of their biological and zoological characteristics. The astounding number of published spider books containing classificatory and practical information, intended both for the specialist and the general public, is another reason to pursue a different approach in this book. Spider types as such are thus not discussed in a comprehensive way but only case-wise, when relating in our discourse to some trait worth analysing or referring to.

An illustration of spiders of the genus Neriene, from John Blackwalls 1864 A History of the Spiders of Great Britain and Ireland.

The spectrum of the symbolic meanings of the spider is a very broad and varied one. Ovids famous narrative in the Metamorphoses proposed through the reference to the Lydian weaver Arachne a personalized etymology of its Greek name, connecting the activity of the spider with the concept of weaving and artistic craft. The spider might thus symbolize creation, in some cases even the creation of the world. It stands for work and industriousness, but in the same breath might represent given the frailty of the web the mindless effort of work, and perhaps its pointlessness. Long is the list of supposed negative traits: overambitious projects, dexterity, cunning, ambition, ruthlessness, avarice, poisonousness. Nonetheless we also encounter positive traits like caution, intellectualism, rationalism, self-reliance and self-sufficiency.