Spider Woman

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The frame is built out of the world. Its crosspoles are the cords of sky and earth; its warp-sticks are rays of the sun; the healds are rock crystal and sheet lightning, the batten is a halo of the sun, the comb is a strip of white shell, and turquoise and abalone are set among the parts, gathered in with the four sacred mountains that bound the Dine homeland. Spider Man made this first loom, the tellings say, after the Holy People sang the songs that make a loom stand strong; and Spider Woman took the Dine women by the hand and taught them to work it. To sit down at such a loom and draw the weft tight is to handle a small model of the ordered cosmos — which is the whole point, and the reason the teacher of it is a Holy Person and not merely a clever ancestor.

The name, and how she comes into the telling

Her name in Dine bizaad is Na’ashje’ii Asdzaa, Spider Woman, and she is one of the Diyin Dine’e, the Holy People who came up through the earlier worlds and set the order of this one. She is not solitary. Throughout the tradition she is paired with her husband, Na’ashje’ii Hastiin, Spider Man, and the two act together: he builds, she teaches; he strings the frame, she carries the craft to the people. Where one is named the other stands close by, so that the gift of weaving comes into the world already as a marriage of making and instruction.

She belongs, frame-internally, to the great narrative the Dine carry of their own beginning — the emergence up through the worlds below and the ordering of Dinetah, the land held between the four sacred mountains. In that sacred history Spider Woman and Spider Man are the ones who bring the spindle and the loom to the Holy People’s new world and set them in the hands of the Earth-Surface People. The standard reference record of the Dine Bahane and the figure of Spider Woman names the pair exactly so — the two who introduced the spindle and the loom — and holds her, across the tradition, as the constant helper and protector of the people.

She reaches the written record along two braided paths, and the difference between them matters. The first is Dine testimony. A version of the emergence narrative was set down from a Dine telling in 1928, when Aileen O’Bryan recorded the words of the elder Sandoval — Hastiin Tlo’tsi hee, “Old Man Buffalo Grass” — with his nephew Sam Ahkeah interpreting; the account was later published as origin myths of the Navaho. The authority in that book is Sandoval’s; the recorder only held the pen. The second path is the outsider ethnography, which must be read with care. The 19th-century Army surgeon Washington Matthews collected Navajo narratives at Fort Wingate and published them as Navaho Legends in 1897. Gladys Reichard, who spent the better part of twenty-five years working on and around the reservation and learned to weave in a Dine household — tending sheep and living the daily round of a Dine woman — titled the 1934 book that came out of that apprenticeship Spider Woman: A Story of Navajo Weavers and Chanters, and followed it in 1950 with the two-volume Navaho Religion. Father Berard Haile, working among the Dine in the same decades, set down much more. These recorders wrote from outside the frame, in a colonial century, and some of what they took down was ceremonial knowledge shared under particular conditions. The living authority for who Spider Woman is has never rested with them. It rests with the Dine — the hataalii who carry the chants and the weavers who carry her teaching at the loom.

She is kindred to, and held distinct from, the Spider Grandmother of the neighboring Hopi and the other Pueblo peoples, Kokyangwuti, a parallel weaver-and- helper of the Southwest. The resemblance is close and old, and across a shared desert the two figures plainly answer to one another. But the Hopi grandmother is the Hopi’s own and Na’ashje’ii Asdzaa is the Dine’s own, and to fold them into one figure would flatten two distinct sacred worlds into a convenience they do not ask for.

The loom, and the keeping of hozho

The gift for which she is best known is the loom, and the loom she is said to have given is no ordinary carpenter’s frame. In the account Reichard carried and the weavers keep, its parts are the materials of the created world. The reference record of Navajo weaving preserves the same core: that Spider Woman taught the people to build the first loom of exotic materials — sky and earth, sunrays, rock crystal, and sheet lightning — and then taught them to weave upon it. Spider Man raised it after the Holy People had sung over its parts, and it is this that makes the difference. A loom sung into being out of the sky’s cord and the sun’s ray is an instrument that models the order it is used to make; the weaver at work is not decorating cloth but repeating, in wool, the setting-in-order that the Holy People performed at the beginning.

That is why the craft is bound up with hozho, the central good of the whole religion — the state of beauty, balance, and right order that the ceremonies labor to keep in place and to restore when it slips. To weave well is a small daily act of hozho: the pattern brought into balance, the tension held even, the colors set in their proportion. Scholars have noticed the fourfold symmetry that runs through so many Dine designs and read it as harmony made visible, and the tradition itself treats the loom as a discipline of order rather than a mere trade. The turquoise and white shell and abalone named among the first loom’s furnishings are the same sacred stones and shells that recur through the ceremonies and the four mountains; the loom is furnished from the sacred inventory of the world.

Among weavers a particular thread carries her name into the present. In many finished rugs a thin line of the background color is run out from the field, across the border, to the very edge — the ch’ihoniti, the spirit line or spirit outlet, sometimes set in a corner. The weaver, it is said, works part of her own spirit into the cloth along with the wool; the line left open to the edge is the path by which that spirit, and her creative energy, can leave the weaving safely rather than be shut inside it, so that she keeps her strength to weave again. The practice is spoken of as a way of honoring Spider Woman, who taught the craft in the first place. It is described here only as weavers describe it — a made thing with a meaning, not a rule to be issued — and the songs that are said to make a loom strong belong to the singers and the weavers who hold them, not to any page that would set them down as a recipe. The tradition lets the loom into the open this far and keeps the rest to itself.

A Dine weaver at the upright loom, the blanket rising on a single continuous warp set in by hand — the craft carried, in the tradition, from the first loom Spider Man built and Spider Woman taught. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, 1901, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The helper of the Twins

Weaving is her most famous gift, but her most famous deed is a rescue. When the world was still overrun by the Naayee, the monsters that were devouring the people, the Sun and Changing Woman had two sons — the Hero Twins, Monster Slayer, Naayee Neizghani, and Born for Water, To Bajishchini — who set out to find their father the Sun and win from him the weapons to clear the world. The road to the Sun’s house ran through country meant to kill them, and it was Spider Woman who saw them onto it alive.

In the tellings she takes the young men in, hides them, and equips them for the journey. She gives them a feather taken from a living eagle — the life-feather — to keep close, and she teaches them the words to say and the way to hold the feather up so that the dangers along the road will let them pass: the rocks that clash together, the reeds that cut, the cane cactus, the boiling sands. So armed and so instructed, the Twins cross the four deadly places and reach their father’s house, where the Sun puts them to his own tests — hurling them against spikes of turquoise and white shell, shutting them in a sweathouse of exploding stones — and they endure each because Spider Woman has told them what to do. Only then does the Sun own them as his sons and arm them, and only then do they turn back to clear Dinetah of the monsters, whose fallen bodies became certain of the land’s own dark and jagged forms. The whole later shape of the world the Dine live in runs back, in part, through the old woman who hid two frightened brothers and taught them the words that would carry them past the Sun’s anger. She is, in the record’s plain phrase, the constant helper and protector of the people, and this is the deed that shows it.

Spider Rock, and the two voices about her

She is said to live atop Spider Rock, the great twin-summit spire that stands where Canyon de Chelly meets Monument Canyon in the Dine homeland of northeastern Arizona. The pillar rises about 750 feet from the canyon floor, cut from the deep-red De Chelly Sandstone — a Permian dune-sand laid down some 250 million years ago and left standing, after long erosion along the rock’s own joints and fractures, as one of the sheer freestanding towers the canyon is known for. Navajo tradition names the taller of its two summits her home; the lower spire beside it is called Speaking Rock. The whole of Canyon de Chelly lies within the Navajo Nation, and its national monument is the only unit of the National Park Service owned by the Navajo Tribal Trust and managed cooperatively with the Dine — the sacred spire has never left the people whose Holy Person is said to sit on it.

Two voices speak about her at once, and the tradition lets both stand. Alongside the deep reverence for her as teacher and protector runs a well-known cautionary telling, the kind parents use: that the pale cap of Spider Rock is bleached white by the sun-baked bones of children, and that Spider Woman will let down a web-ladder from the summit and carry off a child who badly and stubbornly misbehaves. The frightening story does the work such stories do — it fixes obedience and the weight of Dine values in a child’s mind — and it coexists with, rather than replacing, the older and larger understanding of her as the one who gave the loom and saved the Twins. The pillar can be a nursery warning and a shrine of the weaver’s art in the same breath.

Spider Rock in Canyon de Chelly, northeastern Arizona — the deep-red De Chelly Sandstone spire whose taller summit the Dine name as the home of Na’ashje’ii Asdzaa. Cacophony, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The living loom

Her fullest reception is not on the rock but at the frame. Dine weaving is a working sacred art, still made much as the first loom is said to have been made: an upright frame, a single continuous warp strung top to bottom, each strand of hand-spun wool set in by hand and beaten down, the whole worked without the treadle or the shuttle of the European loom. Contemporary Dine weavers and writers name Spider Woman as the source of that craft, and they name her in the present tense — not a figure the tradition has finished with, but the teacher whose gift is taken up again every time a warp is strung. It is their voices, increasingly, that carry her, and they carry her differently from the old books: from inside the craft, as a living relation, rather than as an entry in an outsider’s collection.

Two accounts of that craft run side by side, and both are true in their own register. The tradition tells of a loom sung into being at the beginning and a teacher who carried it to the people. The documented history tells of an upright loom worked in the Southwest across centuries, of the Spanish bringing the hardy churro sheep whose long wool the Dine took up and made their own, and of a weaving art that grew, through trade and skill, into the blankets and rugs now prized across the world. The two stories do not compete. The first says what the loom is and where its authority comes from; the second says how, in documented time, the wool was spun and the market found. A weaver can hold both at once without strain, and most do — the sacred source of the craft and the worked history of it braided as tightly as warp and weft.

That older ethnographic record is not thrown away, but it is put in its place. Matthews, Reichard, and Haile preserved a great deal that might otherwise have gone unwritten, and their pages remain useful. They also wrote through the lens of their century, sometimes filed knowledge that had been shared under conditions, and never held the standing that belongs to a Dine singer or weaver speaking of the tradition as her own. The reasonable order is to read the ethnography with gratitude and suspicion together, and to let the Dine speak first for what is theirs. Where the tradition holds a thing closely — the chant, the sandpainting, the ceremonial procedure — the right response from outside is to go quiet at the edge of it, which is what the weavers themselves do when they show the loom and keep the song.

The kinship with the Hopi and Pueblo Spider Grandmother is acknowledged across the Southwest and left uncollapsed; the Apache and other neighbors know their own spider figures too, and the threads of borrowing among all of them, across centuries of trade and war, are genuinely tangled and debated. Through all of it Na’ashje’ii Asdzaa stays particular — the Dine’s own Holy Person, married to Spider Man, seated on her red spire, remembered in a bedtime warning and honored at every loom. The clearest proof of how alive she remains is the smallest: a single thread, run deliberately out to the edge of a finished rug and left open, so that the weaver’s spirit can follow it into the light and come home to weave again — a thin bright path, kept for her, in nearly every rug the Dine make.

→ Related: Changing Woman · The Holy People · The Hero Twins · Talking God · Canyon De Chelly · Shiprock · Mount Taylor · The San Francisco Peaks · The Dine · The Hopi · The Apache