To the Hopi tribe, a sovereign nation located in northeastern Arizona, the Spider Grandmother is Kokyangwuti, and is the primary goddess of their culture. In Hopi traditional stories she can take the shape of an old woman, a timeless woman, or a spider. In her arachnid form she lives in a hole in ground, which may be a more sophisticated notion than it first appears, because subterranean rooms have been found in the ruins of ancient peoples of the southwestern region of the United States such as the Ancestral Puebloans. These subterranean rooms, called kiva, could be used as domestic spaces, but could also have social or ceremonial purposes. Threads of the Hopi belief systems could, therefore, link back to this ancient culture.

The Spider Grandmother is integral to the Hopi creation story, where she is identified as the Earth Goddess who separated from Tawa, the Sun God, in order to create the other gods, and then Earth and the creatures. Tawa and Kokyangwuti found that the creatures were not alive, so they gave them souls. They then created woman and man, using themselves as models, and then they sand the first people to life. Different stories provide different details of the creation story but most agree that the Spider Grandmother guided the people through Four Worlds, or four great caverns, and as they changed their form, becoming more human. She taught them the rules for a woman and a man, and what religious practices they were to follow. In other stories, Spider grandmother is a helpful figure, she finds missing people, assists one village in a race against another village (which had offended her), and helped to secure a good hunting dog for another village.

The Navajo tribe, a sovereign nation that straddles the Four Corners region of the United States (southwestern corner of Colorado, southeastern corner of Utah, northeastern corner of Arizona, and northwestern corner of New Mexico), have a similar deity that the refer toas Spider Woman, or Na’ashjé’, who is a helper and protector. She was also used, however, to scare children, as it was said she would cast her net and capture and eat naughty children. Both the Hopi and Navajo attribute the knowledge of weaving to the Spider Goddess, which makes sense given that the spiders are nature’s great web weavers. The Spider Woman is also significant in other areas of the Americas. To the Ojibwe people of North United States and South Canada, the Spider Grandmother is Asibkaashi, a helper figure, who also inspires mothers to weave protective spider web chams, often called dream catchers.

The gorget (usually use of an article of clothing that covers the throat) in the photograph is from the Spiro Mounds of eastern Oklahoma. It is quite large at 23cm and the holes in the gorget would have allowed to be attached to a range of apparel, for instance a headdress. The spider in the center has its eight legs divided into four lots of two, and the swirling cross in the center of the spider’s back is another fourfold division, perhaps representing the Four Worlds that the Spider Grandmother led people through after creation. Spiro mounds in an eighty-acre site on the floodplain of the southern side of the Arkansas River. It was occupied between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries by a people that were culturally linked to the Southwestern Ceremonial Complex AND to what anthropologists call the Mississippian Ideological Interaction Sphere. Spiro was a major outpost in the west of the Mississippian culture, and when the burial chamber that contained this gorget was uncovered during the Great Depression of the 1930s it was considered to be the archaeological find of the century – the Kansas City Star ran with the headline, “A ‘King Tut’ Tomb in the Arkansas Valley,” on December 15, 1935.[1] It was so important because it proved that North America had a wide-spread culture to rival that of the Maya, Inca, and Aztecs to the south.

Unfortunately, archaeology in the 1930s was not the professional discipline and the prospectors who found the site at Spiro, the Pocola Mining Company, basically raided the tomb. The tomb contained copper breast plates, elaborately carved effigies, as well as hundreds of carved shells like this gorget. These objects were sold off to curio-seekers and dozens of institutions including the British Museum, the Louvre, and the Smithsonian. The scattering of the object from Spiro diminished its subsequent fame, but in 2022, 175 of these objects were brought together again for the first time in nearly a hundred years for an exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art in Texas. You can hear more about Spiro Mounds on an episode of The Past podcast (https://the-past.com/podcasts).

Spider Grandmother is a large part of the traditions and religions of many of the indigenous peoples of North America, she is known from many different stories that have been passed down orally and many beautiful objects such as the spider gorget from Spiro Mounds. I find it a little sad that American children have much greater familiarity with ancient mythical figures from Greece and Scandinavia than those of their own country.

Sources:

George Merrick Mullet, Spider Woman Stories (University of Arizona Press, 1979).

Natalie Tobert and Colin F. Taylor, Native American Myths and Legends (Smithsonian Libraries, 1994)

Harols Courlander, Hopi Voices, Recollections, Traditions, and Narratives of the Hopi Indians (University of New Mexico Press, 1982)

“Legend of the Dreamcatcher,” Akta Lakota Museum and Cultural Center, accessed June 13, 2024. http://aktalakota.stjo.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=8820

“Native American Legends: Spider Grandmother (Koyangwuti, Kokyangwuti),” Native Languages of America, accessed June 13, 2024. https://www.native-languages.org/spider-grandmother.htm

“Spider Grandmother,” Wikipedia, accessed June 12, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider_Grandmother

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[1] https://www.spiromounds.com/collection/objects/“a-‘king’tut’-tomb-in-the-arkansas-valley”- accessed 5/18/2024.