This supernatural being has strong associations with creation, and often acts like a teacher or helper, imparting wisdom, skills, and healing. The Spider Woman appears in several Native American myths, especially in the southwest United States, with the Hopi, Pueblo, and Navajo peoples. As a result, people would view spiders as a good omen, and it is widely believed that this custom originated in the Han dynasty (202 BC – 220 AD). There is a certain type of spider with long red legs that is called ' xizhi', a homonym of the words that mean 'little joy'. The story of the spider in the Chinese telling present another dimension of why this happy insect is favourite good luck sign. The webs are especially significant, too, indicating an attraction of joy and prosperity in our lives, while the eye-like centre can mean that good luck is always within eyesight. Likewise, the sight of a spider hanging from a long thread can denote a friend arriving, or good fortune descending from the heavens. The sight of these positive creatures were often associated with good news: one story recalls that a mother, waiting for her son to return from a long journey, finds a spider crawling on her clothes soon after her son arrives. In ancient China, spiders were referred to as ' ximu' or ‘happy insects'. The spider and its web hold many auspicious associations in Chinese culture. “Because my best friend was my mother and she was deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, reasonable, dainty, subtle, indispensable, neat, and as useful as a spider.” As her celebrated sculpture Spider IV comes to auction in Sotheby’s Contemporary Evening Auction (27 April, Hong Kong), we look at some of ways people and cultures have contended with all the captivating and formidable characteristics of the polarising eight-legged creature. “The spider-why the spider?” Bourgeois wrote in her 1995 book Ode à Ma Mère. Images of the spider recur throughout Louise Bourgeois’s work, signifying aspects of her childhood and relationship to her mother, a tapestry restorer. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, foolhardy Arachne challenges Minerva to a duel on the loom, only to be transformed into a spider and forced to weave for eternity. From Buddha to Picasso | Five Icons from Across Time and Spaceĭespite this, spiders have held varying symbolic meanings through history and culture, both positive and negative, inhabiting oral traditions, literature, poetry, as well as art.
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