Divine Arachnophobia

a brain dump on shame, desire & divinity.

I found a dead spider behind the couch yesterday—a quarter-sized tangle of black, its limbs curled in on itself like a gathering of dark, dead weeds. I wondered where in my living room something of its impressive size and girth and horror could have taken up residence without my awareness. And what led to its eventual demise? Were there others like it, just as hair-raising, hiding somewhere nearby?

It goes without saying that I’m an arachnophobe. I’ve fucking hated these little things for as long as I can remember. I don’t know how it started. There is, somewhere within me, a vague, half-formed memory of being bitten by a spider while sitting in the bathtub when I was four or five, but it’s possible I made that up. And hovering just above that is a memory I know for certain is true: seeing a fly meet its untimely end in a web that sat in the east-facing window of our kitchen at age nine. I watched the unfolding drama—half-transfixed, half-horrified—as the spider dashed across its nest, mounted its prey, wrapped it in silk, and drained its life away like a vampire.

It isn’t just their alienness that I find unnerving—not just the fangs or the eight eyes or the eight flailing legs. It’s deeper than that. There’s something about the swiftness and sureness with which a spider moves. The steadiness with which it constructs its web, both a home and a tomb. The patience with which it lingers and stalks, suspended in the corners of our homes or out in the veins of nature somewhere. Regardless of size, a spider’s presence is felt profoundly, in a way I don’t encounter with other insects. There’s a recognition of mutual aliveness in every spider I meet, as if they’re silently saying: “I am here, and so are you, and we are actively sharing this space. What are you going to do about it?” The sight of a spider always forces me into my body, to be present in ways that often evoke shame.

Maybe there’s a circular spider-fly dance happening inside me. A fear-desire-shame complex. I encounter it regularly.

The first time I fell in love, for instance, I told myself I was a fly—that desire was happening to me instead of within me. I believed the depth of my feelings rendered me helpless. That I was cornered by my love. That I existed solely at the mercy of a separate thing, which was so seductive to me that, indeed, it felt like I was being cocooned in unbreakable bondage.

But it was all too easy to project and externalize that hunger, to separate myself from the call to a sacred, full-bodied hunt. The only true bondage there was shame, and that’s precisely how it operates and ensnares. It convinces you that you must never be the spider, that you must fear the present and its life force.

Earlier today, I broke down in tears because I am finally well enough and have slowed down enough to realize the extent to which I’ve let shame dictate my life. If life is a current of color and feeling, I have been a smooth stone, skipping over its tides, my only goal to make it across without being so irrevocably touched by the current that I sink into it.

I try to give myself grace. Deconstructing childhood experiences anchored around trauma and toxic religious rhetoric isn’t easy. It’s like learning how to walk again. It’s the theater of easing your mind out of years-long conditioning that tells you instinct is to be mistrusted, that the body is a site of destruction, that you must not be as the spider, who says, “I am here and I will feast.”

I read recently that spiders are “[emissaries] of the Goddess.” In ancient times and Indigenous wisdom (like that of my Hopi ancestors), they represent/ed creation, storytelling, and maternal power. The legacy of the “Spider Woman” is rooted in a broad range of cultures and traditions. As fearful as I am of them, perhaps this is why, simultaneously, spiders leave me so intrigued, finding me as guides both in waking life and in (ironically serene) dreams. Maybe they are the muses and fates that aid all writers who are open to their instruction. Perhaps their visitations in my life carry reminders—that my hunger is sacred, that my power can be a place of refuge, that my creativity is my lifeblood, that I am not a fly.

So rest well, Patroness of Silk and Soil, wild, eight-eyed, fang-bearing bitch. We bless your sacred venom and the terror you invoked simply by existing. We bless your thirst, your need to feast, to drain life of its colors ‘til you were swollen with its essence. We revere how bombastically you commanded space. We praise and emulate how you must have lived, Couch Spider—with eternal presence, tethered to your instincts. May we all build our webs according to your design. 🕷️🕯️

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