Symbolism of Spiders & Tarot
Tucked away around the edges, cobwebs appear on the Thoth Art card. There is nothing in Aleister Crowley's commentary on spiders or cobwebs, but there is a comment in Liber 777 on Column XXXVIII:
The Spider is particularly sacred to Tiphereth. It is written that she "taketh hold with her hands and is in king's palaces." (The most characteristic title of Tiphereth is "Palace of the King.") She has six legs and is in the centre of her web exactly as Tiphereth is in the centre of the Sephiroth of Ruach.
Now of course Spiders have eight legs, and it is doubtful that Crowley was unaware of this. On the Tree of Life, the Art card is on the vertical path from Yesod to Tiphereth, so it is as if we enter Tiphereth through a cobwebbed portal. Spiders have the ability to span distances through silken threads, and cobwebs of course span space. Another interesting point is that Tipareth is masculine, particularly the Son/Sun, but Crowley refers to the Spider as 'She', so we may well infer that the Spider enables us to access different worlds Tipareth to Malkuth or Kether of Trees above and below.
To the Native Americans, Grandmother Spider is the weaver who brought the gift of fire from the other side of the world. Gary Buffalo Horn Man says:
...her webs bind all things together and form the foundation of the Earth. Still other stories talk of Spider as the weaver of the threads of life. Spider's gift is the ability to shape the patterns of one's life. If Spider has walked into your awareness, it is a reminder that a person's Earth walk should be like a web, balanced and even and cohesive, made according to the design that Creator has given us. Watch the Weaver and see where your life has gaps and snags, and rebuild the web of your life.
Animal Energies, Dancing Otter Publishing
Remarkably, many of the shamanic qualities of the Spider reflect the qualities of the Art card.
Spider Cults are fascinating, particularly as they were suppressed by Christianity. The symbolism on the Art card encapsulates alchemy and sex magic, but Aleister Crowley does not explicitly discuss these important themes.
Darcy Kuntz (The Golden Dawn Tarot by A.E. Waite) says "Waite felt that the most appropriate name for the Tarot deck should be The Wheel of Fortune or The Great Wheel." This card, Fortune, along with the Chariot is closely connected to the Chariot Vision in Ezekiel. Far from being two-dimensional, the Wheel has three dimensions, and the direction of spin can be changed
when certain "keys" appear the motion of the Wheel is reversed. Mr. Parisious suggested that Florence Farr and the Sphere Group started the spinning of the Fool's eight pointed wheel in 1898. (See Kuntz's The Enochian Experiments of the Golden Dawn, 1996). The Fool's wheel is also contained in the centre of the Wheel of Fortune.'
Kuntz, The Golden Dawn Tarot by A.E. Waite
Spiders spin webs, they have eight legs, and here we have the suggestion of wheels within wheels.
Waite had no intention of revealing his true thoughts on the design of at least some of the Tarot cards:
I saw to it therefore that Pamela Coleman Smith should not be picking up casually any floating images from my own or another mind. She had to be spoon-fed carefully over the Priestess Card, over that which is called the Fool and over the Hanged Man
Shadows of Life and Thought, 1938
The spider spins webs, making connections:
All things are held together by correspondence, image with image, movement with movement: without that there could be no relation and therefore no truth. It is our business - especially yours and mine - to take up the power of relation.
The Greater Trumps, Charles Williams
Williams explains the essence of the Great Dance:
"Tell me first," she said, "now we're alone, tell me more of this dance. It's more than fortune-telling, isn't it?"... "O, how shall I explain," he cried out, "what we can only be taught to imagine?"... "Imagine, then, if you can," he said, "imagine that everything which exists takes part in the movement of a great dance - everything, the electrons, all growing and decaying things, all that seems alive and all that doesn't seem alive, men and beasts, trees and stones, everything that changes, and there is nothing that does not change. That change - that's what we know of the immortal dance; the law in the nature of things - that's the measure of the dance."
The Greater Trumps, Charles Williams
The Tree of Life and the Spider
Most people see the Tree of Life as having three paths connecting Malkuth at the bottom to the rest of the Tree, but this is not the only arrangement. Some early versions have a single path from Yesod to Malkuth, and if we include the symbol of the Spider, as the Golden Dawn did, we have only a slightly abstracted version of the Tree as a cobweb with suspended spider. Vogh identifies the Spider as lunar, and we know that the Lunar or Feminine aspects of divinity were suppressed in Kabbalah.
The Spider and Astronomy
In Volume 9 of the Golden Dawn book, the Tarot is related to the Celestial Heavens. Here are the cards associated with the Spider's area of the sky.
- King of Swords - 20° Taurus to 20° Gemini
- Head and body of Castor (Gemini), greater part of Auriga (Cancer), and Capella, head and forepart of Lynx, forefeet of Camelopardis
- The Heirophant - Taurus
- Head and forepart of Taurus the Bull. The Greater part of Orion. The beginning of the River Eridanus
- Art - Sagittarius
The Art card
Art or Temperance is related to Sagittarius, the opposing sign to Gemini or the Lovers. Aleister Crowley makes clear that the two cards are intimately related to each other, and should be studied together.
The Heirophant
Orion is also known as Horus who is of course tremendously important in the Golden Dawn and Thelemic systems. Horus, the Crowned and Conquering Child, is depicted on the Hierophant card in the midst of the Priestly figure, within a Pentagram. Bernadette Brady says
"Orion/Osiris was God. The constellation was not a symbol of God, it was god; god's physical place or appearance, in the same way that Sirius in Canis Major was the dwelling place of Isis... The effects of precession caused the god to slip lower and lower in the sky... The constellation Orion managed to rise for roughly two thousand years but the Egyptians knew that their immortal god was moving into the whirlpool taking the journey across the water as he slipped into the underworld.
To account for these observations, the Egyptians developed the concept of an immortal god dying and passing on his throne to his son. Now, one of the features of the constellation Orion is that it contains a bright red star called Betelgeuse, found in Orion's right shoulder. By coincidence, the constellation Taurus, the next constellation to herald the dawn of the equinox, also contains a bright red star, by the name of Aldebaran. So, as Osiris died and was replaced by the stars of Taurus, the natural "heir" to the solar throne appeared. This constellation ws therefore considered to be the son of Osiris, Horus. Osiris became the god of the underworld or afterlife, and Horus, his son, ruled the new world order... Many modern theologians/mythologists agree that this precessional movment of Orion is the source of the religious concept of an afterlife given to us by a god who dies. Osiris/Orion is a "prefiguring of Christ."
