Spider

Anansi is the best-documented spider in world tradition, and the documentation matters because he is frequently reduced to a generic trickster.

Anansi, Kwaku Ananse, belongs to the Akan peoples of what is now Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire, and the stories are anansesem, spider tales, a named genre with conventions of performance. The foundational story is an acquisition: Anansi buys the stories of the sky god Nyame at a price meant to be impossible, capturing the python, the hornets and the leopard by trickery, and thereafter all stories belong to him. That is why the genre carries his name.

He is small, weak and physically unimpressive, and he wins by wit against the strong. He also frequently loses, is exposed as greedy, and is punished; the tales are not straightforwardly celebratory, and several explain the origin of a defect in the world through his failure.

The Atlantic crossing is the crucial part of the history. Anansi travelled with enslaved Akan people to the Caribbean and the Americas, becoming Anancy in Jamaica, Nancy or Aunt Nancy in the Sea Islands and parts of the American South, Kompe Anansi in Suriname and Curacao. In those contexts the small clever figure who defeats the powerful acquired an obvious additional charge, and the survival of the cycle through enslavement is one of the clearest documented continuities between West African and Afro-diasporic culture. Jamaican Anancy stories were collected in quantity from the nineteenth century, and Anansi remains a living figure in Caribbean literature and children's publishing rather than a museum piece.

Where spiders are creators, it is almost always because of the web, and the traditions involved are specific enough that generalising them does damage.

Hopi. Kokyangwuti, Spider Grandmother, is a creator figure who in Hopi emergence accounts assists in the making of people and guides them upward through the worlds. She is small, lives underground, and gives counsel. She belongs to Hopi tradition and to the particular clans and ceremonies that hold those accounts.

Dine. Na'ashjeii Asdzaa, Spider Woman, taught the Dine to weave, the loom itself is traditionally understood as her gift, and appears in the Hero Twins narratives as a helper who gives the twins the means to survive their father's tests. Weavers have historically left an intentional flaw or a small opening in a rug, a practice explained in relation to her. Spider Woman Rock in Canyon de Chelly is named for her.

These two are not the same figure and neither is a pan-Indian archetype. Popular writing that merges them into a single Native American Spider Grandmother is doing exactly what Indigenous scholars object to.

Egypt. Neith, a very ancient goddess of Sais associated with weaving and with war, is sometimes connected to the spider through the weaving attribute; the connection is an interpretation rather than an Egyptian statement.

Greece. Ovid's Metamorphoses gives Arachne, the Lydian weaver who challenges Athena, produces a tapestry depicting the crimes of the gods, and is beaten and transformed into a spider to weave forever. It is a story about presumption and about the danger of being right in public.

Japan. The jorogumo is a spider that takes the form of a woman and devours those it lures, a yokai rather than a deity.