Minerva descends from Olympus to confront Arachne, a famous weaver who has insulted her authority. Disguising herself as (simulat) an old woman, she at first implores the young mortal to humble herself and ask for forgiveness. But Arachne refuses, doubling down on her initial challenge to the deity of wisdom and weaving and war: “let her but strive with me.” Incensed, the goddess finally throws aside her disguise, and the two enter into a contest. Minerva, so the story goes, weaves a stunning tapestry with the twelve Olympians adorning its center, bordered by a wreath of olive branches that frames scenes of mortal failure. Arachne’s tapestry, on the other hand, depicts scenes of celestial deception—of gods simulating mortals and animals, cheating and tricking, giving false gifts. Minerva’s work is beautiful indeed, but not even Envy can find fault with Arachne’s tapestry. Naturally, then, the jealous goddess destroys it.
Arachne cannot go on living after this. So she hangs herself. But rather than allow her to die, Minerva transforms her, with a curse and a melancholy drug (tristi medicamine), into a spider.
As she hung, Pallas lifted her in pity, and said: “Live on, indeed, wicked girl, but hang thou still; and let this same doom of punishment (that thou mayst fear for future times as well) be declared upon thy race, even to remote posterity.”
Ovid, Metamorphoses. Translated by Frank Justus Miller.
Even today the descendants of Arachne continue to spin her tapestry, unseen at the margins of the human world, in forests, or basements, or catacombs.
But if Arachne lost for winning this contest, she also won for losing it: the instant that Minerva cast her spell and destroyed her opponent’s work, the scenes of treachery and deceit depicted upon it realized themselves in the world, leaving their borders of ivy and flowers and entangling the immortal goddess in their silk. Arachne’s identity was unraveled with her tapestry, but the destruction of her picture simultaneously wove life into its image, confirming not only its superior beauty but also its truth. Ovid’s myth in this way goes beyond any simple commentary on hubris and punishment, and presents a complex reflection on representation itself: Arachne’s textile or text (from texere, “to weave”) reaches the zenith of its meaning only at the moment it is ruptured and condemned to be forever unreadable.
Nearly two millennia later, many of the continental thinkers of textuality still found themselves working through this writing of spiders. Roland Barthes, for example, famously described his own “Théorie du texte” as a “hyphology” (from the Greek for what is woven); Jacques Derrida placed spider webs next to the intricate lacework of Mallarmé; Lacan at one point even mentioned the spider’s weaving as a prototype of the symbolic. Though we can no longer interpret the texts that Arachne spins in darkness, we still find ourselves tangled up in the endless threads and dissimulations of her curse, which ensnares us each time we write, binding us all the more for thinking we have broken it. To those who believe themselves wise or divine enough to struggle free, she repeats her challenge, happy to begin again: certetis mecum, she says—come and strive with me.
