Of Spiders

[smokingboot]

...I began with a darkness full of multicoloured stars. Around me rose high dark arches, or the undersides of giant spiders, but with no dread to that idea...the creations of cathedrals and those of spiders seemed each as great as the other, and the idea that I was seeing the architects of mind or the universe interested me. I had bumped into the heavens of the freemasons without realising it. Why did I not see the brilliant colours the others saw? Well I have been very depressed recently, so that might have been it. Still, these distant gems in the dark were many and all around me. And then my experience truly began.

This is a quote of mine from an entry here a few years back, after an ayahuasca ritual. I often wondered what it meant. Just recently met a scholar who told me of the aztec belief that at the end of days it will be giant spider spirits who devour all. 'The spiders will end it,'he said, 'Maybe you saw where they rest and wait until that time.'

I recalled Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell;

By degrees we beheld the infinite Abyss, fiery as the smoke of a burning city; beneath us at an immense distance, was the sun, black but shining; round it were fiery tracks on which revolv'd vast spiders, crawling after their prey; which flew, or rather swum, in the infinite deep, in the most terrific shapes of animals sprung from corruption; & the air was full of them, & seem'd composed of them: these are Devils, and are called Powers of the air. I now asked my companion which was my eternal lot? he said, 'between the black & white spiders.'

Somewhere in this lies an excellent story. At least, I hope it's a story...

As you see, these Spring mornings find me remarkably chipper.