Spiders and flies, interwoven etymologies, and an old story from West Africa.
TRANSCRIPT
Once long long ago, there were no stories in the world, but all of the stories we know today belonged to the sky god, Nyame. However, the spider, Anansi, wanted to have the sky god’s stories, so he went to Nyame to inquire about what price he would ask in order to pass over his stories. The sky god laughs at the feeble looking spider and asserts that not even the great kingdoms in the land could afford the price of his stories. But Anansi insists that he could afford the price if Nyame would only name it. And so Nyame asked for Anansi to bring him four of the most dangerous and elusive creatures of the jungle, certain that Anansi would not be successful in capturing them.
So begins an old origin story from West Africa. An origin story, of course, explains how something came to be in the world as we know it. And when I hear an origin story like this one, I imagine that some afternoon long ago, or maybe it was in the evening sitting around a fire, a child asked “Why?”... Why do snakes not have legs? Why does the moon change its shape? … And prompted by the question, a clever adult spins a fantastical story as an explanation to amuse the child’s curiosity. Anasi is a very well-known character in West African stories. He is a trickster character depicted as an anthropomorphized spider or as a man with spider-like qualities. Because he takes center stage in so many tales, I imagine that the question that prompted this story might have been, “Why are there so many stories about Anansi?” or “Why do we call our stories Spider Stories?”, which is the collective name given to the stories of Anansi.
Of course, Anansi - along with his wife - did devise and execute ways of catching each of the creatures for which Nyame had asked. For example, Anansi’s wife, Aso, suggested he pretend to have an argument with her about how long the python is within earshot of the python. Hearing the argument and wanting to prove his length, the python voluntarily lays down alongside a palm branch, allowing Anansi to quickly tie him to the branch with vine creeper. Later, Anansi pretends it is raining on a hornets nest, and he offers the hornets shelter inside his calabash, which he quickly stops up so that he might easily transport the hornets to Nyame. When Nyame has received each of the creatures for which he had asked, he praises Anansi, who is then celebrated by all the people of the sky kingdom. Nyame, of course, hands over his golden box of stories to Anansi, which is, of course, why the stories became known as Spider Stories.
We often think of origin stories as simply being a thing of fantasy and folklore, but if we look around our world today, we can see that we are surrounded by living attempts at origin stories being formulated in real time: scientific inquiry, the study of history and economics, the practice of journalism… they are all attempts at “getting to the bottom of things”, uncovering causal relationships between various phenomena or circumstances and their catalysts or beginnings.
We even have origin stories for our words in our study of etymology, and the etymology of the word story tells us that the word began as a shortening of the word history, as in a factual account of actual events. But of course, our stories also have a mythic, symbolic quality; and there was once a time (and perhaps this is still the case) when our histories and our mythologies were woven into one.
And just as we have different types of stories, so we also have different meanings of the word story; the word story also refers, of course, to any given level of a building with multiple floors. The etymology of this “second” meaning has been highly debated, but there are a few strong possibilities (and who is to say there couldn’t be more than one!). One such origin exists in the medieval practice of installing tall painted windows on each floor of a building, each depicting a narrative… in other words, the windows formed different layers, or different levels, of stories.
Another possible origin of the word story as the floor of a building comes from an Old French word meaning to build, furnish, or replenish, because the different floors of a building were used for storage of different types of furnishings. This old word is connected to the ideas of renewal and restoration. With these coinciding and intermingling origins and uses of the word, we have a linguistic documentation of how stories can be storehouses of knowledge and wisdom, and also how we can read a story on multiple layers, just like the multiple floors of a building.
Of course, in the tale from west Africa, the stories themselves exist on different levels, beginning in the sky and then eventually making their way down to the earth (and of course, while we don’t have it in this particular tale, there are also many stories that deal with the lower level of the underworld). But more than just different levels within a story, we can also see different layers to a narrative, reading it both factually and symbolically. And, like that Old French word I mentioned, when we learn to read a story in different layers, we find that it can bring renewal and restoration to the meaning, and purpose, and energy in our lives.
All this reminds me of a personal experience that I think I’ll share as an example. Many years ago, I took a cross country trip as a very intentional attempt to relieve a great emotional difficulty I was undergoing. The trip proved to be a turning point in my life in more ways than one, and because I thought it made for a good story I began to write it down as a memoir; and twelve years later I’m finally seeing the possibility of finishing the story somewhere on the horizon.
As a history, there are, of course, many many events that are included in my account of the weeks that I was on the road and in Seattle and its surrounding areas (which is where my travels came to rest before I returned home again). Two of those events happen to be the writing of a song about two months before I left on the trip (and the song made several allusions to the idea of going west, since I had been thinking about it quite a bit)... and the second event I’m bring up was watching the sunset over the Pacific Ocean while camping on a beach in the wilderness of the Olympic Peninsula.
Now, both of these events were emotionally significant at the time they happened, so there is another layer of the story: the emotional layer. And we’ve already talked about the historic layer… in other words, the chronology of when they happened in my life. But it wasn’t until I began piecing together this story as a memoir that I uncovered how these two events were directly connected on a mythic level. When I wrote the song, I was experiencing what felt like the fullness of the emotional pain of that period in my life. The sunset was a big deal for me - what Abram Maslow described as a peak experience - and in many ways, that experience provided a remedy for the pain I had been feeling during the previous several months.
As I was putting together the story, I was looking for a way to express the magnitude of the sunset experience, and that search seemed to take me to the idea that the whole purpose of the trip was for me to end up on that beach on one of the only days that year that the sky was clear enough to see the sun sink below the horizon. For anyone familiar with Carl Jung’s psychology, it probably comes as no surprise that a psychological or emotional symptom (specifically, the emotional difficulty I was having) would lead to some type of medicinal experience that might be healing or even transformational. But here’s the part that did surprise me: Months before I left for Seattle, and long before camping on the beach was even an idea I had considered, I wrote the song I mentioned, and the last few lines of that song go like this:
The road will take me with it
Always trapped yet always free
My wheels spinning towards the sunlight
Until it sinks below the sea
With this all having been my own lived experience, and having not uncovered this connection until many years later, I found that to be pretty uncanny. Now, I imagine one response to all this that a person might have is, “So what? That happened years ago. Why does it matter now?” And to that, I would say that, in addition to galvanizing the significance of my own biography, the process of reading that biography through a mythic lens also helped to highlight how the lessons I learned during the time about which I was writing, also happened to be relevant during the time I was writing.
And that takes me back to the child sitting around the campfire asking “Why?”, as well as the scientists and the journalists and the economists who are also all asking “Why?”. It seems that, as human beings, we are hardwired to ask that question. And as we look at our own lives and ask why, it might be tempting to do so with a sense of desperation or victimhood - like, “Why did this happen to me?”. To be clear, there are certainly times in which we are legitimately victimized. But reclaiming our sense of personal power - as well as our sense of purpose and meaning in life - comes from asking why with a sense of curiosity, as in, “Where is this leading me? What is this pointing to?”. Asking this sort of why gives us a vision towards a future characterized by an expansion of life and a greater wholeness of being, as well as a part to play in making that future a reality.
I like how the West African stories are called spider stories. It suggests the ways that stories are woven together - and how they connect different aspects of life - the way a spider’s web is woven together with strands attached to different objects or different points along a tree branch or other structure. If we do not learn to navigate the stories in our lives - including reading them on different levels and layers - we may be like flies who get caught in the stories of our lives as perpetual victims. When we become skillful at navigating our stories, we may be like the spider who is at home upon her web; and instead of getting caught ourselves, the web helps us to capture greater meaning in life that may serve as spiritual food, fueling our creativity and passion for life.
One of the goals of the MeadowSong Podcast is to inspire listeners to find greater meaning in their own lives by discovering the symbolic, mythic layer in their own biographies. Before the music for today’s episode, I thought I would also mention that I am also working 1:1 with individuals who would like a companion or a guide as they explore the directions in which their experiences and dreams and any other life-stories might be pointing. You can find about more about working together by going to meadowsongpodcast.com, clicking on “Connect,” and scrolling down to where it says “Work With Lee.”
Photo by Alex Radelich on Unsplash