Arachne, Ancient Goddess of the Zodiac

The following is taken from pages 160-162 of ‘The Secret Life of Humans’

What James Vogh seems to have missed in his otherwise excellent investigation [The Thirteenth Zodiac] is the overwhelming psychological significance of the spider’s web itself. It is a key that unlocks many further mysteries. The real spider makes its web by first establishing the straight lines radiating from a central point. Then from that central point it moves in a spiral towards the outer edge, laying down a widely-spaced cross-thread as it goes. But when it reaches the outer edge it turns, and now spirals inwards laying the narrow-spaced cross-thread of the finished web. As it goes it gathers up the original outward moving spiral cord, which was only a kind of structural sketch or guide.

Surely in these two acts of the spider we have the explanation of the ancient inward and outward spiral dance of the maze and labyrinth? Sometimes the ancient dancers laid out and gathered up a thread – but there is a mass of confirmatory testimony in legend also. So when Theseus was condemned by King Minos to be shut in the labyrinth with the dreaded Minotaur, he was secretly given a ball of thread by Ariadne (the daughter of MInos, who had fallen in love with Theseus) so that he could find his way out again.

This ruse of the ball of thread had been suggested to Ariadne by Daedalus. Minos now wished to kill Daedalus, who fled. Minos beleived that Daedalus was in hiding at the court of King Cocalus, so he went to Cocalus with a puzzle. Here is a snail shell and a thread, he said to Cocalus. How can the shell be threaded without breaking it? Minos knew that Cocalus would take the riddle to Daedalus, which he then did. Daedalus’ solution was to tie the thread to an ant, which then followed the path of the spiral shell to the end and back again.

It was Daedalus also who procured the bull which made love to Pasiphae, the wife of Minos, a union which produced the bull-headed monster the Minotaur. Pasiphae is the Moon Goddess – and she is also the mother of Ariadne. Ariadne therefore also represents the Moon. In turn, some scholars consider that Ariadne and Arachne are one and the same. But that both of them are much involved with threads and labyrinths and weaving is in any case not in doubt.

What we have taken the briefest of looks at here is a mass of evidence which points again and again to conclusive but secret links between labyrinths, mazes, spirals, threads, spiders and moons.

But there is much more in these secrets than traditional scholars have realised. James Vogh has made the following interesting suggestion. The rightful place of Arachne, the Spider Goddess and the missing thirteenth sign of the zodiac, is between Taurus the Bull and Gemini the Twins on the conventional twelve-sign zodiac. (On Vogh’s revised zodiac Arachne’s house extends from 16 May to 13 June.) Vogh proposes that the word ‘Minotaur’ is a form of an anagram between ‘geMINi’ and ‘TAURus’. The fact that the order o fthe two houses on the zodiac are reversed in the anagram is no problem. Such reversals, plays on words, use of initial letters only of words in sentences to spell out meanings, and so on and so on, are absolute commonplaces in the writings and sayings of kabbalists, mystics and adepts down the ages. They were always trying to preserve and communicate the ancient truths for those who had eyes to see, while hiding them from the gaze of the stupid or uninitiated.

The central picture of the synagogue mosaic at Beth Alpha is an excellent pictorial example of such a message with hidden meaning. She has the crescent moon at her left side (and the crescent moon is the most powerful moon of all – see Guardians of the Ancient Wisdom). Her head-dress contains thirteen items. She rules the four seasons (or the four elements perhaps – earth, air, fire and water) and the eight planets (?) with reins or threads – and we have yet to consider the full implications of the thread. This is, in fact, Arachne the Spider Goddess, the ancient, true ruler of the universe.

As for the Minotaur, living at the centre of the labyrinth he therefore symbolises the central mystery, and as the son of the Moon is also a disguised reference to her. I myself also think the Minotaur is a disguised reference to the cerebellum (the heavily folded and creased cerebellum is more of a labyrinth even than a walnut). So the Minotaur is the ‘cerebellum-headed’ human being. And since a birth in Arachne is par excellence the sign of the psychic individual (see below), the various interconnections are perfect.

But let us come back for the moment  to the spider web itself, the most important symbol of all. I hope we have made it amply clear that all labyrinths and mazes are symbolic webs. The straight, radial lines of the spider’s web are the same straight lines of logical rational thought: and also at the same time the rays of the sun, the symbol of waking consciousness. The spiral line of the web is the symbol of intuitive, unconscious thought, the sideways oblique approach of the mystical mind – ‘knight’s move’ thinking, as it has been called, in an image taken from chess. Such oblique, non-linear thought operates above all at night in dreams, and the Moon herself is likewise a symbol of unconscious thought. Scientific evidence is accumulating, by the way, that the phases of the Moon directly relate to amount and vividness of dreaming, an ancient belief in any case.

But matters do not end even here. When the spider is making its second and final spiral, it makes the thread sticky. But it would now itself stick to its own web. So the spider plucks its web, and the sticky substance arranges itself into droplets at the intervals dictated by the laws of harmonic vibration. Now the spider can run over the web, touching only the non-sticky parts.

Spiders communicate in a complex way with their mates and their young by twanging different harmonics on the web. The mother talks to her children in this way: ‘stay in the nest, come and eat, remain motionless where you are on the web – there is danger’ and so on. We need not seriously doubt that the ancient meditators observed and understood all this.

In ancient Greece there was the belief that the planets were arranged in distance from the sun according to the laws of harmonics – and this is very nearly, if not quite true. The harmonies of the musical scale and the relative positions of the planets were thought to be expressions of the same basic laws of vibration in the universe – hence the phrase ‘the music of the spheres’. These ideas are no doubt far older than the Greeks.

Now we can see how the ancients pieced everything together in their vision of the universe. (Let us not overlook here that the central motto was ‘as above, so below’. What goes on in the heavens is the same as goes on below.)

The Sun is the centre of the web and his straight rays hold the planets in position. But the Moon, with her erratic path, is the spider, whom the web serves. And we, mankind, are the children of the spider – hence the umbilical cord of the new born baby. This is, again, the spider thread which connects the baby to the centre of the labyrinthine womb. (And trees were said to be the umbilical cord which joined the Earth to the sky.)

But many of the Moon’s threads are invisible. The thread which draws up the tides is invisible – it is magnetism. The thread which draws the floating lodestone to the north is invisible – it is magnetism.

From here it is but one more short step to the ‘web of fate’ and the ‘thread of life’ which the Fates (or the Spinners as they are also called) cut when we die.

The Beth Alpha Zodiac

The following is taken from pages 157-158 of ‘The Secret Life of Humans’.

The history of stellar astrology

Astrology has its roots far, far back in mankind’s past. But the ‘ancient’ art of it practised to day is only some three thousand years old at most. The evidence is that still further back the rules and the theoretical base were once very different.

Proof is steadily accumulating in all areas of religious and philosophical inquiry that where the number twelve, and the Sun, rules in historical times, the number thirteen and the Moon ruled before it. There were, for instance, originally thirteen tribes of Israel, not twelve; and an old English ballad vehemently challenges the then current orthodoxy; ‘But how many monthes be in the yeare? There are thirteen I say; the midsummer moon is the merryest of all, next to the merry month of May.’ In short, it looks very much as if the zodiac once had thirteen divisions, which were considered to be governed by the Moon. The position is entirely logical, for there are thirteen moons in every year, and every lunar calendar has thirteen divisions.

James Vogh has performed some excellent detective work on this last issue in his book The Thirteenth Zodiac, following trails blazed by such eminent writers as Robert Graves (The White Goddess). James Vogh offers us evidence of a very solid kind. Gnostic Jews built a synagogue at Beth Alpha in the Jezreel valley in AD 520. Inlaid into the floor is a zodiac – at first glance a conventional twelve-division zodiac, shown in Figure 9. But at second look there are immediate inconsistencies. Even with the unaided eye, the twelve divisions can be seen to be unequal. Measurement confirms the impression. Virgo, for instance, is forty percent larger than it should be. Furthermore, the four seasons around the outside of the circle are both irregularly and incorrectly placed in relation to the signs they govern.

Figure 9 Zodiac from Beth Alpha in the Jezreel valley.

 

As Vogh demonstrates, this zodiac can be made fully symmetrical by converting the twelve signs to thirteen. Six of the existing signs are already, in any case, one-thirteenth each of the full circle. It is clear tha this zodiac was originally designed to be one of thirteen divisions. what is not quite clear is whether the original plan was abandoned in the course of construction, in response to some countermand, or whether the design was altered as some date subsequent to completion.

The central figure of the zodiac is also of great interest. It shows a goddess driving a very odd kind of chariot. The head-dress of this female figure has six panels divided by seven rays, a total of thirteen. To her left is the crescent moon. The four horses’ heads are, presumably, again the four seasons (though Vogh thinks these heads were also added later). Then below these are eight – what? – wheels, legs or whatever.

James Vogh produces much evidence in his book to show that these eight objects present the eight legs of a spider – and we come to that matter in a moment. But an interesting side question here is whether these objects also represent eight planets. The ancients are traditionally believed to have known of seven planets, and we ourselves only discovered the eighth planet (Neptune) in 1846. Subsequently, literally by accident, Pluto, the  ninth planet, was discovered as recently as 1930.

James Vogh’s case is that the purged and hidden thirteenth sign of the old zodiac was Arachne the Spider Goddess, also synonymous with the Moon herself. She was likewise the overall ruler of the total zodiac, as well as of the universe and everything in it. Other ancient stone-carved thirteen-zodiacs have been found, incidentally, among the Australian Aborigines and the North American Indians.