Spiders are ruled by the sign Cancer. I didn’t read that in a book, I worked it out for myself. Cancer is a territorial, home-loving sign, and spiders like to mark out and defend their territory. And of course in many cases spiders are on best form in the centre of their web.
The average Cancerian realises that they live in a dangerous world, and they take all reasonable precautions. If they’re human Cancerians, they have good insurance policies and the doors on their houses are triple-bolted. If they’re spiders (and arguably all spiders are Cancerians, regardless of their star sign) they don’t walk around in open spaces, and when they’re climbing up and down walls they stick to the corners and the edges.
Then there’s the fear factor. Cancerians can be scary, especially if they feel threatened. They have a weaponry that isn’t immediately obvious, and if you cross the line they can inflict serious damage. In the case of spiders, they’re all poisonous, and the larger spiders, when cornered, can give you a very real bite.
Yet for some reason humans have a fear of spiders that goes beyond rationality. In today’s Daily Mail there was an article about a man who wanted to ‘rescue’ his wife from a spider, that she’d found in their bathroom. He cornered it behind the lavatory bowl, before spraying it with an aerosol can – and he then used the illumination from a cigarette lighter to see if he’d killed it, which ignited the aerosol cloud. As a result he got burns on his hands.
It’s said that killing a spider brings seven years of bad luck, though in this case it was instant Karma. He killed, or attempted to kill, a spider, and immediately suffered the consequences.
Which brings me to the subject of my own arachnophobia. On a scale of zero to ten my arachnophobia level is probably seven. I can pick up very small spiders, and if at night I see a largish spider on the bedroom wall I can just about get to sleep. However I get nervous when isolating and removing big house spiders. I don’t want to touch them, but I also don’t want to kill them either.
This is strange, given my attitude to wasps. I am not afraid of wasps, even though in the past I have been stung by them. I am indeed quite happy to pick up a live wasp in a piece of tissue, something I’d never do with a big spider.
Of course I live in Europe, not the US or Australia. The spiders I come across are pretty harmless, and if I was dealing with black widows or funnel webs it would probably be quite reasonable to be terrified. So there is an environmental context to my discussion.
However in a European context there is something disturbing about killing something just because you’re afraid of it.
When I see a big spider on my wall, the easy option is to kill it, and so eradicate the object of my terror. I don’t kill it for a number of reasons. There’s a simple matter of ahimsa, the Hindu doctrine of not harming any living creature. Especially a living creature that can’t harm me, and that also has a role to play in the ecosystem – for example by keeping at bay crop-destroying and disease-spreading insects.
From a Karmic point of view, there seems to be something doubly wrong about killing a spider. It’s not just about ahimsa, it’s also about not confronting one’s fears. If you kill a spider the root cause of one’s fear doesn’t go away, and in terms of spiritual development you stay in the same place, or even go backwards. I think, in our heart of hearts, that we’re all aware of this, and this is why killing a spider is associated with bad luck.
Talking about superstition, I came across this French saying:
Araignée du matin–chagrin;
Araignée du midi–plaisir;
Araignée du soir–espoir
If you see a spider in the morning it’s sorrow, in the afternoon pleasure, in the evening hope. But whenever you see a spider, be nice to it!
Copyright © 2010 Archie Dunlop
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