My friend Roselie Estey is a consummate herbalist, and as such gives considerable attention to natural matters transpiring beyond the ken of casual observers. Many years of investigating and studying the flow of life at the level of pokeweed and spotted wintergreen have brought her many encounters with the phenomenal as well as a rich and highly developed sense of the interconnectedness of all things, even those things which seemingly extend between visible and invisible realms of being. In this we are kindred spirits, often on the phone either exchanging mysteries chanced upon in our respective ramblings or trying to parse a puzzling sentence uttered in the complex speech of nature.

Recently she mentioned watching a large spider which had positioned itself in a corner of its immense and geometrically elaborate web and was rhythmically bouncing, shaking the web as if testing its tensile strength. We considered several explanations of this peculiar behavior, one of which was that the spider in fact might have been checking the reliability of its own construction.

I had also seen the same peculiar behavior in this species of arachnid and had wondered about it. At the time, I had made the easy assumption that it was in some way securing prey that had strayed into the web. But Roselie is a keen observer, and when she reported that no prey was struggling anywhere in the web, I remembered that my own spider had also been dancing on an empty web. So that night the question went unresolved and the conversation wandered on to other matters.

But the next evening as Spike and I were leaving the house to walk down to the creek, the westerly sun was at just the right position to cause a small glistening in the upper left corner of the doorway, its light subtly refracting in the delicate skeins of a web I would otherwise have missed. There was no spider, but the patterns of the web were unmistakably those of the species in question. As I stood there regarding it, a possible explanation for the spider’s odd dance occurred to me. Later I called Roselie.

At the core of all religion is a thing called mimesis, and it is the fundamental principle of magic. A Greek word, it is the root of mime, mimic, mimosis, etc. The plant mimosa is so named because it is what botanists call “sensitive” in that it reacts to stimuli with seemingly animal responses; it “imitates” them. And the process and applications of mimesis are very deeply ingrained in the human psyche. In every primitive culture, mimesis is practiced to connect the hunter’s consciousness to the consciousness of his quarry in ways that are favorable to the hunter. He imitates the animal in dance, ritual and art. Mimesis is used to evoke helpful spirits and ward off malign ones. When, in our places of worship, we use music, meditation and prayer to bring ourselves to a higher plane of awareness, we are in effect imitating the mind of divinity in order to enter and be transformed by it.

And so what I suggested to my friend was that mimesis is not unique to our own species. It is indeed a significant factor in the evolution of all life forms with myriad examples to be found in both flora and fauna. Insects without effective means of defense are often barely discernible from other species that are venomous or possessed of other attributes that deter predators. Certain orchids have evolved flowers that mimic the appearance of bees or wasps, and are pollinated by dust clinging to the bees or wasps who attempt copulation with the flower.

My conjecture, then, was that maybe the spider was straddling that very fine line between instinct and will. When this species of spider is tending the web, it is alerted to the capture of an insect by the vibrations of the insect’s struggle traveling through the strands of the web to the sensory hairs of the spider’s legs. Because the spider knows that the web shakes when food comes, could it not be engaged in mimetic magic, as a shaman would be, in order to invoke the food? Could it not be mimicking the conditions necessary to its survival in order to cause those conditions to occur?

It is not likely that the spider thinks this through in a linear kind of way, or that primitive people embrace mimetic ritual after analysis and abstract reasoning. Rather, it would seem to arise from something imbued on a genetic level. Who, for example, has not grown impatient in a busy restaurant and without thinking about it unfolded the napkin or repositioned the silverware with a vague and nearly subliminal awareness that this might bring the waiter?

Forty-four years ago, John Storer published his classic work of ecology literature, The Web of Life. It was one of the first major scientific studies of the interrelationships of all living things which clearly demonstrated that nothing which lives is truly independent. Storer’s premise was that all forms of life can be seen as coalescing into a single pattern, and in later works and in the works of those who studied him, consciousness and form also came to be viewed as inseparable. This was presaged in the forward to The Web of Life when Storer wrote:

“Life is a flowing stream, forever passing away and as constantly being renewed. The energy that brings us life is supplied from many different sources, most of them beyond our vision of experience.”

Extrapolating from that one fundamental insight, it is not at all difficult to perceive in the mysterious actions of the spider a truth, a pointed communication manifesting out of the flow of divinity: The energy that brings us awareness and intelligence and passion and love, as well as life, is supplied from many different sources, most of them beyond our vision of experience.

© 1997 J.W. Mozingo

~ J.W. Mozingo (Walker) is Unity's sexton. As a kid, he sometimes caught wolf spiders with which he frightened his classmates, telling them that the spiders were actually poisonous tarantulas. He believes it was for that indiscretion that many years later he was bitten by a brown recluse, the scar of which he still bears on his right calf.