Arachne

“Nor could Arachne take such punishment:
She'd rather hang herself than bow her head.”

Becoming an arachnid is not a choice: becoming an arachnid is something that happens to you. You become an arachnid whenever the truth of who you are puts you in direct conflict with someone with power over you.

In later renditions of the myth about the girl from Colophon, Ovid, I think, tried to embroider some sort of moralizing nonsense about how Arachne depicted disrespectful and naughty scenes of various gods' infidelity and that this somehow justified her treatment at the hands of Pallas Athene. That's bullshit. Arachne did not merit punishment because she was rude. Arachne was punished because she was very good. But I would believe that Arachne wove those kinds of stories into her tapestry: I get pissed off too when I feel trapped in a lose-lose situation. If she won, she failed: her true self was unacceptable. If she failed, she failed: she didn't show her true self at all. And I bet Athena didn't give her the option to bow out of the competition. I mean, what choice did she have at that point? She had said she was a better weaver than Athena.

Because she was a better weaver than Athena.

I suppose that's boastful, but it's also true. Likewise, we become arachnids the first time we say something true, and we're punished for it. We may not even remember the first time this happened, though we may. As we grow, we learn that living in this world requires making compromises with others in order to survive. We also learn that if we don't play by the rules of the game, we will be punished; and that, conversely, if we play by the rules of the game, then we will be rewarded. These are two different lessons, but we often think they're the same thing. Conformity and compromise are actually distinct, but for some reason have become practically blurred. And yes, there's a conspiracy behind the mechanism that makes this so.

To be an arachnid is to reject conformity and embrace compromise. It is not only to participate in an evolving, contentious dialectic with the received truths of the world that deny our own, but also to maintain harmony and achieve balance with them. Arachne is a weaver still, though more microscopically, and her loom can no longer be destroyed: she is now her own loom and can set up shop anywhere three-dimensional. Likewise, there is no longer a need to fall on our swords or cut off the ears of messengers. We can say what we need to say and move on. If we hit a wall, we can walk around it or walk away from it, though limping.

"So you shall live to swing, to live now and forever,
Even to the last hanging creature of your kind."