Spiders in culture

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There are many references to the spider in popular culture, folklore and symbolism. The spider symbolizes patience for its hunting with web traps, and mischief and malice for its poison and the slow death this causes. It symbolises possessiveness for its spinning its prey into a ball and taking it to its burrow (for burrowing species).

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[edit] In folklore

Some fictional and mythological characters are related to spiders:

  • Arachne, a weaver turned spider in Greek mythology.
  • Anansi is a famous character from African folklore, often depicted as a spider. Anansi is also known as:
    • Kwaku Ananse, the West African trickster.
    • Aunt Nancy (or Sister Nancy), a variant specifically found in some of the islands of the West Indies, but also in South America and the United States.
    • Bouki and Ti Malice, Anansi adventures in Haiti.
  • A famous legend, probably apocryphal. states that King Robert the Bruce of Scotland, when fighting the English, took refuge in a cave after a series of military failures. In the cave he saw a spider, which after repeatedly failing to weave its web, eventually succeeded due to perseverance. The moral of the story is "try, try and try again". Bruce eventually won Scotland's independence, and many places claim the cave, most notably Rathlin island.
  • Itsy Bitsy Spider is a well-known children's song.
  • Little Miss Muffet is a nursery rhyme involving a spider.
  • The Italian dance and music tarantella is related to the spider Lycosa taruntela, once thought to be venomous to humans, either as a folk remedy for bites or from its vigorous movements.

[edit] In literature

  • Charlotte's Web is a 1952 children's novel by E. B. White about an intelligent farm spider whose machinations save a young pig from the slaughterhouse.
  • The novel Web by John Wyndham is set on an island populated by spiders that have developed a co-operative social structure similar to ants.
  • Shelob is a giant spider-like creature in The Lord of the Rings.
  • Spider Boys (ISBN 0-688-12858-0) is a novel by Ming Cher. Written in the fractured but vibrant English of street kids in Singapore, the kids capture, nurture, sell, and send into combat the male jumping spiders indigenous to that clime.
  • Lolth is the spider queen in Dungeons & Dragons . Literature references appear in many Wizards of the Coast publications, many written by R.A. Salvatore.
  • In The Three Investigators series, one book is called The Mystery of the Silver Spider, where an entire kingdom's symbol is the spider, based on the legend that when the throne was attempted to be overthrown, the king hid in the cellar. Almost immediately after, a spider spun a web over the trap door, and the troops pursuing the king did not look in the cellar due to the web over the door misleading them into thinking it had not been touched in a long time. Due to the spider "saving his life", it became the symbol of the nation, and sacred. Spiders were never to be harmed, under penalty of death.
  • In James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl, Miss Spider is a friend who aids James on his journey to New York.
  • In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J. K. Rowling, Hagrid's pet Aragog is a giant spider, which then runs away to live in the forest.

[edit] In comics, manga, and cartoons

Spider Jerusalem is a futuristic gonzo journalist with an arachnid tatooed on his forehead in the comic series Transmetropolitan written by Warren Ellis

[edit] In motion pictures and television

  • Arachnophobia (named for arachnophobia, fear of spiders) is a 1990 movie directed by Frank Marshall, in which spiders multiply in large numbers and kill humans. The movie inspired a video game of the same name, developed by BlueSky Software and Disney for the DOS and Commodore 64 platforms.
  • Spider! is a 1998 feature film in which a giant spider comes from outer space through a shuttle which is sent on an outer space mission. Once the Spider arrives on Earth, it eats human beings, and uses their bodies to lay eggs, and more spiders come out of the human body.
  • Eight Legged Freaks is a 2002 feature film in which spiders get mutated because of harmful nuclear waste in mines and hence become over-sized creatures and hunt humans.
  • Kingdom of the Spiders (1977) is a feature film starring William Shatner as a veterinarian forced to deal with spiders after the spiders' normal food sources were destroyed by heavy use of pesticides.
  • In Jumanji (1995), one of the group of creatures which appears is a group of giant spiders.
  • A famous deleted scene from the 1933 version of King Kong is called "the spider pit scene". In this scene, several sailors are chased by King Kong onto a log lying over a fissure. Kong starts to shake the sailors off the log, until he finally drops the log down the fissure. The surviving sailors are eaten alive by giant bugs, including a spider. This scene was taken out of the film because it was too shocking. This scene has not yet been found, although many film experts are hunting for it. A similar scene was used in the 2005 remake, although it contained no spiders.
  • Spider is the stage name of an American songwriter and producer from Los Angeles.

[edit] Sports and games

  • Many techniques (fictional and otherwise) of ninja are named after spiders, usually due to involving spiderlike movement or other traits.
  • Spider is a popular solitaire card game.
  • There have been several sports teams named after spiders, including the Cleveland Spiders and San Francisco Spiders
  • Spider was the nickname of Vladimir Sabich, an Olympic skiier who was shot to death by his girlfriend
  • The University of Richmond is the only active athletic program to have the Spider as their mascot.
  • In the Philippines, Spider fighting is a popular sport among rural children.

[edit] Technology

  • A web spider or web crawler is an automated software agent that gathers pages from the World Wide Web

[edit] Music

  • Spider is a punk rock band from Long Beach, California
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