The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth

by Wendy Doniger

This spirited, enlightened book offers a powerful antidote to the paralysis of postmodern intellectual life, showing how to make sense of, and learn from, the extraordinary diversity of cultures past and present.

Genres: Nonfiction, Mythology, Religion, Philosophy, Politics

254 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 30, 1998

Reviews

[Talia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd rate this at 4.5 stars if I could, but I can't. Dongier knows her stuff... I mean, she knows it COLD. That said, I was hoping for something more enlightening. Her work is largely a way to study comparative myth that avoids Campbell's methods in order to reach a more enriching and enlightening study. It's thorough and a great primer when studying. She brings in such works as fairy tale, the Bible, the Mahabharata and other Indian texts, Shakespeare, and other such works in order to get a more thorough understanding of mythology at large.

My biggest bone to pick is simply that most of the book is meant to "convert" those who find the study of comparative myth sloppy and juvenile work. For me (who's actually studying this stuff), a good chunk of the book felt a bit repetitive.

[Vikram X · Rating 3 out of 5]

Excellent scholarly work by Wendy - It takes a certain mind to find common patterns in various cultures ; from ancient Abrahamic religions to polytheistic ideologies like Hinduism separated by thousands of years , isolated geographically ; themes like ‘Virgin birth’ , ‘ Resurrection’ , natural disasters like floods etc. ; repeat themselves in the collective minds of those ancient people i.e. “The Spider” . The Implied Spider who weave these stories i.e. “The Web” connecting humanity through the ages .
These myths metamorphosis into different interpretations depending on the political scenario during that time and cementing into religious dogma’s. If one has ever a doubt of how much influence they exert in the 21st century – Imbeciles convinced by texts willing to embrace “martyrdom” for some “holy cause” should be a good starting point!
Enjoyed the book; however was labouring through certain parts due to my lack of familiarity on certain literary works and theology .

[Shanthanu · Rating 2 out of 5]

To begin with the central metaphor of "telescopes vs. microscopes" to contrast a bird's eye view vs. an in-depth study irked me a lot (since both those instruments actually narrow your attention to minutiae in your field of vision. Perhaps a telephoto vs wide-angle panoramic view would have been a better metaphor). That in itself, is just a minor problem that could be overlooked, but the entire book seems to be a bag of such metaphors without much content that I personally found interesting. This book seems to lie in that middle ground where it's neither actual comparative mythology comparing texts in detail, nor does it talk purely in the abstract about the problems of undertaking such studies.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was okay, but not great.

Wendy Doniger, a scholar of Hinduism and mythology, explores the ways in which myths, both religious and secular, are used to reflect and shape political and theological beliefs. Doniger argues that myths are not simply stories, but rather they are deeply embedded in culture and society, and they have the power to shape the way people think and act.

The book is divided into three main sections: "The Implied Spider," "Theology and Politics," and "The Spider in the Web." In the first section, Doniger examines the idea of the implied spider, which is a metaphor for the way myths are woven into the fabric of society (think of the world-wide-web and the web of language and meaning). She uses examples from various cultures and religions, including Hinduism, Christianity, and Judaism, to illustrate how myths are used to convey deep truths about the human condition.

In the second section, "Theology and Politics," Doniger explores the ways in which myths are used to shape political and theological beliefs. She argues that myths are not just stories, but they are also used as tools to gain and maintain power. She looks at the ways in which myths have been used to justify wars, oppression, and other forms of violence.

In the third section, "The Spider in the Web," Doniger examines the ways in which myths are used to create and maintain social order. She argues that myths are not just stories, but they are also used as tools to create and reinforce social norms and values. She looks at the ways in which myths have been used to justify social hierarchies, such as caste systems.

In summary, The Implied Spider is a book that explores the ways in which myths, both religious and secular, are used to reflect and shape political and theological beliefs. Doniger argues that myths are not just stories, but they are deeply embedded in culture and society and have the power to shape the way people think and act. She examines the ways in which myths have been used to gain and maintain power, create and maintain social order and justify social hierarchies.

The Importance of Reading Myth in Their Historical Context

In "The Implied Spider," Wendy Doniger argues that reading myth in its historical context is crucial for understanding its true meaning and significance. She argues that myths are deeply embedded in culture and society, and they are shaped by the historical and cultural context in which they were created.

One of Doniger's main arguments is that reading myth in its historical context allows us to understand the political and theological beliefs of the time in which it was created. Myths are not just stories, but they are also used as tools to shape political and theological beliefs. By understanding the historical context in which a myth was created, we can better understand how it was used to justify certain beliefs and actions.

Another argument that Doniger provides is that reading myth in its historical context allows us to understand the social and cultural norms and values of the time in which it was created. She argues that myths are not just stories, but they are also used as tools to create and reinforce social norms and values. By understanding the historical context in which a myth was created, we can better understand how it was used to justify certain social hierarchies and institutions.

Doniger also argues that reading myth in its historical context allows us to understand the different layers of meaning and symbolism in the myth. She argues that myths are not simple stories, but they are complex texts with multiple layers of meaning and symbolism. By understanding the historical context in which a myth was created, we can better understand the different layers of meaning and symbolism in the myth.

In summary, Wendy Doniger argues in "The Implied Spider" that reading myth in its historical context is crucial for understanding its true meaning and significance. She argues that myths are deeply embedded in culture and society, and they are shaped by the historical and cultural context in which they were created. Reading myth in its historical context allows us to understand the political and theological beliefs, social and cultural norms and values, and the different layers of meaning and symbolism in the myth.

Lenses of Myth

We might distinguish three levels of lenses in methods for the analysis of myths: the big view (the telescope) is the universalist view sought by Freud, Jung, Eliade; the middle view (the naked eye) is the view of contextualized cultural studies; and the small view (the microscope) is the focus on individual insight. In chapters 3 and 4 I will suggest two different, specific ways in which the big view and the small view can be combined in a scholar's work; here let me approach the more general question of scholarly focus (p. 9).

We are always in danger of drawing our own eye, for we depict our own vision of the world when we think we are depicting the world; often when we think we are studying an other we are really studying ourselves through the narrative of the other (p. 10).

To find our place in the world after we emerge from the magnified mythological vision, the world of the truly wide screen; to avoid getting the metaphysical equivalent of culture shock or a deep­sea diver's "bends" from coming up (or down) too fast, or from awakening too fast from that other world that we also enter sometimes when we dream but usually forget; and to find our car in a different place from the place where we parked it ­that's the trick, and myth is the key (p. 26).

Myths as Human Lenses

Sometimes the myth is formed not within a text, but rather in the intersection of our own lives with a text, a telescope that provides a political as well as a theological shock. Delbanco writes of the time when Roosevelt discovered Kierkgaard and understood, for the first time, the Nazi evil; it was "a moment at which this feeling of theatrical distance was obliterated by a shock of recognition." The double vision of a dead philosopher writing about the human condition in general and the immediate problem posed by totally new, totally specific human details produced this particular shock of recognition: Kierkegaard's general insights into human nature allowed Roosevelt to understand not that the Nazi evil had occurred (which, by then, he knew) but how it could have occurred (p. 26).

The Importance of Comparison

A rich body of evidence suggests that people compare things all the time, consciously or unconsciously, with useful results. Comparison, is, after all, the basis of our value systems; to the question, "Do you like this, want this?" the answer is often, "Compared with what?" Maurice Chevalier, when asked on his eightieth birthday, "How do you like being eighty, Monsieur Chevalier?" is reputed to have replied, "Considering the alternative, I like it very well." Hilaire Belloc, during the reign of Queen Victoria, remarked of the lurid details of the life of Queen Cleopatra, "How very unlike the domestic arrangements of our dear queen." Comparison is our way of making sense of difference (p. 30).

The Context

Attention to cultural specificity is part of the Hippocratic oath of historians of religions, including mythologists. The need for historical, in addition to cultural, specificity demands even more rigor, for it requires that the phenomenon (in my case, the myth) be contextualized not only in space (the bounds of the culture) but also in time (the particular moment in that culture when the myth was told). This demand is one that many historians of religions regard as even more essential to their work than the demand for cultural specificity.

Texts have contexts, are determined by their contexts; the context in which "the same" story is told may totally transform its meaning, like the glass of water in the old toast to the exiled kings: when James II and James III were in exile in France, their supporters in England, forced to toast the reigning kings whom they did not recognize, would raise their wine glasses and say, "To the king" ­­ but they would hold their wine glasses over their water glasses, so that they were in fact toasting "the king over the water." Exponents of the myth­and­ritual school argue that the ritual (the equivalent of the gesture with the wine glass) holds the key to the meaning of the myth (the equivalent of the words of the toast). With myths such as the story of Eden, which we will consider in chapter 4, the particular point in time and space in which the myth is told may serve, like the glass of water in the toast, to turn the meaning on its head. Even if we acknowledge that the myth in all of its widely distributed forms carries some cross­cultural human meaning, what it says about this basic meaning differs not only from culture to culture but within individual cultures. And when one culture borrows a plot or a theme from another, it becomes a different plot; it is not "the same" story anymore (p. 46-47).

Implied Spiders and the Politics of Individualism

As C. S. Lewis put it, "Myth is the isthmus which connects the peninsular world of thought with the vast continent we really belong to."

We share certain dispositions and predilections, and that's why coffee and tea catch on everywhere once they are brought from the Orient ­­ and why certain myths catch on when they are brought from the Orient. And certain questions recur in myths, which I would call religious questions: Why are we here? What happens to us when we die? Is there a God? How did men come to be different from women? Questions such as these, which are the driving force behind myths, have no empirical answers, and there is much disagreement about the nonempirical answers that have been advanced. Different cultures predispose their members to perceive shared experiences differently and to ask shared questions differently. Cross­cultural comparisons therefore have much to contribute to the insoluble chickenand­egg paradox of nature vs. nurture: if we suspect that certain things are culturally constructed but several different cultures construct them in the same way, that sameness strikes a blow on the side of nature (p. 59).

Accounting for mythological themes that appear in different cultures by assuming that they derive from certain shared human experiences frees us from the obligation of specifying a mechanism (such as C. G. Jung's collective unconscious, or, more respectably ­­ but no more convincingly ­historical diffusion) by which a universal theme might be perpetrated. All we need point out is that the same forms do appear in many different places, in response to human experiences that appear to be similar on at least one level, and that they take on different meanings to the extent that those experiences turn out to be dissimilar on other levels (p. 60).

When myths are told in a group or enacted in a ritual… (they become) communal… mythic communities thus form a kind of archaic self-help group, Paradoxes Anonymous (p. 60).
As Lévi­Strauss put it with uncharacteristic naïveté, "How are we going to explain the fact that myths throughout the world are so similar?"

And, more subtly: Mythic stories are, or seem, arbitrary, meaningless, absurd, yet nevertheless they seem to re­appear all over the world. A "fanciful" creation of the mind in one place would be unique ­­ you would not find the same creation in a completely different place. . . . If this represents a basic need for order in the human mind and since, after all, the human mind is only part of the universe, the need probably exists because there is some order in the universe and the universe is not a chaos.

If one did not know that the author of this remarkable credo was the great French structuralist, one might have mistaken him, in the dark, for Jung (p. 65).

Problems with some of the comparisonists

The most common arguments against extant works of comparison are that they lack rigor; that they advance unfalsifiable universalist hypotheses; and that they are politically unhealthy. I will take up these three challenges one by one. As for the lack of rigor, it is certainly true that there is a great deal of shoddy and superficial comparative work flying about…

The question of the politics of myth is more complex. There is, I think, some irony in the fact that the modern comparative study of religion was in large part designed in the pious hope of teaching our own people that "alien" religions were like "ours" in many ways. (By "ours" we usually meant Protestantism, as do scholars who mean, but never say, what is said by Mr Thwackum in Fielding Tom Jones: "When I mention religion, I mean the Christian religion; and not only the Christian religion, but the Protestant religion; and not only the Protestant religion, but the Church of England.") The hope was that if we learned about other religions, we would no longer hate and kill their followers; that "to know them is to love them” (p. 73).

Every telling of a story is an Interpretation

Every telling of a story is an interpretation, and it has been well argued that no text ever stood in the way of a good interpretation. As the historian William McNeill once remarked, "Really important texts are those susceptible of being richly and diversely misunderstood. An author can always aspire to that dignity."

Alan Dundes has pointed out "that interpretations of fairy tales and their appeal may reflect the same unconscious message as the very tales they purportedly claim to explicate." Roland Barthes has rightly insisted that in proposing one meaning, a subjective choice, one must not suppress other meanings; moreover: The meaning of a text can be nothing but the plurality of its [symbolic] systems, its infinite (circular) "transcribability": one system transcribes another, but reciprocally as well: with regard to the text, there is no "primary natural," "national," "mother" critical language: from the outset, as it is created, the text is multilingual.

But there are limits to the pluralism of interpretation. There is an old Jewish story about a rabbi who gave a particular interpretation of a text and said, "Isn't that right?"

"No," replied his opponent. "But there are seventy different interpretations of Torah," said the rabbi. "Yes," said the opponent, "but that is not one of them” (p. 173).

The Multiversity

People can also read other books about the cultures that we draw on for our comparative studies. We don't all have to do the same thing or do it in the same way; we can stand on the shoulders of giants, or as the case may be, pygmies, and they can stand on ours. From each her own. My argument here is for the academy, for multicultural, multidisciplinarian approaches. I would hope that the respect for "difference" (and pluralism, and diversity) that prevails in cultural studies would extend to the methodologies within the discipline of the history of religions, and indeed within the academy at large. I have argued against the present trend of studying only one cultural group ­­ Jews, blacks ­­or, as discussed in chapter 5, only one gender. Now I challenge the trend of limiting those who study any group to those within the group ­­ women studying women, Jews studying Jews ­­ a trend which, if followed slavishly, would automatically eliminate not only my tiny, precious world of cross­cultural comparison but the more general humanism of which it is a part. This is a trend fueled, in large part, by the high moral ground assumed by disciplines, such as feminism and cultural studies, that argue, or imply, that their subject matter (racism, sexism, the class struggle, genocide) has such devastating human consequences that there is no room for error or playfulness or the possibility of more than one answer.

When did scholarship cease to be a collective enterprise? When did interdisciplinary values cease to apply to comparative studies? Men did the "uni" in "university" come to refer to ideology? Perhaps we should rename our institutions multiversities (with overtones of multivocal multivalent, multicultural) or polyversities, if not diversities (let alone inversities ­­ for structuralists ­­ and perversities ­­ for our academic enemies). Whatever we call it, the academic world should never be a place where there is only one poker game in town. It should be a place where we can say, as in an ice cream parlor or hamburger joint: "Make me one with everything" (a phrase that can also be read as a pantheist prayer) (p. 174-175).

[Michael Capstack · Rating 3 out of 5]

The use of the microscope and telescope when discussing myth was very good, a nod to the individual experience and the universal concepts. The rest of the book not so much. It’s an academic book that seeks to downplay other academics’ works, specifically people that have had tremendous influence on mythology and psychology, it’s an odd thing to see. The book also makes extensive references of prior literary works, with no context. The assumption is that the reader has already read everything, there is no explanation of why that text is specifically being referenced. Forced myself to finish it.

[Nikki · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding read! So glad this was recommended to me to read before returning to my studies. It really put me in the right head space and opened my mind to a lot of information regarding comparative mythology. Definitely not a quick read, this book is very dense and rich. I'm already re-reading my notes and highlights as I continue to take it all in.
I must say, though, that at one point Doniger absolutely flipped my world upside down when she declared, "Campbell got it wrong." I've been reading Joseph Campbell for nearly a decade now, and all my post-undergraduate studies have been informed by his rich and vivid texts. I was further shocked later in the text when she defined Campbell as a "superficial comparatist." I've always known that not all mythologists have agreed with Campbell's assertions, but I've never read any negative commentary on him before. I found an article Doniger wrote about Campbell that I want to read; I want to understand her argument against him more, as it is very brief in this text. I may not agree with her, but it's always good to take in opposing viewpoints.

[Christine Shan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very well written scholarly text with great metaphors and analogies. It is a pleasure to read even without an extensive background in comparative mythology. The book elaborates on the merits and short-comings of comparing cultures through myth. The identification of similarities is not to simplify and extract the barebones of a culture, but to highlight the differences and the source of these differences. The interconnectivity and intertwinement of myths across cultures are like webs spun by a spider. The spider that we believe to have made theses intricate webs take material from the culture and human imagination. The latter half of the book becomes more scholastic and revolves around the opposition against and support for structuralism. There is also a section about women's voice in men's text and men's voice in women's text that was interesting.

[Lisa Findley · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I agree with many of Doniger's ideas about the necessity of myth to cross-cultural studies and the necessity of cross-cultural studies to a rich intellectual life and healthy political discussion, I found that I needed her to be using more concrete examples from the outset, rather than setting out all her theories for four chapters before using the final two chapters for a series of examples.

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can see how this would be called Eliade-lite. I wasn't a big fan of her exaggerated effort to include references to pop culture, but I did appreciate her idea of viewing the world with both a tele/microscope. I don't know that I find trying to do both practical on a scholarly level, as she seems to advocate for, but it certainly fits in with the postmodern destruction of meta-narratives.

[tara sh]

to read because of my interest in postmodern narrative and myth.