Spider Old Woman
Spider Old Woman, also called Grandmother Spider or Spider Woman, is the Kiowa grandmother-spider of the central origin cycle. When the Sun's wife is killed in her fall from the sky, the old spider-woman recovers the surviving boy, carries him to her lodge, and raises him as her grandson. She is his teacher and protector, and it is she who warns him never to throw his ring (gaming-wheel) upward toward his father the Sun. When he disregards the warning the ring falls on his head and divides him into the two Half Boys. She belongs to the broad Spider-Grandmother type shared with Southwestern and other Plains peoples, but in Kiowa narrative she is a specific, named foster-mother figure whose presence (alongside the Twin Heroes and Coyote) ethnographers have read as evidence of Southwestern affinities in Kiowa mythology.
Domains
- fostering and protection
- domestic wisdom
Powers
- to raise and protect the orphaned son of the Sun
Epithets
- Grandmother Spider
Relations
- foster mother of: Sun Boy