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 SpiderAlice Marriott and Carol K. Rachlin, 'American Indian Mythology' (Thomas Y. Crowell, 1968) (secondary)

Relations

• foster mother of: Sun BoySpider Old Woman takes in the surviving infant son of the Sun and raises him as her own grandchild, becoming his foster-mother and counsellor.Elsie Clews Parsons, 'Kiowa Tales', Memoirs of the American Folk-Lore Society, vol. 22 (G. E. Stechert, 1929) (secondary)

Sources

• Spider Old Woman (Grandmother Spider) is the Kiowa grandmother-spider who fosters the orphaned son of the Sun and counsels him before he splits into the twin heroes.: Elsie Clews Parsons, 'Kiowa Tales', Memoirs of the American Folk-Lore Society, vol. 22 (G. E. Stechert, 1929) (secondary); Alice Marriott and Carol K. Rachlin, 'American Indian Mythology' (Thomas Y. Crowell, 1968) (secondary)