The Spider & The Yew

Nestled within the cracks, crevices, splits and shards of the Yew’s bark are spiders, fitting companions for the tree of eternity. For arachnids have existed on earth an astonishing 400 million years in their various evolutionary forms (1) and have colonised every continent apart from Antarctica. Their capacity of adaptability and resilience are closely matched by the yew, whose

family Taxus has survived for over 200 million years according to fossil records. Both the Yew and arachnids are part of the exclusive 0.1% club of flora and fauna which have survived since before the dinosaurs roamed these lands.(2) Both the yew and the spider share a lineage which reaches far beyond fathomable time. They originate in mythology.

Sit beneath a yew on a sunny day and the luminous threads of orb-weaving silk dancing throughout the canopy emerge from the unseen, weaving an overlay of web upon the interlacing yew needles. Light glancing from the myriad delicate pathways which the spider uses to both travel and hunt. This interplay between overt and occult, the denseness of the tree within and throughout this almost invisible cobweb is the concomitant signature of spider and yew. One is an expression of the other and vice versa, they live in symbiotic reflection, holding each other in a deathly embrace.

There is a darkness which surrounds them both, a darkness which we have been taught to fear and one which perhaps we would be wise to know better because it is from the shadows that all life emerges. The feminine void of pure potentiality. It is the dark goddess offering opportunity as well as limitation. There is a death and rebirth theme emerging from our contemplation of yew and spider, one stands sentinel over the entombed in graveyards and the other spins life into being.

The yew seems to absorb the light, sometimes turning it’s leaves away from the sun, rendering these powerful trees invisible to some or unnoticeable even to those who revere them. It’s spirit concerns itself mainly with the inner worlds, the land of the dead and the higher realms of transcendence, spanning great eons of time and layers of consciousness. The yin opposed to the yang of spider who draws elemental forces out to the external to create the most magical art. Both powers flowing between each other in a reciprocal dance and mutual appreciation.

As a portal to the Otherworld, the yew stands sentinel between realms, holding the threshold to the land of the ancestors, the dominion of the dead. The spider spins it’s own portal of death, sitting in patient anticipation of passing flies. Both are guardians of their own gateways and both have the potential to send you through, their poisons acting as catalysts of change, shakers of worlds. Poison in all its forms exposes us to the ‘other’, that which is not us, death which is not us while alive, states of consciousness altered from the mundane. Poison breaks the spells we cast upon ourselves and reveals the paradoxical nature of life, for they can be used for both good or ill. Sit under a yew tree long enough and its alkaloid mist activates visions into the inner planes and as all venoms do, introduces us to the Underworld of life, the Plutonian and the unconscious, the illogical and the irrational. Integrating polarities within is a human conundrum, it is a lifetimes work yet here are the teachers and gurus who can lead the way if we dare follow.

Known within Norse legend as the Axis Mundi, the yew holds the nine worlds and from deep deep within its roots flow the three springs of life, ancestral wells of power and grace. Guardians of these wells are the three norns, the fate-weavers, the crafters of the Olde ways and according to the Hopi, the Grandmother spider lives within a similar chthonic abode informing and holding the threads which weave our life into being and cuts them as we leave. Yew and spider are woven within genesis stories both holding in quietude the memory, the non-polarised truth of living and dying. For our world is Indra’s net, interconnected oneness, separated only by human perception. By stepping into the wisdom infused inner realms of spider and yew we can be taken apart by their poisonous perspective and woven back together again in their protective embrace, alive, witness, sovereign.

So why does the spider choose the yew as it’s weaving companion? Perhaps it is drawn to the smell of death which pervades the air around it. Perhaps the predator hangs its spirals where the river of life flows through the yew branches, upon whose currents its prey rides. Perhaps like attracts like, perhaps life and death are actually one and the same.

~ Emma Fitchett

No part of this piece was written or edited with the assistance of or by AI

1. Spider origins: a paleontological perspective, Jason A. Dunlop. British Arachnology Society, 2022

2. https://scotlands-yew-trees.org/science-research/whats-so-special-about-yew-trees/