Spinning wheel

“SPINNING Wheel” is the title of a song from 1968 by the band Blood, Sweat & Tears. The song was nominated for three Grammy Awards at the 1970 ceremony, winning in the category Best Instrumental Arrangement. Clayton-Thomas, writer and lead vocalist of the band described the song as his way of saying, “Don’t get too caught up, because everything comes full circle.”

A spinning wheel is a device for spinning thread or yarn from fibers. A spinster is someone who spins (who twists fibers into threads) and normally are women, who, by being unmarried, ended up with lower-status, lower-income jobs like spinning wool. The fact that most spinners in the Middle Ages were women, and the fact that it was common to use occupation as a surname (i.e. Carpenter, Baker, Smith, etc.), women who spun yarn or thread were given the surname Spinster in legal documents.

Ancient myths about spinners and weavers tell us a different story, and none of the powerlessness and status of the spinsters of the Middle Ages. Mythology personified “fate spinners” who determine the events of the world through the mystic spinning of threads that represent individual destinies. The Fates (Moirai) are “a group of three weaving goddesses who assign individual destinies to mortals at birth. Their names are Clotho (the Spinner), Lachesis (the Alloter) and Atropos (the Inflexible).”

Other countries have woven their own tales of spinners and weavers. In the Baltic myth, “Saule is the life-affirming sun goddess, whose numinous presence is signed by a wheel or a rosette. She spins the sunbeams.”  In China, during the Tang Dynasty, “the weaving goddess floated down on a shaft of moonlight with her two attendants, to show a court official that a goddess’s robe is seamless because it is woven without the use of needle and thread, entirely on the loom.” The phrase “a goddess’s robe is seamless” became synonymous with perfect workmanship.

Holda, the patron of spinners in German mythology, extends her control over the weather, and source of women’s fertility, and the protector of unborn children. “The Spindle, the Shuttle and the Needle,” recounts how the magic spindle, flying out of the girl’s hand (Ariadne), left a thread, which the Prince (Theseus) followed, leading to what he was seeking: a bride “who is the poorest, and at the same time the richest”, in a simple village cottage adorned with products of spindle, shuttle and needle.

Maya is “the Virgin aspect of the triple Hindu Goddess, symbolized by a Spider, spinner of magic, fate and earthly appearances. The spider’s web was likened to the Wheel of Fate and the spider to the Goddess as a Spinner, sitting at the hub of Her Wheel. Mother of the Enlightened One, Buddha.”

The Romans however, regard the processes of spinning and weaving with superstition. Any woman holding a spindle is public could mean bad luck or failure of a harvest.

In the present, as in the past, the universe continues to spin threads of human destinies, based on a fixed natural order of the cosmos, under the illusion that destinies are most often the creation of luck, the accumulation of past events, and the direction of a person’s will.

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