Spider Woman and the Timeroc: Archetypal Worlds, #3

By Michael A. Susko

A hidden web connects all, from our earthly reality to imagined worlds. This work takes us on a fantastical voyage where the planet is a living being that harbors other creatures, blown-up animals from our microscopic world, as well as humans who experienced too much pain on earth. The black waters are an ever present danger as our protagonist works his way along the length of the immense body of the Timeroc. The world ends at its head, and our unnamed protagonist returns to Spider Woman to find something new.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AllrOneofUs Publishing
• Release date: Sep 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201163921

Michael A. Susko

For many years, the author taught a course on the symbolism of Indigenous cultures. During several trips he made deep into the interior of Guatemala, he experienced the Indigenous lifestyle and was exposed to ancient Mayan rituals. In this work, he draws upon his experience as a photographer and his own vision quest experiences. By sharing this work, the author hopes to return the gift that this stone has given him.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

THE WEB

In my dream I saw a medieval-like statue, a woman in wood, her hands joined in prayer, head bent to the side, and her face with an expression of piety. She became real––enfleshed, beautiful, affectionate. From asexual wooden frozen to alive and sexual. But there was a sad knowledge accompanying it. She had only a day to live!

And as the day closed, she changed into a spider! Mysterious and strange and horrible too, a small black spider with a web in the corner where walls joined.

What is the meaning of this dream? Is the spider woman my anima, my ambivalent feelings from religious piety to my body, from being a human to feeling alien? Could there really be such a woman? Was there another dimension where such transformations took place between levels of reality––from animal, to human, to spirit? That was like an archetypal world long ago envisioned by Plato and updated by Jung. If such a world exists, our access occurs only under certain conditions, where dreams, imagination, and mystical incursions are suddenly amplified.

These are windows through which not everyone can see. In a dream I also saw a merman with a golden harp in the water. Yet only I could see it.

Can one step into that world? Is that not what mad people experience in daylight––the sudden interface of the archetypal world side by side with ours?

If stepping into this is madness, if imagining it is literature, if experiencing it when our defenses are down at night, is called dreaming, and if you’re in a monastery, it’s called mysticism — can it not be summoned? Do we only glimpse it when we think we are going mad? Can we start dreaming in the daytime and wake up there, or would that be just a flight of fancy?

Perhaps the Spider Woman can help us.

I have followed her into her web. She’s near the center there, waiting. I have become small, tightrope walking atop her nearly invisible lines. She is there––her bulbous body like an hourglass, a reflection of her once human form. Is she poisonous? I search for the red hourglass markings of the black widow, but don’t see any. Instead, her abdomen is filled with yellow dots like a grand garden spider. So, is she friendly, after all? Yet, within that presence, I sense something disturbing. She was once human....

I slip and get stuck on a cross web: the sticky strands. The spider lurches over but stops, puzzled. I am human.

I am fearful. I imagine her webbing me in a cocoon, with white lace tightly binding before she injects me. I do not flee but find myself staring at her markings. They grow larger, and I enter her world.

I see differently now––patterns, movement that become suddenly abstract, with flashes of lines. Vibrations are visual. Have I become a spider too?

I do not know how, but I saw and felt abstractly. Forms did not congeal, but rather became a pattern interlaced with their surroundings––like all things are webbed, as the spider made this web out of her body. It connected all things, for I saw the web extending all over. The web of the world, invisible to us; connected by thoughts and feelings, which have their sudden materiality. And I was seeing it. I tried to speak, but I could only vibrate the net or show colors by feelings within me.

Somehow, I passed through the body of the spider and saw the woman again—not outside or inside, but surrounded by abstract patterns. Her body moved with a connectedness, with flashes revealing webbing emitting from her body.

Who was the human she? Is she one of the Goddesses envisioned by the ancient Greeks? Arachne, the spider woman?

She wore black apparel, her body covered tightly, as if a second skin. She appeared to be a cross between a spiritual wooden and a seductive enfleshed form. Deeper yet, I sensed the mystery of an animal. She was all three presences. I realized I could now speak to her.

I have dreamed of you.

Yes, we were intimate...in my beautiful form.

It only lasts a day, I said.

"Yes, and you desire that form for more