The Implied Spider

In this text, the author shows how to make sense of, and learn from, the diversity of past and present cultures. Drawing on traditions ranging from the Hebrew Bible to the “Bhagavad Gita”, Doniger examines other cultures and finds in the world’s myths a way to talk about experiences shared across time and space. Doniger shows that myths bridge the cosmic and the familiar, the personal and the abstract, the human and the divine, and that they do so for all cultures. Myths are the tales that are told to bring meaning to life, answer mysteries of birth, death and creation, and good and evil. The author demonstrates how studying myths from cultures other than our own can be exhilarating and illuminating. Even if scholars such as Freud, Jung and Joseph Campbell typically overstated the universality of major myths and suppressed the distinctive natures of other cultures, postmodern critics are wrong to argue that nothing good can come from a systematic comparative study of human cultures. Doniger shows how to critically and responsibly compare stories – or texts or myths or traditions – from different cultures by revealing patterns of truth from themes that recur repeatedly.
She enables the reader to see the “implied spider” that weaves the web of meaning that sustains all human cultures – the fabric of our shared humanity.

Author Biography

Wendy Doniger is Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago and a member of the Committee on Social Thought. Her books include Dreams, Illusions, and Other Realities; Other Peoples’ Myths; The Cave of Echoes; and the English-language edition of Yves Bonnefoy’s Mythologies. Her translations of such sacred texts as The Rig Veda are widely considered definitive.