Beginning a new 8 week Learn to Weave course tonight. I like to begin by jumping right in with winding a warp to get immediately to the experiential nature of this process. I also like to begin a discussion of how weaving and fibre itself forms the very nature of how we think about; communication, relationality, social structure - life! This thinking began with the Ancients. Above you see the Three Fates; Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos. These gals were not Gods or Muses, but were thought to have more power than either. Clotho spun the thread of life, Lachesis measured the length of thread allotted to each of us, and finally Atropos, cut the thread, deciding how each would die, and when.
Plato wrote in the Statesman that weaving could be used as a metaphor to describe the art of ruling and statesmanship. In a turn around from Homeric societal values based on Strength Beauty and Wealth, Plato's democracy aimed to create a more "just" society, which for him meant "weaving together" social virtues, without one dominating the other. Like the herdsman, the shearer, the dyer, the spinner and the weaver, all needed to work together with one aim - to make quality cloth. In the West we come from this very legacy of "thinking", so no surprise that we talk about moral fibre and social safety nets, in various states of repair and functionality. We talk about email conversations as threads, some of us live life hanging by them!
The Ancient Egyptians also held cloth and the making of it close to their very thinking about life itself. They have/had the same word for weaving and being "nnt".
Many indegineous cultures also use cloth making to think about life. Wade Davis in his book and research, One River of the Kogi People of the Amazon Rain Forest, says this of them,
"As they pass over the earth, they weave a sacred cloak over the Great Mother, each journey like a thread, even a person’s thoughts are like threads. The act of spinning is the act of thinking. The cloth they weave and the clothes they wear become their thoughts. Everything they do is conceived of as a fabric and everything begins and ends with the loom."
Plato wrote in the Statesman that weaving could be used as a metaphor to describe the art of ruling and statesmanship. In a turn around from Homeric societal values based on Strength Beauty and Wealth, Plato's democracy aimed to create a more "just" society, which for him meant "weaving together" social virtues, without one dominating the other. Like the herdsman, the shearer, the dyer, the spinner and the weaver, all needed to work together with one aim - to make quality cloth. In the West we come from this very legacy of "thinking", so no surprise that we talk about moral fibre and social safety nets, in various states of repair and functionality. We talk about email conversations as threads, some of us live life hanging by them!
The Ancient Egyptians also held cloth and the making of it close to their very thinking about life itself. They have/had the same word for weaving and being "nnt".
Many indegineous cultures also use cloth making to think about life. Wade Davis in his book and research, One River of the Kogi People of the Amazon Rain Forest, says this of them,
"As they pass over the earth, they weave a sacred cloak over the Great Mother, each journey like a thread, even a person’s thoughts are like threads. The act of spinning is the act of thinking. The cloth they weave and the clothes they wear become their thoughts. Everything they do is conceived of as a fabric and everything begins and ends with the loom."