Seeing a tarantula
A tarantula crossing a road in late summer is nearly always a male on the one long journey of his life, after years in a burrow. It is a slow, deliberate picture of setting out late.
What it may mean
The tarantulas people meet crossing desert roads from August into October are nearly all males, out for one reason. A male spends years in a burrow, often close to a decade, before he matures. Then he leaves home and walks, sometimes more than a mile, searching for a female's burrow, and he rarely lives more than a few months afterward. Females stay put and can live for decades. One crossing the asphalt at dusk, slow and deliberate, is making the single big journey of a long, hidden life. People make such journeys too: the move finally made at fifty, the trip saved for since childhood, the letter written after twenty years. Daniels and Stevans tell of a Brahmin in India who, weighing a purchase, watched which way a tarantula on the wall approached before deciding.
Depending on how you saw it
A tarantula flicking its hairs
Tarantulas in the Americas defend themselves by kicking barbed hairs off the abdomen toward a threat, which leaves a bald patch that stays until the next molt. Every defense costs something. What do you shed to protect yourself, and what does it cost you?
A molted skin in the tank
Owners of pet tarantulas sometimes panic at what looks like a dead spider lying on its back, then find the real one beside it, fresh and pale. The shed skin is a perfect copy, empty. Which old shell of yours might people still mistake for you?
The dance named after it
In southern Italy the bite of the tarantula was once believed to make people dance, and only the tune called the tarantella could cure them. An English writer in 1771 insisted that music did nothing of the kind. What do you dance off when something gets under your skin?
Why it happens in nature
The tarantulas of the American Southwest are large, hairy, slow-moving spiders that spend most of their lives in burrows. Mature males leave their burrows from August into the fall to search for females, which is when people see them on roads and porches. Their venom is mild for people, and when threatened, species in the Americas flick barbed hairs from the abdomen that can irritate the skin.
What folk beliefs say
India
A tarantula was a very fortunate creature to the Brahmin of India: if, while weighing a purchase, he saw one on the wall advancing from a quarter he considered favorable, he would buy at once, but if it came from an unfavorable quarter, nothing would persuade him.
Source: Cora Linn Daniels; C. M. Stevans (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences of the World, vol. 2 (1903), vol. 2, p. 710. View the page
India
In India, a 1903 collection says, it is unlucky to kill centipedes, tarantulas, scorpions or spiders.
Source: Cora Linn Daniels; C. M. Stevans (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences of the World, vol. 2 (1903), vol. 2, p. 701. View the page
Italy (Taranto)
The bite of the tarantula was believed to make people dance, a mania that broke out in Tarentum (Taranto), Italy, in the sixteenth century; only the tune of the dance called the tarantella was thought to cure it.
Source: Cora Linn Daniels; C. M. Stevans (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences of the World, vol. 2 (1903), vol. 2, p. 710. View the page
England
A writer in the Gentleman's Magazine of 1771, quoted by Brand, refuted the common belief that the tarantula is poisonous and that music has any particular effect on those it bites.
Source: John Brand; Henry Ellis (ed.), Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain, vol. 3 (1849), vol. 3, p. 381. View the page
To reflect on
What journey have you been waiting years to make, and what is still keeping you in the burrow?