The warning came too late for Arachne. Finished with her work, she stepped back from her loom so the goddess could see. Into her tapestry Arachne had woven the fear of Europa recoiling from the waves over which Zeus, in the form of a bull, was stealing her away. There was Leda, powerless beneath the beating wings of the swan, and Asteria violated by an eagle. To Alcmēna, Zeus appeared disguised as her husband, and Antiope thought it was a satyr and not the Almighty who seduced her. Arachne pictured Danaë overcome by the golden shower that produced Perseus, and Aegina assaulted in flames. Arachne depicted not just the deceptions of Athena’s father, but those of the other gods as well: Poseidon, too, in the shape of a bull to deflower Arne, and as the swiftly moving river that filled Aloeus’ wife with twins, and as the ram that mounted Bisaltis. Apollo, Dionysus, and Cronos were pictured in the myriad forms into which they had metamorphosed for the purpose of deceit. Arachne embellished her ungodly collage with a maidenly border of dainty, entangled flowers and leaves.

There was not an ungainly stitch in Arachne’s rendering of the depredations inflicted by the rapacious gods; she stood contemptuous by her subversive embroideries, watching Athena’s face knead with indignation and envy for the girl’s unmistakable craft. Finally the goddess could stand the affront no longer. Athena took up her shuttle and beat Arachne between the eyes before ripping her impudent tapestry from the loom.

From her husband’s bed, from her father’s, a woman discovers how she has been betrayed. And still she longs for the light, and the parting of the whispering crowd, and the face of god emerging through the dark door. For her.

Athena’s insult was more than Arachne could bear. Outraged, she knotted a heavy skein of her own wool into a noose and hung herself from the castle beam of her loom. But death was not sufficient punishment in Athena’s eyes; it was unresolving retribution she was after. She lifted the girl, easing the rope, and sprinkled a potion from Hecate over Arachne’s head. The herbs of the great mother of the gods, Magnae Deorum Matris, contracted Arachne’s head and body into tiny orbs, her legs and arms into filaments. She hung, a spider, from her own thread.

Sometimes one is so defenseless, says the young woman to her husband on the night she will wait for the door to open. It opens, and her face is incandescent with longing. As her family listens for the approach of the ambulance, she tells them she has seen her god: it was a spider, a rapist, with a cold, stony face.