Jorogumo- Japanese CreatureCreature · Monster"Binding Bride"
Also known as: 絡新婦, 女郎蜘蛛, and Jorōgumo
Titles & Epithets
Domains
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Description
When a jorō spider survives four hundred years, it gains the power to take human form — appearing as a beautiful woman near waterfalls and lonely crossroads, luring men with charm until her invisible silk binds them fast and drags them to their deaths.
Mythology & Lore
The Jōren Falls
The most famous Jorōgumo story belongs to Jōren Falls in the Izu Peninsula of Shizuoka Prefecture. According to local tradition, a woodcutter went to wash his feet in the pool beneath the falls and felt a strange tugging at his leg. Looking down, he discovered spider silk wrapping around his ankle. He untied the thread and fastened it to a nearby tree stump. Moments later, the stump was wrenched violently into the pool and dragged underwater. That force would have pulled him to his death. Thereafter, the people of the area avoided the pool and made offerings to the Jorōgumo of the falls to appease her.
Toriyama Sekien depicted Jorōgumo in his Gazu Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro (1784) as a woman surrounded by her spider brood and wreathed in flame. She controls fire and commands lesser spiders as servants.
The Strange Wife
In the Taihei Hyaku Monogatari (1732) and similar Edo-period kaidan collections, the Jorōgumo takes a longer approach. She marries a human man and maintains her disguise for months or years, running a household and appearing entirely normal. Her true nature emerges only when her husband discovers her spinning silk in a back room, or catches her monstrous form reflected in water. Unlike the sympathetic crane wife of other tales, the Jorōgumo wife is genuinely predatory. Her domesticity is a prolonged form of hunting.