Bestiary

A weaver of webs and words, Anansi is the god of com­ munication. Once, long ago, the Sky God alone held access to all the stories in the world. Anansi asked the Sky God for stories, and so he was given the task of capturing three elusive animals. When Anansi used his cunning to capture them all, the Sky God made Anansi the god of all stories. But there was a catch, as there usually is in any deal: If the Sky God needs something to be told to someone, Anansi must act as the messenger. Anansi agreed.

Now Anansi has access to all the stories and fables hu­ manity has ever invented, and he uses it to be cunning and teach lessons to humans. Like a spider winding a web, he spins tales and legends to keep his heritage alive. When African peoples were captured and sold as slaves across the ocean, he came with them. When people lost their language, their names, and their stories, Anansi whispered their heritage to them and told them to keep it in their hearts. He helped the slaves stay tied to their roots, and he inspired the cunning they needed in order to survive the atrocities of manor and plantation. It was Anansi who gave the slaves the intellectual resistance to stay alive during one of the worst times in history, and so his name has been revered for 500 years. The fact that so many slave masters feared the massive tropical spiders of South America, and often suffered and perished from the venom within them, became signs of Anansi’s favor.

Anansi has a wife, who is known only as Mistress Anansi or Mistress Spider. They have countless children, the most notable of whom is Ntikuma, who outsmarted his father’s attempt to gather up all the world’s knowledge and hold it for himself. The chilling were-spiders who are also known by Anansi’s name sometimes claim distant heritage from their namesake god. More often, though, they serve the imprisoned Queen-Mother Ananasa, Lady of Webs, who may or may not

be a child of Anansi himself, or perhaps some aspect of his enigmatic mate.

Anansi appears sometimes as a normal spider. Other times he looks like a spider with a man’s face; a spider wear­ ing clothing; or a man with spider-like attributes, such as a disconcerting number of long limbs. His ability to assume multiple forms is part of his desire to know more stories; Anansi can turn into a man and sit at a poetry reading, or become a spider spinning a hidden web during a museum lecture, in order to hear the tales of all people.