TODD MOFFETT  

An Uncommon Thread:
A Brief Look at the Weaver Archetype

Introduction

Recent scripts, because of their global reach, have engaged archetypal characters in order to cross cultural divides and appeal to audiences with varying ages and backgrounds. This trend is perhaps even more apparent in the screenplays for animated features, many of which are geared toward younger audiences without the discernment (or the patience) needed to unpack complex narratives and characterizations.  

One such archetype that screenwriters use is the Weaver, which has appeared, among other places, in epics such as Homer’s Odyssey and in folk or fairy tales such as the many incarnations of Cinderella. In mythology, the Weaver, of course, appears as the Moirae, the Norns, and other goddesses of fate, but even a brief study of her character reveals that she has a much wider repertoire of roles. Creative writers interested in working with archetypes – but with a unique flair or twist – may find inspiration in the scripts for such films as Moana (2016) and The Breadwinner (2017).

The Weaver in  Moana

The Disney animation machine is not unfamiliar with the archetypes of literature and mythology. In the hit film Moana – directed by Ron Clements, John Musker, and Don Hall – written by Jared Bush, Ron Clements, and John Musker – the writers borrow from Pacific Islander culture to create a quest adventure for the title character, the daughter of an island chief voiced by Auli'i Vravalho. Interestingly, the opening sequence of the movie firmly establishes the presence of the Weaver. Beginning on the island paradise of Motunui, the scene features the protagonist's grandmother, Tala (Rachel House), telling a group of children how, long ago, the sea monsters sought to steal the Heart of the goddess Te Fiti, a magic stone that "gave life to all," and how the demigod Maui (Dwayne Johnson) succeeded and then failed in his attempt. Eventually, she says, because the stone has gone missing, the islands will succumb to darkness unless one of their people can find the stone and coerce Maui to return it to the goddess. The children (except for Moana) cry and wail such that Moana's father, Chief Tui (Temuera Morrison), must assure them that the monsters of the story do not exist. However, in his scramble to calm everyone, he knocks open Gramma Tala's tapa cloths, which reveal the images of the monsters that terrify the children.

These tapa cloths establish Gramma Tala as the Weaver in a role that is widely attested: historian of the village. A link between weaving and record keeping in our own language appears in the etymology of text and textiles, each of which derives from the Latin verb texere, "to weave." Further examples of this link stretch across the continents from antiquity to modern times. In ancient Egypt, for instance, tapestries of the military victories of Amenhotep II (c. 1427-1401 BCE) adorned the walls of the temples at Amada and Karnak (Thomson 6-7). Another famous military record is the Bayeux Tapestry, the 231-foot-long linen sheet on which the Norman history of the Battle of Hastings is embroidered in pictures and text sewn from colored wool (Setton 208). In South America, the Inca civilization developed the khipu, a cord from which hung a series of knotted strings that follow complex patterns of color coding, material, spin direction, and knotting types that suggest the possibility of over 1,500 different character signs – more than the number found in Sumerian, Egyptian, or Mayan systems – and the capability of holding as much information as a scroll or a book (Mann 400-401, 403). In North America, the Plains Indians record significant events and keep tribal and family records known as winter counts, pictographs painted on buffalo hide or deer skin ("The Lakota"). Gramma Tala, in her use of the tapa cloths to tell the children the legends of their people, clearly takes up a similar role.

At the same time, Gramma Tala performs another role long associated with the Weaver: the guardian of the labyrinth. The link between thread, labyrinths, and the Underworld – as well as a female guide or rescuer – is again established worldwide. For example, Theseus accepts the ball of twine from Ariadne that will provide his escape from the Minotaur; similarly, in the African epic of Mwindo, the hero gives his aunt the end of a rope he will carry with him into the Underworld (The Mwindo 266); in one Navajo story, a young hunter trapped in a canyon by an enemy tribesman is rescued by Spider Woman, who dangles a silk rope from her rock tower (Redish and Lewis); in a number of Russian folk tales, the rescuing or guiding figure is Baba Yaga, who "lives…in the heart of the labyrinth," where the "hero or heroine enters…to face his or her worst fears and vanquish them" (Forrester, loc. 447-448). In a number of Baba Yaga's tales, the young seeker is given a ball of thread that will lead to her house, where she "mediates the boundary of death so that living human beings may cross it and return, alive but in possession of new wisdom, or 'reborn' into a new status" (loc. 506). In our own language, yet again, the idea of a ball of thread leading a seeker to enlightenment is carried by our word clue (loc. 447). Further, the idea that a woven fabric itself may be the labyrinth is demonstrated in a Navajo story, in which Spider Woman, the inventor of weaving, passes on her skill to a woman who obsesses so much about creating the most beautiful blanket ever that she ends up weaving her own spirit into the cloth. She has to be rescued by Spider Woman, who pulls a thread out of the blanket, which opens a path for the woman to escape (see Duncan).

That Gramma Tala is Moana's guide to a similar pathway is established early in the movie. Immediately after her grandmother tells the children about the Heart of Te Fiti, and during her father's scramble with the frightened children, Moana wanders down to the shore where, after being led into the water by a trail of seashells – the magic thread – she is given the Heart by the ocean itself. Entranced, Moana traces her finger over the design imprinted in the stone: a spiral, from paleolithic times the emblem of the labyrinth (Baring and Cashford 24). 1. But it's not until Moana is older – and her island begins to succumb to the darkness her grandmother foretold – that she acts as the hero. When her father flatly forbids any of their people to explore beyond the reef that protects their island, Moana steals a boat and sets sail. However, her lack of seamanship nearly kills her; the waves capsize her boat and smash her back to shore. 2.

At this point, Gramma Tala yet again guides Moana into the labyrinth. She leads Moana to a cave – Moana's first visit to the Underworld – in which their people have hidden a fleet of boats. This is a significant moment in Moana's personal and social development. As Joseph Campbell puts it, "[T]he stowing of the wealth in the dark abyss becomes associated with the undiscovered gold of our spiritual potential" (192). Appropriately, Moana, following her grandmother's advice to bang the drum on the largest of the ships, has a vision of her people's true history as sea voyagers. The boat that Moana chooses for her later adventures is hidden here, too, on its sail the same spiral depicted on the Heart of Te Fiti. Gramma Tala also gives Moana the Heart, which she recovered after Moana lost it as a toddler. By giving Moana the Heart, providing her access to a boat, and showing her the constellation she must follow to find Maui, Gramma Tala has initiated her granddaughter into the mystery of the labyrinth and awakened her power to navigate it successfully – a power she will use a number of times on her adventures.

Gramma Tala acts in yet another role that has long associations with the Weaver: that of shapeshifter or mistress of disguise. Like the Weaver's other roles, this power appears in some of our oldest myths and fairy tales. In the Odyssey, for example, Athene, the Weaver goddess, takes on different forms, human and animal, and hides Odysseus in his beggar's disguise. And in several versions of the Cinderella story, the heroine is forced for a time to wear inferior or outlandish garments before obtaining the magic gown that will transform her into a princess. In many of these cases, the shapeshifting or disguise leads to questions of identity. Odysseus becomes Nobody in his encounter with Polyphemos and remains a Nobody during his time as a beggar until, winning the archery contest with the suitors, he throws off his disguise. Similarly, the girls in the Cinderella stories becomes nobodies, losing family, home, and social standing before their various princes recognize them.

With Moana, it's no different. Gramma Tala, like Athene, like the fairy godmother in Cinderella, aids her protégé with her power, which she first demonstrates upon her death by guiding Moana past the reef – another labyrinth – in the guise of a ghostly manta ray, the image once tattooed on her back. Her second shapeshift occurs just when Moana has suffered her worst defeat: not only have she and Maui failed to get past the fire demon Te Ka, who guards Te Fiti's island, but Maui, angry over the harm done to his magic hook, has abandoned Moana on her damaged boat. Moana, questioning her role as hero, relinquishes the Heart to the ocean. But as if drawn to Moana by her distress, Gramma Tala appears again as a manta ray and brings with her the spirits of their ancestors, reawakening Moana's purpose and her connection with her people. Moana dives into the water to retrieve the Heart, and at the end of an uplifting song, cries out, "I am Moana!" Her identity has been restored. Ironically, though, she is alone on the ocean, the spirits gone.

The demigod Maui, whose aid is crucial to Moana's success, also has powers that connect him to the Weaver. First, his skin is a tapestry similar to the tapa cloths used by Gramma Tala in her storytelling, and to the hides used by the Plains Indians for their winter counts. He is covered with tattoos that present a history of his life. As he explains to Moana, every time he achieves some great feat, a new tattoo appears, a power that manifests at the end of the movie when, after helping Moana fulfill her quest, a tattoo of her appears on his chest. Secondly, like Gramma Tala, he is a shapeshifter. In the story Gramma Tala tells of his theft of Te Fiti's Heart, he changes into different animals – hawk, lizard, bug – to win his prize. However, he can exhibit this power only when in possession of his magic fishhook, and he lost this hook, and the Heart, in a battle with Te Ka. Indeed, he can escape his thousand-year exile on his deserted island only when Moana arrives with her boat. But his initial reaction to her, the egoism in his introductory song "You're Welcome," and his obsession with retrieving his lost hook make it clear that he, too, is bedeviled by a loss of identity. Moana, by appealing to his ego and by agreeing to help him recover his hook, enlists him in her quest to restore the Heart to Te Fiti.

To regain his hook, however, they must journey to Lalotai, the Underworld realm of monsters, to face Tamatoa (Jermaine Clement), the giant crab – one of the sea monsters searching for the Heart. Maui belittles Moana, saying she cannot go with him to Lalotai because she is mortal. But because Moana has been initiated by her grandmother in the ways of the labyrinth, she proves capable to the task. Not only does she climb the mountain where the entrance to Lalotai lies, not only does she survive the descent into Lalotai – a long drop into the mountain and through a watery deep – but she provides the distraction, a copy of the Heart, that fools Tamatoa and allows Maui to recover his hook. 

After they escape Lalotai, Moana again comes to Maui's rescue. Maui fails several times to change into the animal that he wants, the problem reaching its worst point when he turns himself into a half-human, half-shark. It's Moana who perceives the crucial link between Maui's tattoos and the power of his hook: both are related to his identity. Back on their boat, Moana asks him about one of his tattoos, an image of a woman tossing a baby into the ocean: "Is it why your hook's not working?" Maui explains that the image is of him being thrown into the sea by his own mother, "like [he] was nothing," thus echoing the loss of identity suffered by Odysseus and the various Cinderellas. It's after this abandonment that he is rescued by the gods, given his magic hook, and set upon his career as a demigod. Moana puts her finger directly on his lifelong motivation: he's done everything for humans – raise islands, bring fire, create coconuts, even steal the Heart – so that humans would love him. When Moana points out that he, like her, has been chosen by the gods, but that the gods aren't the ones who made him Maui – "You are," she says – she reestablishes his identity, and to the glorious accompaniment of the sunrise, he regains his shapeshifting power. 

However, as noted above, their first attempt to evade Te Ka and reach Te Fiti's island ends in failure. When they try to pass Te Ka's barrier islands, Maui is again no match for the demon, and Moana disobeys his injunction to turn their boat around. After Te Ka cracks Maui's hook and sends their boat spinning back across the ocean, Maui abandons Moana. "Without my hook, I'm nothing," he rages, again doubting his identity. But Moana, after having her own identity crisis resolved by her grandmother's reappearance, has all the tools she needs to move forward on her quest. She demonstrates her own nascent power as a Weaver by sewing her damaged sail and retying the ropes that bind her boat. Then, with the wayfaring skills she has learned from Maui, she sails toward Te Fiti's island. Te Ka and her rocky barriers rise before Moana again – another labyrinth to navigate. With her new resolve, Moana succeeds in steering through the barriers, though not without capsizing her boat once more. At this point, the characters undergo a role reversal. Maui returns, but now he will distract Te Ka while Moana takes the Heart to Te Fiti, which is as it should be. With her passage through Te Ka's islands, Moana has mastered the labyrinth four times, proving herself more than capable – and worthy – of this task. 

There is one last complication. Where Te Fiti should rest, a depression sinks into the ocean floor. But looking back at Maui, whose hook has been destroyed in his battle, Moana sees the spiral on Te Ka's chest and realizes that the demon is the alter ego of Te Fiti. Again, the problem is one of identity, as reinforced by the song Moana sings as she approaches Te Ka: "I know your name…This is not who you are…You know who you are, who you truly are." Like the properly initiated Malekula when confronted by the goddess Sevsev, Moana knows how to restore the damaged pattern: by giving the Heart to Te Ka. Indeed, when Moana places the Heart in the spiral on Te Ka's chest, Te Fiti is reborn. The story thus ends happily. Te Fiti restores Moana's boat and Maui's magic hook, and when Moana returns to Motunui, the island comes to life. Some time later, she leads her people back to their ancient lifestyle of wayfaring. While the story is structured around a typical heroic quest, livened by Disney's technical magic and brightened by its musical score, it's the power of the Weaver that underpins the imagery surrounding the storyline and makes it soar.  

The Weaver in The Breadwinner 

Another film showing the strength of the Weaver archetype is The Breadwinner – directed by Nora Twomey – written by Anita Doron and Deborah Ellis. The tone of this movie, however, is decidedly different from that of Moana. The setting is Kabul, Afghanistan, after the Taliban takeover, and on the eve of the US attacks in retaliation for 9/11 – a time of great upheaval and repression. In this atmosphere, as presented in the framing story told by the protagonist's father, clothing doesn't just hide or establish one's identity. 3. For women, clothing is a cage: women must cover themselves in public and cannot leave home without an adult male chaperone. These restrictions underlie the opening scene, where Parvana (Saara Chaudry), the eleven-year-old heroine, and her father, Nurulla (Ali Badshah) are sitting on a crowded street, trying to sell their best household goods to raise money for food. Parvana brushes her fingers over the costume jewelry bedecking her nicest dress, a dress she has never worn. Her story thus starts as do so many Cinderella stories: with the heroine forced to give up her finest clothing, and with it, the identity established by her family's status. Parvana's mother, Fattema (Laara Sadiq), was a writer and her father a respected teacher until Taliban suppression and her father's crippling injury reduced their family to peddling.

A random event escalates the tension when a roaming dog comes too close to Parvana's dress. Once she shoos it away, she draws the attention of Idrees (Noorin Gulamgaus), a young recruit of the Taliban. After making it clear that he is looking for a wife, the boy tells Parvana to cover her face as she is in public. The father tells Idrees that perhaps he should not be staring at his daughter. But this retort earns retaliation. Idrees follows them home and calls in a squad of Taliban thugs to arrest the father. This skirmish over appropriate clothing intensifies the initial situation encountered in the Cinderella stories. The father is not merely inattentive or absent; he is taken to prison, his life threatened. Worse, when Parvana and her mother enter Kabul to learn what has happened to him, her mother, though she wears a burqa, is beaten for not having a chaperone. The city has become a labyrinth in which they cannot set foot without severe consequences, nor will a handsome prince restore Parvana to her former station. Rather, the young man, Idrees, has become the source of all the problems she faces in the rest of the film. 

The next significant event brings us back to the Weaver as mistress of disguise and guardian of the labyrinth. Unlike Odysseus, who needs a disguise to enter his own house, Parvana needs one to leave hers. While trying to buy food for her family, Parvana is ignored by a shopkeeper and nearly chased down by Idrees. With the aid of her older sister, Soraya (Shaista Latif), who in this scene takes on the Weaver's role, Parvana must cut her hair and change into clothes that belonged to her deceased older brother. The transformation is not initially a perfect fit. Her mother, as soon as Parvana is dressed, remarks on how much she looks like her lost sibling. Still, Parvana, during her first foray out of the house, exudes fear and timidity as she bumps into strangers in the street and again salutes the shopkeeper. But when the shopkeeper fills her (masquerading as his) order, a remarkable change works on her. She now can navigate the labyrinth: she has the freedom of movement, the power to buy and sell in the marketplaces, and the companionship of her friend Shauzia (Soma Chhaya), another girl forced to dress as a boy. 4. She and Shauzia also pick up odd jobs around the city to earn money for their families, yet they face punishment – or worse – should their secrets be exposed. Reminders of their danger abound, as when Parvana witnesses another mother and daughter in her neighborhood being beaten for appearing outside the house uncovered and unchaperoned. At the insistence of Shauzia, Parvana further protects herself by assuming a new name – Aatish, the word for fire – but a name that earns her friend's teasing: "That’s not really a name." Hence, like Odysseus, Parvana gives up her old name to be Nobody. 5. 

Like Odysseus as well as Moana, Parvana must make a journey to the Underworld. She realizes that in her disguise, she can go to the prison where the Taliban took her father and perhaps finally discover his fate. That the prison is the land of the dead is reinforced by the fact that she must bring a bribe for the gatekeeper. Additionally, the last time she goes, this time to rescue her father, she witnesses the harrowing sight of sick and injured prisoners being shot by the guards. 6. To keep up her spirits during this slaughter, she finishes telling herself a story that she has been narrating to other characters throughout the film: the quest of a boy to retrieve his village's stolen seeds from the Elephant King. In this final chapter of her story, her identity and that of her dead brother merge even more closely. The boy in the tale assumes her brother's name, Sulayman, and wears the same clothes with which Parvana has carried out her disguise – thus establishing Parvana herself in the role of the rescuing prince. 7. And like Odysseus to the suitors, like Moana when she reclaims the Heart from the ocean, Sulayman declares his name and his history to the Elephant King at their final confrontation. It's interesting to note that the same actor who voices Sulayman, Parvana's hero, also voices Idrees, the villain, thus connecting Idrees again to the role he might have taken had he not aligned himself with the Taliban. With the help of Razaq, a man whom she befriends earlier in the film, Parvana succeeds in removing her father from the prison and thus leading him out of the labyrinth. Hence, as with Odysseus, as with Cinderella, as with Moana, Parvana's fate is guided by the influence of the Weaver.

Parvana's mother and sister have an adventure just as noteworthy as her own. While Parvana is rescuing her father, her mother, Fattema, and her sister are being driven by a distant cousin to the town of Mazar-i-Sharif, where Soraya, to buy safety for the family, is to be given in an arranged marriage. However, on a lonely stretch of the road, the cousin's car breaks down. Initially, while they wait for help, Fattema and Soraya wear their burqas, but as the sun begins to set, Fattema draws her veil aside to build a fire, an action which seems plausibly motivated by their circumstances, but one that creates an image – the hearth – that has long associations with the Weaver. For example, in the Odyssey, Kalypso has "a great fire blazing on the hearth" (5.59) near her loom in her cave; and Arete, queen of the Phaiakians, sits “beside the hearth, in the firelight” (6.305), where she spins her yarn. 8. The hearth takes on significance for each heroine in the Cinderella tales as well. It is the place where she sleeps in the ashes, gains the aid of the birds in sorting the lentils, cooks the soup that gains the attention of her father, or attracts the notice of the prince or the young master of the house. For most of these heroines, finding the hearth is like finding the outlet for a plug. Once that plug is inserted, the power of the Weaver can flow through her again. 

The same power surge lifts Parvana's mother as well. When the cousin's car is repaired, Fattema, the fire burning hot beside her, demands to go back to Kabul. Ordering her to obey him and return to the car, the cousin resorts to drawing a knife. Far from being cowed, as she was during her beating, Fattema grips the blade with her bare hand and defies him. As a result, Fattema and Soraya are abandoned in dangerous territory, unchaperoned, exposed to the war and to any passersby. In exchange, however, Fattema, by freeing herself from her cage, has ignited the hope that her family will reunite in Kabul.  

Conclusion 

What happens to Moana, Parvana, Fattema, and Soraya points to lessons writers can reflect upon as they write their own stories – whether in comedy or drama. For Parvana and her family, the role-defying use they make of clothing turns out to be the only means they have to fight for their survival. In general, their story, along with that of Moana, reveals that throughout the ages, in whatever guise the Weaver appears, her archetypal power is that of transformation. Whether creating the material of the universe itself or the identity of a single person, the Weaver shapes patterns that alter the course of human destiny and reveal not just who each individual hopes to be, but who they really are. Weaving, at its most elemental, changes the fluff of an animal's fur or the strands of a plant's fibers into a thread that ultimately becomes cloth. The same transformation, whether by the story of an elder, the magic of the labyrinth, or a new set of clothes, happens to the character who comes under the Weaver's influence. Thus, we can see that the Weaver archetype remains a powerful tool for creative writers – whatever the tone, whatever the genre.

Notes 

1. The same spiral appears in the movie title – as the O in her name – in many promotional materials. 

2. On this first attempt, Moana brings a pig, which from ancient times has been linked to the goddess of the Underworld and to the "labyrinth pattern that leads" to it (Campbell 32, 33). According to the myths of the Malekula, believers must raise a pig during their lifetimes because when their spirits journey to the land of the dead, they must pass the goddess Sevsev, who draws a labyrinth on the ground as they approach and then erases half. The spirits must redraw the other half to pass her, and as they do so, they give the goddess a pig (33). It's the pig's tusk, whose spiral mimics the labyrinth, that is the key (33); the growing of the pig is an initiation ceremony designed to teach how to enter the land of the dead "without getting lost" (Eliade 381). 

3. This framing story, like that of Gramma Tala in Moana, is a history lesson that the father, Nurullah, tells his daughter. He is thus acting out a role of the Weaver. However, he is soon forced from his role by the arrest described below. Aside from the opening scene, during which he is trying to sell his daughter's dress, he has no other associations with clothing or weaving. 

4. This practice is so widespread in Afghanistan that it has been given a name, bacha posh (Strochlic). In extreme cases, some girls are chosen at birth to be brought up as males. 

5. Even so, despite these measures, on one job, Parvana and Shauzia are recognized and nearly killed by Idrees. 

6. The bribe, of course, recalls the coins with which shades pay the ferryman to cross to the land of the dead. She raises this money by finally selling her dress, an act that in this context also resembles the Sumerian myths of Inanna stripping her clothing to reach the Underworld realm of her sister, Ereshkigal. Earlier in the film, Parvana loses her headdress and her satchel, the first stages of this process. 

7. In her tale, Sulayman uses a net to trap the jaguars that guard the mountain lair of the Elephant King. The ensnaring net is actually the tool of the Weaver's counterpart, the One Who Binds, another archetypal character.

Works Cited 

Baring, Anne, and Jules Cashford. The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image. Penguin Books, 1993. 

The Breadwinner. Directed by Nora Twomey, Universal Studios, 2017. 

Campbell, Joseph. Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine. New World Library, 2013.

Duncan, Lois. The Magic of Spider Woman. Scholastic, 2000. 

Eliade, Mircea. Patterns in Comparative Religion. Translated by Rosemary Sheed, U of Nebraska P, 1996. 

Forrester, Sibelan. "Introduction." Baba Yaga: The Wild Witch of the East in Russian Fairy Tales, edited by Sibelan Forrester, Helena Goscilo, and Martin Skoro, UP of Mississippi, 2013, Kindle. 

"The Lakota Winter Count." Akta Lakota Museum and Cultural Center and St. Joseph's Indian School, Pine Ridge Reservation, Akta Lakota Museum & Cultural Center, n.d., aktalako-ta.stjo.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=8993 

Mann, Charles C. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. 2nd ed. Vintage, 2011. 

Moana. Directed by John Musker, Ron Clements, and Don Hall, Buena Vista Home Entertainment, 2017. 

"The Mwindo Epic." African Folktales: Traditional Stories of the Black World, edited by Roger D. Abrahams, Pantheon Books, 1983, pp. 240-296. 

The Odyssey of Homer. Translated by Richmond Lattimore, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2007. 

Redish, Laura, and Orrin Lewis. "Spider Woman." Native Languages of the Americas, 8 June 2004, www.native-languages.org/navajostory.htm 

Setton, Kenneth M. "The Norman Conquest." National Geographic, August 1966, pp. 206-51. 

Strochlic, Nina. "Inside the Lives of Girls Dressed as Boys in Afghanistan." National Geographic, 2 March 2018, www.nationalgeographic.com/photography/proof/2018/march/bacha-posh-gender-afghanistan/ 

Thomson, W. G. A History of Tapestry: From the Earliest Times Until the Present Day. Hodder and Stoughton, 1906. Internet Archive, archive.org/details/AHistoryOfTapestry/page/n13

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