Symbolism of Spindle and Spinning Wheel

Spindles and spinning wheels possess great symbolic power and are frequently used in myths, stories, and fairy tales. They are often part of our dreams and they can represent many different things depending on cultural, historical, and personal context. Let's explore the symbolism behind spindles and spinning wheels with a few simple examples.

Sleeping Beauty

The most famous spindle and spinning wheel are very likely the ones from Sleeping Beauty. At the beginning of this classic fairy tale, a prophecy is given: when the princess turns fifteen (this age may vary a bit depending on the version), she will prick her finger with a spindle and die.

Each of the elements in this prophecy/curse given by the old fairy and realized with the help of an old woman can be easily interpreted with a very classic analysis.

Spindle is obviously a tool of change. With its characteristic shape, being long, strong, hard with pointed at one and thicked at the other side, it is a clear phallic symbol. It is being used by the hands of women. Not men, not girls, but women. When a girl takes a spindle in her hand, she symbolically turns from a girl into a woman. Her childhood is over. In some way, we could say, that her childhood is dead. Her adulthood is in front of her.

Pricking a finger is not coincidental either. Fingers are in virtually all cases our first instruments when we explore our sexuality. Blood, of course, represents loss of virginity and it means death (of childhood) and birth (of adulthood) at the same time.

Old woman/women as a medium of this important, if not fatal event is not in the picture by coincidence. Fairy tales often incorporate older women who pass some kind of knowledge and experience to youngsters, especially girls who are about to become women. Spinning, as an activity traditionally associated with women, with the spinning wheel, traditionally associated with changes, creativity, and life cycles, is a perfect opportunity for such a transfer.

Sleep as an important part of the prophecy represents waiting. Spinning is a creative process where patience is crucial. It takes time to transform a thread into a textile, it takes time to become a woman from a girl. It takes years and can be perceived as 'one hundred years' before you grow up - in the case of Sleeping Beauty, before you find (or be found) by 'Mr. Right'.

Rumpelstiltskin

Rumpelstiltskin is another example of spinning. A strange-looking (can we just say - ugly?), small but obviously powerful man, represents a male reproductive organ. Miller's daughter is afraid of him but is even more afraid of her seemingly impossible task. She must spin straw into gold.

She is clearly incapable of this extremely creative process. All men in her life (her father and the king) expect that from her but she can't do it alone. She needs help from a magical being and Rumpelstiltskin enters as a confident (and confidential) bearer of the necessary creative, even magical, life-bringing power.

While he saves her life (literary in the story and symbolically as a man who transforms the girl into a woman), he creates a new one (literally by making gold and symbolically by demanding her first child). After all, he spent three nights in a row with a girl who was never with a man alone, not alone in the dark.

The life threat coming from the king seems a bit too much if we are looking at the story only. On the other hand, he is looking for an heir and for that, he needs a wife. If she can't give him a son, his legacy will die. King will symbolically die. so she should die too!

One more thing - Rumpelstilzchen (original title in Grimm's fairy tales) is a slang word in the German language for a construction pole and in certain circles, it's used as a vulgar depiction of the male reproductive organ. When she (literary) learns Rumpelstiltskin's name she (figuratively) proves she is able to handle men (sexually and reproductively).

Three Spinners

Three Spinners (or Three Spinning Women) is a less-known fairy tale from the same collection. It's actually a variant of Rumpelstiltskin with strong association with three fates (Clotho as Spinner), Lachesis as Allotter, and Atropos as Inflexible) who control human fate. The first is spinning, the second is dispensing, and the last is cutting, which determines the beginning, shape, and end of life for each individual. By the way, three is a divine number, a number of perfection.

The spinning wheel represents domesticity, feminity, and productivity - everything society expects from women but not from girls.

Spinning is always strongly connected with women who are capable of bearing new life, which gives them the ultimate magical power. Such a look at spinning is present all over the world. In Hinduism, for instance, it symbolizes karma with life, death, and rebirth.

For the end of this simplified explanation of the symbolism behind the spindle and spinning wheel, we can look at one more picture from a famous fairy tale. It's painted by Richard Andre who decided to portray the well-known scene from Little Red Riding Hood differently than hundreds of other artists who decided to present the taking goodbye outside of the house.

He puts the scene inside and Little Red Riding Hood's mother behind the spinning wheel. Why? To emphasize the safety of the girl's home she is about to leave? To justify mom's decision to send the girl into dangerous woods alone by having important work to do? Or maybe to predict a new life for both characters in the picture - the girl will become a woman (in French the phrase 'to meet a wolf' actually means 'to lose virginity'), and her mother can focus on making clothes for a new child.