The Culture of Cloth

Before there was a world, there was a thread. In this episode of First Makers, I’m looking at two very different models of the same idea. Divinity and thread as the origin of everything that matters. First, Mama Ocllo, sent by the Inca sun god Inti to teach the first women to spin and weave. She is a culture-hero, not a weaver herself, whose myth explains where an entire craft tradition came from....

The First Makers: West Africa and the Diaspora This edition is different from every other one in this series. Every tradition we’ve covered so far came to us through a written documentary record (the Kojiki, the Rigveda, Hesiod). The traditions in this edition travelled through the worst thing human beings have ever done to each other. And they survived. In this episode I cover: Anansi (ah-NAHN-se...

Every culture created a goddess who presided over making. But not all of them did it the same way. This episode introduces two categories.  The first: goddesses whose mythology is explicitly about weaving. Documented, primary sources, this is what the texts actually say.  The second: goddesses that weavers chose. Figures whose domains of creativity, wisdom and skill made them the natural patrons o...

Tully Walter is a Strategic Futures Director at Soon Futures and this is one of the most substantial conversations I've had on the show. We get into what trend forecasting actually is (observed, invented, or accelerated) and how the answer changes depending on who's paying. We talk about cultural appropriation and why origin gives a trend its meaning, what happens when that context gets...

Every single one of these goddesses survived, but none of them survived intact. In this episode I trace the weaving goddesses of Celtic and European mythology (Brigid, Arianrhod, Frigg, and Holda) and the pattern running through all of them. They were rewritten, renamed, absorbed into new religions, turned into fairy tales, reduced to saints. Brigid survived by becoming a saint. Holda survived by...

While researching the Goddess Project, I came across something that stopped me completely. Every culture, independently and without contact with each other, created a goddess who presided over weaving. Not because ideas travelled along trade routes, but separately. Across thousands of years and thousands of kilometres. In this episode I walk through the oldest part of that record, from Uttu, the S...

There's a word you use every single day that used to mean woven fabric. And the most authoritative dictionary in the English language is named, etymologically, after a medieval woman weaver. In this episode we follow the thread from Old English occupational suffixes through spinster, webster, and the World Wide Web, to Noah Webster, the Hattori clan, and the myth of Arachne. Women's text...

The most coveted colour in the ancient world came from a sea snail that smelled of garlic and cost more than gold.  Tyrian purple built empires, wrote laws, and ended careers and when Constantinople fell in 1453, the knowledge of how to make it disappeared almost entirely. In this episode we trace the colour from the Phoenician city of Tyre to the courts of Rome and Byzantium, through the chemistr...

Women invented binary code. They ran it by hand across thousands of threads, encoded it into the punched cards that built the first computer and knitted it through enemy checkpoints during wartime. We didn't call it code because we didn't call anything women did by its right name. This is the story of fabric as information technology and the consistent pattern of who builds the foundatio...