To Spin

From dew-covered spiderwebs to electrical cables, paths, and writing, the world is crisscrossed by lines. Among the countless filaments woven into the world, one is so familiar and ubiquitous as to be nearly invisible: thread. Yet it’s “the unseen weapon that allowed the human race to conquer the earth.”¹ Behind it lies the ancestral know-how of spinning, which transforms natural—and now synthetic—fibers into unbroken lines. Transforming raw materials into strong, versatile finished products constituted a true “revolution.”²

Thanks to this skill, humans were able to protect themselves from the elements, make the first ropes, design clothing, build shelters, catch fish, and raise the sails that opened the way to navigation. The history of our skills, tools, and resources is wrapped up in the spinning of thread and yarn. Spinning wool, in particular, raises a host of questions about the complex relationships between humans and all other living beings. Producing woolen yarn is not only a technical skill: it’s an ancient relationship with a living material that calls out for special attention.

Thread and yarn can be spun from natural as well as artificial materials. It’s possible to spin fibers from plants (linen, cotton, hemp, ramie, bamboo, nettles, soy) and animals (wool, mohair [goat], angora [rabbit], llama, camel, yak, cashmere [goat], silk), as well as from synthetic or processed materials (viscose, milk proteins, Tencel, glitz, Ingeo [corn], nylon).³

Spinning generally involves three main steps: preparing, twisting, and retwisting the fibers. Different fibers require different preparations: some need none at all, while others must be crumpled and softened (like linen and hemp) or carded or combed (like cotton and wool). Twisting the fibers refers to the processes that bring them together into a thread: “tools vary in size and shape, but the fundamental movement is always circular.”⁴ Finally, retwisting (or plying) is necessary when making yarn or cables: “if left in contact with each other, two or more threads with excess twist will spiral together to reestablish their usual twist.”⁵

With natural materials, spinning means binding the fibers together. As they’re twisted, they cling to each other, becoming thread or yarn. In the hands of a spinner, a previously amorphous mass of disorderly fibers turns into a clear line. Short, fragile fragments unite in a flexible, solid, and continuous whole. The lines take shape and wind around spindles and spools; in theory, they could go on forever.

The quality of wool yarn depends greatly on steps taken prior to spinning, including the animal’s health, how it was raised, the care taken during shearing, and the meticulous cleaning and detangling of the fibers. Depending on its preparation, wool can produce different kinds of yarns: fine and smooth when combed, flexible and fluffy when carded. The term “carding” comes from thistles (Latin carduus), a wild plant that tends to snag bits of wool from passing sheep.

Humans have been transforming natural fibers since the Paleolithic Age. For thousands of years, spinning was done by hand. The first nomadic peoples carried the skill with them, and it gradually became part of feminine domestic space. The extent to which spinning was embedded in daily life gave it a strong symbolic weight and inspired a wealth of artistic representations.

Since antiquity, spinning by hand has inspired tales and legends that employ it as metaphor. Mythical cloth and sacred thread abound in ancient stories: from Greek mythology to European folklore, spinning is part of a web of beliefs and symbolic associations in which thread is a feminine creation—a symbol of life and the passage of time.

Spinning was a central metaphor for human destiny. First, in the figures of spinning goddesses: three sisters who hold the power of life and death over mortals. The Greeks called them the Moirai, or Fates. The first sister, Clotho (the spinner), pulls the thread of birth; the second, Lachesis (the allotter), measures its length; and the third, Atropos (the inflexible), cuts it, marking the end of existence. Their names changed over time, but the same figures are found in many mythologies: the Romans called them the Parcae (Nona, Decima, and Morta), and in Norse mythology they were the Norns (Urd, Verdandi, and Skuld), who wove fate under the roots of Yggdrasil, the world tree. There are equivalent trios in other traditions, including the pre-Islamic goddess-mothers, the three Brigits in Irish mythology, and the three Marys in Christianity. Linking birth and death, the thread of mythical spinners represents fate and time,⁶ creating a powerful symbolic connection between thread, femininity, and existence.

“According to Plato, everything began with a simple thread wound on the spindle of the cosmos, turned by a woman spinning the fate of the world.”⁷ In his Republic, Plato uses spinning to describe how the universe works: it’s structured around an immense cosmic spindle connected to the celestial bodies. The spindle and hook are the tools of a cosmos in which spinning goddesses determine, respectively, the past, present, and future.
“Tend to your own tasks, the distaff and the loom […] As for the bow now, men will see to that”:⁸ these words, spoken by Telemachus to his mother Penelope in The Odyssey, illustrate the role given to thread work at the time.

In ancient Greek society, space was divided between domestic feminine space and public masculine space, and in Homeric tales, thread is a vector of women’s expression. Helen “weaves her wool into depictions of battles”⁹ in the ongoing war. Penelope uses yarn as a ruse: to avoid her suitors while waiting for Ulysses to return, she resists the passage of time, weaving during the day and undoing her work at night. Ariadne, who figures in the expression “Ariadne’s thread,” gives a ball of thread to her beloved Theseus so he can retrace his steps and escape from a fatal labyrinth. Philomela, who is raped and whose tongue is cut off, communicates the scene to her sister by weaving it in red thread. Lastly, Arachne, guilty of weaving a finer tapestry than the goddess Athena, is turned into a spider. Tricks, resistance, connections, speech: in Homeric tales, thread does the work of a feminine language forced into silence.

In medieval European folklore, the spinning goddesses responsible for human fate». gradually evolved into fairies and godmothers who guide human life and set its tempo. Spinning entered the supernatural, and wooden spindles became magic wands. “The princess shall prick her finger with a spindle.”¹⁰ In various versions of the Sleeping Beauty tale (Grimm Brothers, Charles Perrault), spinning tools prick, warn, and punish young Aurora on the cusp of her adulthood.

The symbolic link between femininity, domestic space, and thread work holds throughout the ages, including long after textile production was commercialized and industrialized. In France, schools were largely segregated by gender until the 1970s, and sewing class was mandatory for girls, which perpetuated the connection between domestic work, thread, and femininity, long used to “keep their hands occupied.”¹¹ Girls were taught to write by embroidering letters onto samplers, practice for embroidering their initials onto household linens—another example of how tradition embedded thread work into intimate domestic space.

These myths and metaphors rest on the perception of thread work as being relegated to the private sphere of the home. This “women’s work” was invisible and repetitive, considered to be “non-ideological, non-intellectual, and therefore trivial.”12 Yet spinning was the basis for many inventions that extend far beyond textiles, playing a role in the development of communications systems and the beginnings of information technology:¹³ “The yarn is neither metaphorical nor literal, but quite simply material, a gathering of threads which twist and turn through the history of computing, technology, the sciences and arts. In and out of the punched holes of automated looms, up and down through the ages of spinning and weaving, back and forth through the fabrication of fabrics, shuttles and looms, cotton and silk, canvas and paper, brushes and pens, typewriters, carriages, telephone wires, synthetic fibers, electrical filaments, silicon strands, fiber-optic cables, pixeled screens, telecom lines, the World Wide Web, the Net, and matrices to come.”¹⁴

Thread and yarn are not only the basis for many inventions that extend far beyond textiles—their means of production also seems to have contributed to a certain acceleration of the world.

The first spinning tools were undoubtedly our hands, used to stretch and twist natural fibers to make the first rudimentary threads and yarns. The introduction of the spindle perfected the balance between hands and tools. The drop spindle has been used since ancient times and is simply a stick with a hook. Eventually a weight called a whorl was added to the spindle to help it rotate and twist the thread. The thread grows longer under the weight of the hanging spindle, which turns like a miniature planet. One hand pulls from a stock of wool tied onto a distaff with a ribbon, while the other spins the stick. The rotational force causes the fibers to mix, binding to each other and becoming thread. Once the desired length of thread has been reached, it’s wound onto the spindle. Stretch, wind, repeat. Many other inventions that use rotation were based the movement of spindles. The spindle is one of humanity’s oldest technologies, even older than the wheel. It is undoubtedly the archetype for all rotation-based inventions that followed: vehicle wheels, geared machines, propellors, tape recorders, CD players, and many others.

For centuries, spinning was a necessity of daily life, and it structured both the domestic economy and the first merchant networks. The introduction of the spinning wheel in the fifteenth century was the first time the process sped up. Previously, work alternated between spinning and winding, but with a wheel, they could both happen continuously: the pedal freed up hands, making the work quicker, more precise, and more consistent.

In the eighteenth century, textile processes sped up yet again with the invention of new machines. The spinning jenny, developed in 1764, followed by the water frame in 1769, made it possible to multiply the number of spindles working simultaneously by eight, then by sixteen. Spinning was now subject to the logic of productivity; because manual spinning could no longer compete with machines running day and night, its place in the economy gradually shrank. The tactile know-how contained in hands gradually gave way to a world of machines, speed, and steel.

The effectiveness of technological developments both relies on and coincides with ideological changes. The transition from hand to machine during the industrial revolution was based on a process of “mechanization of nature.”15 From the sixteenth century, nature was no longer a nourishing Mother Earth, but rather a resource to exploit. As a conceptual framework, this new mechanical order was associated with a framework of values based on power, and as such was entirely compatible with the direction that commercial capitalism was taking.

At the same time, globalization was transforming the age-old domestication of sheep, gradually relegating the animals to the rank of wool-producing machines that just happened to have eyes and ears. “Standardized sheep farming was invented in the nineteenth century: that’s what prevails today and supplies global industry.”¹⁶

Between the industrialization of livestock farming and the fragmentation of production stages, wool yarn today still bears scars from the upheavals of past decades and raises crucial questions about ecology and the limits of globalization. “The machines that seized the reins of expansion, at the height of the industrial revolution, tore apart the delicate weave of human and animal lives, splintering their once woolly entanglement into a melee of hard-edged fragments.”¹⁷

In France, it is now a political and militant act to promote wool, a material that has difficulty meeting market demands for standardization and regularity. Unlike the uniform fibers produced by industrial farming (as in New Zealand), French wool is characterized by diversity, with nearly sixty breeds of sheep.¹⁸ Preserving this richness means not only addressing a complex and urgent challenge, but also restoring a respectful bond between all those who work to protect this material and immaterial heritage. The shepherd’s vocation is that of “remembering worlds,”¹⁹ an expression that draws its meaning from the deep bonds that wool has been weaving between the environment, animals, and humans for thousands of years.

Without spinning, no textile would ever have been created. As a foundational skill, it merits special attention. Shepherds and spinners are its guardians; from mountain to invited humanity to make sense of our densely thread, fiber by fiber, they forge paths through sensible world. For millennia, spinning has living matter itself, tracing lines through the living matter itself, tracing lines through the sensible world. For millennia, spinning has invited humanity to make sense of our densely tangled world, one thread at a time.