The ancients held the use of them as such an accomplishment that Minerva is said to have come down to earth to teach the Greek women how to spin. Venus herself did not disdain to take upon herself the semblance of a spinner of fair wool when she appeared to Helen.
And spinning was as universal an acquirement among the Jewish as the Grecian women. They used to spin by moonlight on the housetops [pg 135] and, true to the instinct of their sex, kept so faithful an eye on their neighbors in the meanwhile that the ancient spinsters' tongues were potent in the world of gossip. There is a tradition that S. Ann spun the virginal robes of her immaculate child in the pure beams of the chaste Dian.
Of the valiant woman in the Book of Proverbs it is said: “Her fingers have taken hold of the spindle.” And in Exodus we read that “the skilful women gave such things as they spun, violet, purple, and scarlet, and fine linen and goats' hair, all of their own accord,” for the tabernacle.
We are told that the Jewish maidens who devoted themselves to the service of the temple were employed, among other things, in spinning the fine linen on their spindles of cedar, or ithel, a species of the oriental acacia, black as ebony and probably the same as the setim, or shittim wood, of the Holy Scriptures. According to tradition, the Blessed Virgin Mary, who passed her early days in the temple, participated and excelled in all the pursuits then carried on. The Protevangelion of S. James the Less relates that, when a new veil was to be made for the temple of our Lord, the priests confided the work to seven virgins of the tribe of David. They cast lots to see “who should spin the gold thread, who the blue, who the scarlet, and who the true scarlet.” It fell to Mary's lot to spin the purple. Leaving her work, one day, to draw water in her jar, the angel drew near with his Ave Maria.
A distaff lies at Mary's feet in Raphael's “Annunciation,” and in many other celebrated paintings she is represented with one. In a “Riposa” by Albert Dürer she is depicted spinning from her distaff beside the Divine Babe who is sleeping in its cradle:
“Inter fila cantans orat
Blanda, veni somnuli.”
S. Bonaventura tells us that several of the early sacred writers speak of our Blessed Lady's industry in spinning and sewing for the support of her Son and S. Joseph in the land of Egypt. So reduced to poverty were they that, according to him, she went from house to house to obtain work, probably flax to spin as she sat watching the Holy Infant in the grove of sycamores of traditional renown. Her unrivalled skill in spinning the fine flax of Pelusium became a matter of tradition, and the name of Virgin's Thread has been given to that network of dazzling whiteness and almost vaporous texture that floats over the deep valleys in the damp mornings of autumn, says the Abbé Orsini.
It is said the Church at Jerusalem preserved some of Mary's spindles among its treasures, which were afterwards sent to the Empress Pulcheria, who placed them in one of the churches of Constantinople.
Other nations, too, had their famous spinsters. Dante's ancestor in Paradise, looking back to earth, tells him of a Florentine dame of an opulent family who,