Comparison Snakes and Insects

Comparison Spiders and Insects

[Carolyn Burdet]

Belittled and demeaned or the need to be someone big: Insect and Spider remedies

Of all the animals on earth, insects and spiders are almost universally disliked by humans (only equalled by an archetypal fear of snakes, symbol of the underworld of our intuition).

Spiders make us jump in alarm, our heartbeat increases. Although the neurotoxin of a spider bite is rarely fatal in humans, the phobia is intense. Panic can lead to palpitations, even angina from psychosomatic anxiety in spider remedies. This relates to the action of spider toxin on the central nervous system, which causes pain, paralysis and increased heart rate. In spider bites the ill effects take longer to take effect, with paralysis or sepsis.

Insect stings cause irritation, itching, allergic swelling. In some instances allergic reactions cause anaphylaxis, asphyxiation, rapidly resulting in death. Fear of sudden death and suffocation are present in insect remedies.

Humans revile insects for spreading disease; mosquito bites causing malaria, flies spreading contamination. Dirty or filthy is an insect theme, especially in musca domestica, the bluebottle or house fly

which lives on excrement then indiscriminately lands on food. Maggots are an image of rubbish and rotten food, and our response is disgust. This feeling of disgust, saying ‘it’s rubbish’ to describe their circumstances, and the indignant sense that they are ‘treated like dirt’, is very strong in the remedy picture for musca domestica.

To manage their sensitivity to dirt, people needing an insect remedy may be as fastidious as an Arsenicum case, cleaning, tidying, vacuuming or hoovering (insect behaviour is to suck up via the proboscis).

Demeaning and Humiliated

and in insect cases the person can feel harrassed (malarial miasm), humiliated, insulted.

Ruthless

There are one billion insects for every person on the planet. Insect colonies are tireless, enslaving the workforce of the defeated colony in a ruthless bid to colonise new territory and exploit them with cold acquisitive ambition. This is a mode of success in corporate strategy in aspects of human life from fracking mineral resources to copyright of seeds for food crops. So it’s no surprise if insect consciousness increasingly presents in our cases.

Jonathan Hardy, a homeopathically trained medical doctor based in England, teaches on Spider and Insect remedies, presenting an orderly, structured, sequence through the sub-kingdom. He notes that people who need an insect remedy can often appear to be in the mineral kingdom, as structure and organisation is very important to them.

Competition

Ambitious, hard working, keen to improve and progress, to compensate for an inner sense of inadequacy (which may be confused with a mineral sense of lacking capacity), in insect cases achievement is

a means to validation.

However, in a case needing an insect remedy or a spider remedy, the issue of competition will emerge as a key theme of any case in the animal kingdom. Someone is the winner and someone is the loser. Mineral remedies can have performance issues, attack and defence, but when the sense is of falling victim to a predator, or taking out the competitor, this is animal kingdom fight for territory and survival.

Even so, it may not be obvious. A butterfly case may be preoccupied with their identity. An Apis case may be busy keeping everyone in the household organised to be productive. Social organisation may be a bigger theme than survival. But at some point we glimpse a competitive edge. In insect cases this is often from the point of view of feeling overlooked, belittled, badly treated or disrespected.

Disrespect and Deceit

Spider remedy cases will not tolerate disrespect, they respond to an imbalance of power or unfair treatment by a determination to get even. The defining feature of spider remedies is a provocative and irreverent sense of humour, using pranks and practical jokes to ‘get one over’ their victim. The web that traps a spider’s prey is sticky, almost invisible. The ‘deceit’ of the spider remedies may derive from the artifice of the intricate web of ultra violet threads a garden spider will spin to reflect the pattern of a flower to lure an unsuspecting insect, while a ground dwelling spider disguises its hole as a trap

with leaves or twigs and jumps out to catch its prey.

Restlessness

Spider remedies are internally restless, nervy, they cannot sit still, fidgeting, with restless legs and needing to keep their hands busy (knitting is a spider hobby). Sensitive to noise and sounds, spider remedies feel the vibrations reverberating through their body. Spider remedies have a sense of rhythm, an inclination to dance and jump around, but there is also lassitude and prostration (modality:

> lying down). The rhythmic quality extends to periodicity of ailments, a headache recurring annually or monthly.

Insects are constantly on the move, buzzing around. People who need an insect remedy can have an internal sensation of buzzing with energy, constantly busy, working hard, productively to achieve goals, or wired on hectic fruitless activity.

Ambitious to achieve

A spider remedy characteristic is that they want to be someone big. Insect remedies are ambitious to achieve, materialistic with a fear of poverty. Insects live in highly organised social colonies with defined roles; they can build structures and ‘cities’ or consume and destroy everything in their wake. In people who need an insect remedy, this is expressed as a materialistic streak. They can be avid consumers of the latest must-have gadgets and take care over their appearance, seen to be wearing fashionable brands, using hair styling products or make up.

Ambition is driven by an innate sense of inferiority, they need to keep pushing for more, even when successful. There is a continual ambition for self-improvement. A key theme in insect cases is change, transition or complete transformation of life circumstances. Their hunger to progress involves a transformation from a lowly earthbound grub to taking flight – the point where their life, or their project takes off. They can be ruthless in marching towards this goal.

Power struggle

Insect and spider remedies have issues with control and domination. Wasps lay their eggs inside other creatures such as caterpillars, ants enslave other colonies of ants. This may explain why some insect remedies have the delusion of being ‘under superhuman control’.

Whereas spider remedies often have a power struggle in a relationship, and may defer decisions to a more powerful partner, as seen in the delusion ‘head belongs to another’.

Male spiders are smaller than the female, the theme of bigger than me / smaller than me, more powerful than me, is key in spider. Insect cases can feel small or insignificant; they have an inferiority complex, they feel belittled or worthless by someone’s treatment of them.

In spider remedies there is a power struggle and the spider impulse is to turn the tables or take revenge on the person overpowering them. Being bigger relates to a peculiar delusion of enlargement of body parts in spider cases.

Neglected or Possessive

Insect remedies may feel their parental care was cold and unemotional. Apis is an exception; honey bee larvae are nurtured by worker bees and the insect sexual instinct is sublimated into duty in Apis. Other insect remedies tend to feel neglected by their parents.

Spiders give parental care and male spiders sacrifice themselves as food for their young. In human relationships this ‘self sacrifice’ can be bound up in over-involvement. The close bond can mean the child has to escape the possessive love of the parent. A spider remedy (specifically black widow spider) may be relevant in a case where the parent is needy, demanding, controlling and manipulative.

Animal remedy cases will express aspects of the predator and their prey. Spiders tread warily during the courtship dance, to get tangled in the web risks bondage, powerlessness, paralysis, having the life juice sucked out of them. Yet they cannot resist getting involved, and once involved they struggle to extricate themselves from the situation.

In spider and insect remedies there is restlessness and high sexual energy. Insect sex drive is intense but it can be a casual fling. In spider remedies, what starts as a need for constant attention, can become manipulative. Alize Timmerman: dynamic of possessiveness in the spider subkingdom – the possessive partner feels intense despair that they can’t live without the other person. They develop sychosomatic symptoms from panic, with gripping pains around the heart, or M.E exhaustion, or depression. The need for attention and sexual drama is destructive. If their partner tries to leave them, the manipulative ‘victim’ declares “I’ll take him for everything he’s got”. Lat-m., black widow spider, can be a remedy to release both parties from the destructive holding pattern of a vengeful and crimonious divorce.

Animal Kingdom Theme	Insect Theme	Spider Theme
Competitive	Ambitious, hard working, work for the corporation. Striving, need to achieve goals for validation and material gain.	Ambition to be someone big or to do something big. Ambitious to become bigger. Attention seeking
Competition with a Winner/Loser	Ambitious to do better, improve, get ahead, make something of their life,	Competitive power struggle. Wants to get one over someone else. Victory! Must win, must come out on top
Power struggle - Me versus You	Domination, submissive, enslave, inferiority complex, downtrodden, want to be seen as an individual but feel like nothing	Exert their will over others. Overpowering, or wants to overcome an oppressor. Head belongs to another - personality sublimated into another person’s identity
Bigger than me / smaller than me	Feel small, belittled, humiliated, feel as if people demean them and treat them like dirt	Won’t tolerate disrespect. Feels a need to be bigger in order to defend oneself from a bigger oppressor
Animal kingdom has hierarchy issues	Insects colonise. Feel as if they are working within a structure of control that is abusing them.	No fear, no intimidation, or feels manipulated and overpowered by someone. Big difference in power in a partnership (she is stronger)
Key themes:	Change, Transition, Transformation are key themes for insect remedies	Vindictive, possessiveness, won’t let go, manipulative relationship, female revenge
Tubercular miasm	Trapped, suffocated, fly away, restless activity,	Embroiled, entangled, can’t escape from a situation
Attack / defence is a survival issue	Violent impulses: ruthless, quick attack, fear of sudden death, incandescent rage, feels harassed, fights back	Violent outbursts: pounces suddenly, premeditated impulse for revenge, spiders wait for prey to get caught up
Activity	Team sport, running around, one team wins; eg football	Likes violent sport, sadistic, brutal: boxing, kick boxing
Ruthless	Can be unfeeling, lack of empathy for others feelings, may ruthlessly exploit others	Cruelty, sadism, deceit, lies, trickster, plot to hurt, ‘take him for everything he’s got’
Teasing	Cutting, stinging comments, gossip, unfeeling, abrupt	Joke, tricks, pranks, teasing, mockery, teasing, jibes, sly
Irritating	Irritating, harassing, feels bullied (malarial miasm)	Annoying, trapped, stuck, under someone’s power
Sensitivity to environment	Over sensitive, irritable, buzzing, humming, wired	Sensitive to noise, vibration, rhythm, pulse, sound
Restless	Internal / physical restless - suffocated, restricted, tubercular miasm	Internal restlessness, physical restlessness and nervy, jerky movements
Impatience	Impatient, in a hurry, rushing around, speedy, fidgeting, frenetic or fruitless activity	Impatient to have it, wants it now, can’t stand being kept waiting, demanding
Energetic	High energy, restless, fidgety, energy buzzing in their body, can’t relax	Highly strung nervy energy - noise /vibration reverberates in their whole body
Sexual desire	High sex drive, itching for sex, urgent desire, dispassionate, fickle, casual fling. Apis is an exception - sex is suppressed	Passionate, high sexual energy, one partner has the upper hand, can be deceitful
Animated Movement	Run, hop, fidgety, ADHD, itchy, scratchy, insect bites cause itchiness, restlessness	Jump out at someone, booby trap, climb, ropes, swings, spin, trapeze, ticklishness
Productive	Must keep busy, structured, organised, productive work to do goals or fruitless activity	Creativity, knitting, craft, art, textiles, handicraft, or there may be a desire to lie down
Energy	High energy, excitement, erratic, never stops moving, inexhaustible energy, or tired out. Keep busy even when ill	Rhythm, drumming, dance, Lassitude, lie down. Feels vibrations in body, noise sets their teeth on edge.
Animal kingdom is social, issues about their interaction with others	Social. Conform to society, corporate, follows orders. Insect remedy children may feel overlooked, ignored	Nonconformist, individual, committed to their family and children, spiders show parental care to their young
Delusions	Insect delusions: feels used + abused, exploited, tormented, harassed, humiliated, small	Spider delusions: caught in a web, can’t leave a bad relationship, overpowered
Sensations	Squished, squashed, bugged, demeaned, dirty, stepped on, despised, downtrodden, small	Crushed, crunched, kicked, smashed, tortured, distortion of size, enlargement of parts
Jealousy	Apis:jealous, a saying “jealous as lice”	Can be vindictive, revenge, turn tables, lies web of deceit
Attractive appearance	Materialistic, consumer, look good, fashion trends, brands, shiny colours, nail bar	Prefer black, red, green colours, individual style,
Consumption	Consume stimulants, drugs, caffeine, to stay wired	Craving: to smoke tobacco or marijuana to relax
Animal species in relation to humankind	Insects are stepped on, low, crushed, exterminated, dirty, treated as an infestation (fleas, flies, lice, mosquitoes)	Spiders make people jump, elicit fear + phobias, spider remedies treat panic, heart arrhythmia + palpitations
Compensations	An insect remedy feels small, treated like dirt, filthy, dirty, to overcompensate, they clean, tidy, wash compulsively	Spider cases want to appear bigger and stronger to overcome their oppressor, so plot to get the upper hand
Symptoms + Sensations	Burning, itching, pricking pain, swelling, allergic reaction	Lassitude, enlargement, vibration, nervous conditions
Temperature	Hot, red, burning	Cold, chilly to the bones
Modalities	Hot, itchy, < from heat, > cold applications (Apis)	Palpitations > warm showers (Lactrodectus mactans)
Affinity / pathology symptoms	Urinary tract infection, rash, allergic reactions, sore throat, with swelling constriction	Heart palpitations, angina, fatigue, hysteria, nerves, jerky, injury, blood platelets
Appetite / Desires	Big appetite, constant hunger, feels starved, appetite for sugar	Juice, liquidised food Can go for long periods without eating, indigestion

Insects

Themes Common in Insect Remedies

Busy, active, restless, industrious, organised

Change, improvement, develop, to make something of themselves

Feeling small, powerless, helpless, insulted, humiliated, belittled, used, taken advantage of

Squished, crushed, stepped on, squashed, trampled, downtrodden

Dirty, ugly, repulsive, disgusting, no good, cheap, low, degraded

Desire for a more elevated less lowly existence, dreams of taking flight

Symptoms Common in Insect Remedies

Suffocated, constricted, oppressed in the throat or chest

Itching, crawling, prickling skin

Buzzing, vibrating in the body

Urinary tract symptoms, irritation of genitals

Burning, stinging, stabbing pain

Hoarseness of voice, aversion to fluids

Appetite, hunger,

< heat; > in the open air/from cold applications;

Insect classifications

Coleoptera - beetles

Dictyoptera - cockroach, praying mantis

Diptera - housefly, mosquitoes

Hymenoptera - ants, bees, wasps

Lepidoptera - butterfly, moths

Orthoptera - locusts, crickets

Pterygota Phthiraptera anoplura - lice, blood sucking, wingless parasites

Siphonatpera - fleas

Zygoptera Odonata - dragonfly, damselfly

Characteristics of Insect groups

Hymenoptera - highly organised social structures
Ants, bees, wasps: Busy activity, home, family, social duty, bossy, organised

Vespa: home life feels unstable, fragile, sarcasm, stinging repeatedly

Apis: organised, industrious, bossy, home loving, fastidious, inflammation amel cold water
Ants: industrious, tireless activity, unemotional, dreams aliens, robots

Diptera - housefly, mosquitoes

Musca Domestica: dirty, low, worthless, ‘rubbish’, belittled, confusion, perversion, pornography

Mosquitoes: harassing, malarial miasm

Coleoptera

Cantharis: frenzy, activity, overreaction, mania, stabbing pain, burning pain, cystitis, burns

Coleoptera Beetles: hard shell, fragile inside, feels vulnerable, bullied, feels used, feels guilty, stability

Doryphora (potato beetle feeds on solanaceae): allergy, addiction, loquacity, bloating, red

Dictyoptera

Cockroach: numb, indifference, crushed, ambition for status, to be polished, successful

Preying mantis: brutality, cursing, anger, thinks others are victimising them

Hemiptera

Lice, fleas: Parastic, greedy, needy, clingy, get too close, talk about themselves

Lepidoptera

Butterfly, moths: Restless, flitting, lack concentration, confusion, fickle, change to survive

Orthoptera

Locusts, crickets: irritability, ambition to be the best, hunger, emptiness, cold, fear of attack

Zygoptera Odonata

Dragonfly, damselfly: Floating, meditative, attacking, responsibility vs irresponsibility

Spiders

Themes Common in Spider Remedies
- enervation, sensitivity to noise, sound, vibrations felt in the body, noise
- dancing, music, beat, rhythm, drumming
- restlessness, activity, restless legs, busy hands
- joking, pranks, teasing, tricks, trickery, flattery, risk taking, defiant, outspoken
- jumping, hiding, jumping out, pouncing, climbing, ropes
- tubercular miasm – in a hurry, on the lookout for new and interesting
- deceit, sly, cunning, plotting, conniving
- reclusive, individual (not social like insects, but spiders are close to children)
- power struggle, jealousy, revenge, feel small, powerless, female dominance
- fear of spiders or fascination with spiders
- issues of being trapped or caught, paralysis symptoms
- palpitations, cramping pains, breathing difficulty, feels cold to the bones
- fear of illness, death, hypochondria, psychosomatic, depressed by illness
- inflammation, swelling of wound, oedema, abdominal pain, delirium
- jerky movements, chorea, cannot sit still, vertigo
- nervous exhaustion, weariness, lassitude, wants to lie down, prostration
- attractiveness, sexuality, adornment
- dyslexia, poor memory

Arachnida Remedies

Aranomorpha: eg Aranea: Spin cobwebs in the air.

Mygalomorpha: eg Atrax, Mygale, Tarentula cubensis

Live in funnel hole in the ground. Camouflage the entrance with a twig or leaf like a trap door.

Aranea diadema – papal-cross spider – garden spider (spins a fresh web daily and lives suspended in the air)

Aranea ixobola – the cross spider (larger than diadema)

Aranea scinenencia – grey spider

Atrax robusta – trap-door spider (lives in a hole in the ground)

Latrodectus hasseltii – redback spider

Latrodectus katipo – New Zealand spider

Latrodectus mactans – black widow spider (has a messy funnel-shaped web)

Loxosceles reclusa – brown recluse spider (isolation, sudden attack)

Mygale – black Cuban spider, bird spider (vigorous sexual urge)

Tarentula cubensis – decomposed Cuban spider (known as a remedy for boils)

Tarentula hispanica – tarantula (benchmark of spider characteristics)

Tegenaria domestica – house spider

Tela aranea – spider’s web

Theridion – orange spider (keynote: hands busy, knitting, craves oranges, bananas, sensitive to noise)

Scorpion remedies Androctonos and Buthus australis are also arachnids but they have different characteristics and modalities. For this reason the scorpion remedies are not included in this comparison chart or general summary of spider symptoms. Instead of spiders’ teasing and joking there is isolation, cold blooded violence, the ‘lone fighter in the desert’.

Belittled and demeaned or the need to be someone big: Insect and Spider remedies

Of all the animals on earth, insects and spiders are almost universally disliked by humans (only equalled by an archetypal fear of snakes, symbol of the underworld of our intuition).

Humans revile insects for spreading disease; mosquito bites causing malaria, flies spreading contamination. Dirty or filthy is an insect theme (Musca domestica, the bluebottle or house fly); which lives on excrement then indiscriminately lands on food. Maggots are an image of rubbish and rotten food, and our response is disgust. This feeling of disgust, saying ‘it’s rubbish’ to describe their circumstances, and the indignant sense that they are ‘treated like dirt’, is very strong in the remedy picture for Musca domestica.

To manage their sensitivity to dirt, people needing an insect remedy may be as fastidious as an Arsenicum case, cleaning, tidying, vacuuming or hoovering (insect behaviour sucking up via the proboscis).

Demeaning and Humiliated

Insects are regarded as an infestation to be exterminated (fleas, lice, bedbugs, flies, mosquitoes). They are hard to get rid of and their persistence is annoying. A wasp or mosquito near us feels harassing and in insect cases the person can feel harassed (malarial miasm), humiliated, insulted.

Ruthless

Competition

Ambitious, hard working, keen to improve and progress, to compensate for an inner sense of inadequacy (which may be confused with a mineral sense of lacking capacity), in insect cases achievement is a means to validation.

Disrespect and Deceit

Restlessness

Ambitious to achieve

Power struggle

Whereas spider remedies often have a power struggle in a relationship, and may defer decisions to a more powerful partner, as seen in the delusion ‘head belongs to another’.

Neglected or Possessive

In spider and insect remedies there is restlessness and high sexual energy. Insect sex drive is intense but it can be a casual fling. In spider remedies, what starts as a need for constant attention, can become manipulative. Alize Timmerman describes the dynamic of possessiveness in the spider subkingdom – the possessive partner feels intense despair that they can’t live without the other person. They develop psychosomatic symptoms from panic, with gripping pains around the heart, or M.E exhaustion, or depression. The need for attention and sexual drama is destructive. If their partner tries to leave them, the manipulative ‘victim’ declares “I’ll take him for everything he’s got”. Latrodectus mactans, black widow spider, can be a remedy to release both parties from the destructive holding pattern of a vengeful and acrimonious divorce.

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