The fear of dangerous animals is as old as humanity itself. Why is it that spiders cause so much more fear in many people than more disgusting worms or dangerous wasps? Is there any connection with the plague?
One in three women and one in five men are obsessed with the fear of spiders. Scientifically, this case of zoophobia is called arachnophobia (from the ancient Greek words "arachne" - spider and "phobos" - fear) and is one of the most common phobias. It is not surprising that our distant ancestors were afraid of large predators, some people even today even fear dogs, not to mention the inhabitants of open-air cages in zoos.
Ancient man had neither claws nor fangs that could rival the natural weapons of the fauna. A common place in science is that instinct makes us fear not only predators, but bees or wasps. But the fear of spiders poses a difficult question for scientists and remains largely a mystery. Scientists still cannot tell when this phobia started.
Biologists say spiders are very old animals. The oldest fossilized spiders are several million years old. They are known to have not changed much over the centuries, but they were neither larger nor more dangerous than they are today. Therefore, we cannot talk about the existence of some kind of giant ancestor of spiders that had a deadly bite.
Surprisingly, rhesus monkeys in laboratory conditions did not experience fear of snakes (their relatives who remained at large, on the contrary, are panicky afraid of them). However, observing their relatives in the wild, they quickly adopted this fear. But this fear is not comparable to the phobia of fear of spiders, since snakes are really dangerous. The venom of most spiders is toxic to their prey, but does not affect humans.
So, there has never been a creepy mutant spider, and spiders are not among the poisonous animals. However, the fear of them remains a fact. According to statistics, women are twice as likely as men to suffer from arachnophobia. Even women who are not subject to phobias are on average more fearful than men.
Psychologists set up the following experiment. The subjects were given pictures of moths, bees, wasps, beetles, and spiders in order to describe the degree of their fear, disgust and sense of danger. Curiously, spiders evoked the greatest fear and the most intense disgust. Although bees, for example, are much more poisonous. The danger of spiders is too exaggerated.
What is the reason? Where does this unreasonable, irrational fear of spiders come from? After all, some peoples had a cult of worship of spiders. They erected shrines and shrines, where they were worshiped as deities. One psychiatrist from London expressed a rather original point of view that the fear of spiders appeared during the plague, when this plague wiped out most of the inhabitants of medieval Europe. They were considered carriers of this disease. But not only the descendants of Europeans suffer from arachnophobia and not only within the old Europeans.
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True, according to recent studies, arachnophobia is more common in Western Europe and North America. In other words, the heirs of Western European culture. But in Asia, some species of spiders are even considered edible. Although we recall once again that spiders are afraid in all countries and regions, in particular in Africa. Patients with this type of phobia are afraid of any spiders. Of course, bigger ones cause more fear. Some don't even dare to touch a book that has illustrations of spiders, let alone read it.
According to the modern German psychologist Georg W. Alpers, fear of spiders becomes pathological when a person is afraid to go down to the basement, go into the garage or sit in the garden gazebo because they are waiting for him there. "From now on, we psychologists talk about phobias," says Dr. Alpers on the Welt magazine website.