Dreamcatcher Beaded 7 Chakras

An eight inch hoop strung with beads in all seven chakra colors, red at the root through violet at the crown. It is a lot of color in a small object, which is the point. It reads from across the room.

The form is Ojibwe. The word behind it, asabikeshiinh, just means spider. Frances Densmore wrote the charms down in 1929 and her description is smaller and stranger than the thing we sell: wooden hoops about three and a half inches across, netted with nettle-stalk twine dyed red with bloodroot and wild plum bark, hung over a cradleboard. What she recorded about the purpose is that they caught and held everything harmful the way a spider web catches and holds whatever touches it. Not dreams specifically. Everything. The Spider Woman story usually told alongside them, Asibikaashi looking after the children of a nation that had spread too far for one woman to reach, is a later retelling, and it gets credited to Densmore in a lot of places where she did not write it. The good dreams and bad dreams version arrived later still, and it circulates in two directions: some say the good ones slip through the center, some say they catch in the web and slide down the feathers. Go with whichever you were told. Nobody is checking.

The rainbow is newer than the hoop. The seven colors everybody can recite are not in the Sanskrit sources; the tantric texts give the centers colors, but not a spectrum. What we use now got assembled in the West across the 1920s to the 1970s, out of Theosophical clairvoyance and the color healers, and it locked into place with Ken Dychtwald's Bodymind in 1977. That is about fifty years old. It is not ancient and it works anyway, because the job a color does here is to be nameable and findable, and red for the base of the spine is easy to find.

Worth saying plainly: this is a contemporary decorative dreamcatcher, made for the gift trade. It is not a Native-made piece and we do not sell it as one. The form spread beyond Ojibwe country during the pan-Indian movement of the 1960s and 70s and has been made commercially ever since, which is how it ended up on our wall and probably on yours. If what you want is an authentic one, buy it directly from a Native artist. If what you want is a beautiful object that means something to you over your bed, this is that.

Good to Know

Eight inches across. Beads in all seven colors, root through crown. Hang it where you sleep, or over a desk, or anywhere you want a full spectrum on the wall.

Try It With

The Double Row Chakras dreamcatcher if you want the bigger version of the same idea, or the Transcendence for something quieter. The Little Book of Chakras and Chakras for Beginners both explain the system this is built on. More on the wall in home decor.