The idea of a butterfly or moth as the soul is a remarkable example of the universality of animal symbolism, since it is found in traditional cultures of every continent. The custom of scattering flowers at funerals is very ancient, and the flowers attract butterflies, which appear to have emerged from a corpse.
A butterfly or moth will hover for a time in one place or fly in a fleeting, hesitant manner, suggesting a soul that is reluctant to move on to the next world. The transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly seems to provide the ultimate model for our ideas of death, burial, and resurrection. This imagery is still implicit in Christianity when people speak of being “born again.” The chrysalis of a butterfly may have even inspired the splendor of many coffins from antiquity. Many cocoons are very finely woven, with some threads that are golden or silver in color. The Greek word “psyche” means soul, but it can also designate a butterfly or moth. The Latin word “anima” has the same dual meaning.
Several gems from ancient Greece depicted a butterfly hovering over a human skull. Late Roman artifacts often portrayed Prometheus making humankind while Minerva stood nearby holding aloft a butterfly, which represented the soul. Astory inserted in the first-century novel The Golden Ass by Roman-Egyptian author Lucius Apuleius tells of a young girl named Psyche who was given in marriage to Cupid, the god of love, and contemporary illustrations often showed Psyche with the wings of a butterfly. The wings of a butterfly are frequently used to designate the soul in Western art, and they have also been painted on fairies.
In lands around the eastern shores of the Pacific Ocean, the idea that the soul of a person will return in the form of a butterfly that hovers around the grave of the body is widespread. In Indonesia and Burma, people have traditionally believed that if a butterfly enters your house, it is likely to be the spirit of a deceased relative or a friend. On the island of Java, it is traditionally believed that sometimes during sleep the soul flies out in the form of a butterfly. You should never kill a butterfly, since a sleeping person might then die as well. The Chinese sage Chuang-tzu, one of the disciples of Lao-tzu, the founder of Taoism-used to flutter about as a butterfly at night. On waking, he would continue to feel the motion of wings in his shoulders, and he was unsure whether he was truly a butterfly or a man. Lao-tzu explained to him, “Formerly you were a white butterfly which . . . should have been immortalized, but one day you stole some peaches and flowers. . . . The guardian of the garden slew you, and that is how you came to be reincarnated” (Werner, p. 149).
The way certain butterflies perform a courting dance-each partner moving off in various directions yet always coming back to the other-has made these insects symbols of conjugal love, especially in Japan. Lafcadio Hearn has collected a Japanese story of an old man named Takahama who was nearing death. A nephew was sitting at his bedside when a white butterfly flew in. It hovered for a while and perched near Takahama's head. When his nephew tried to brush it away, the butterfly danced around strangely and then flew down the corridor. Surmising that this was no ordinary insect, the nephew followed the butterfly until it reached a gravestone and disappeared. Approaching to examine the grave, he found the name Akiko. On returning to his uncle, he found Takahama dead. When the boy told his mother about the butterfly, she was not in the least surprised. Akiko, she explained, was a young girl that Takahama had planned to marry, but she died of consumption at the age of eighteen. For the rest of his life, Takahama had remained faithful to her memory and visited her grave every day. The nephew then realized that the soul of Akiko had come in the form of a butterfly to accompany the spirit of his uncle to the next world.
The soul of a beloved also takes the form of an insect, probably a butterfly, in the ancient Irish saga “The Wooing of Etian.” The god Mider had fallen in love with a mortal named Etian, but the goddess Fuamnach struck the young woman with a rowan wand and transformed her into a puddle. As the water dried, it became a worm, which was then changed into a “scarlet fly.” “Its eyes shone like precious stones in the dark, and its color and fragrance would sate hunger and quench thirst in any man; moreover, a sprinkling of the drops it shed from its wings could cure every sickness . . . ” (Gantz, p. 45).
The insect accompanied Mider as he traveled and watched over him as he slept, until Fuamnach sent a fierce gale to blow it away. Pursued constantly by the goddess, the insect was finally carried by wind into the goblet of a chieftain's wife, who drank it and gave birth to Etain 1,012 years after the infant had been first conceived. Mider had searched for her for a thousand years, but when he finally found her, she was the wife of the king of Ireland. Finally, after Mider had won his wife from the king in a game, the lovers flew away in the form of swans. Biologists distinguish between butterflies and moths by anatomical features that strike laypeople as arcane, but folk culture usually distinguishes in a very simple manner-moths are nocturnal while butterflies are diurnal. Furthermore, butterflies have many dazzlingly bright patterns of color, while moths tend to be shades of white and brown.
When homes were lighted by candles or tapers at night, people were particularly fascinated by those moths that would fly toward the fire even when that meant they would expire in a sudden blaze. In one of his most famous poems, “Blissful Longing” (“Selige Sehnsucht”), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe used this motif as a symbol of the soul's desire for transcendence. The poem tells of a moth drawn to a flame and ends with these words:
Dost thou shun the great behest, This, Become by Dying! Thou art but a sorry guest On this dull earth staying. (p. 95)
While many people find the poem beautiful, some critics have been troubled by the romantic celebration of death. Aless mystical but perhaps more compassionate view of such an event is given by the early-twentieth-century British author Virginia Woolf in her essay “The Moth.” She tells of watching a moth dance about by day as its motions became gradually fainter. Many times she gave the moth up for dead, only to see it flutter once again. Finally, when the tiny body relaxed and then grew stiff, she felt awed by both the power of death and the courageous resistance of the spirit against so formidable an antagonist.
As the pace of modern life has become increasingly frantic, people have come to admire the leisurely flight of the butterfly. As W. B.
Yeats puts it in his poem “Tom O'Roughley”:
'Though logic-choppers rule the town, And every man and maid and boy Has marked a distant object down, An aimless joy is a pure joy,' Or so did Tom O'Roughley say That saw the surges running by, 'And wisdom is a butterfly, And not a gloomy bird of prey. (p. 141)
Sometimes the way a butterfly moves from flower to flower has also been decried as lack of commitment, and Yeats, in the same poem, calls it “zig-zag wantonness” (p. 141). Today many ecologists regard butterflies as a keystone species, and they will count butterflies per acre in an attempt to determine the health of an ecosystem, perhaps in a manner not altogether different from that of diviners in the ancient world.
