PHANTOM BUTTERFLIES
Departed souls, according to a Cornish piece of folk-lore, are
occasionally said to take the form of moths, and in Yorkshire, writes
a correspondent of 'Notes and Queries,' 'the country people used,
and perhaps do still, call night-flying white moths, especially the
_Hepialus humuli_, which feeds while in the grub state on the roots
of docks and other coarse plants, "souls."' By the Slavonians the
butterfly seems to have been universally accepted as an emblem of the
soul. Mr. Ralston, in his 'Songs of the Russian People' (p. 117), says
that in the Government of Yaroslaw one of its names is _dushichka_,
a caressing diminutive of _dusha_, the soul. In that of Kherson it
is believed that if the usual alms are not distributed at a funeral,
the dead man's soul will reveal itself to its relatives in the form
of a moth flying about the flame of a candle. The day after receiving
such a warning visit they call together the poor and distribute food
among them. In Bohemia there is a popular tradition that if the first
butterfly a man sees in the spring-time is a white one, he is destined
to die within the year. According to a Servian belief, the soul of a
witch often leaves her body while she is asleep, and flies abroad in
the shape of a butterfly. If, during its absence, her body be turned
round, so that her feet are placed where her head was before, the soul
will not be able to find her mouth, and so will be shut out from her
body. Thereupon the witch will die. The Bulgarians believe that at
death the soul assumes the form of a butterfly, and flits about on the
nearest tree till the funeral is over. The Karens of Burma 'will run
about pretending to catch a sick man's wandering soul, or, as they say
with the ancient Greeks, his "butterfly," and at last drop it down upon
his head.'[159] The idea is an old one, and, as Gubernatis remarks
in his 'Zoological Mythology' (ii. 213), 'the butterfly was both a
phallic symbol and a funereal one, with promises of resurrection and
transformation; the souls of the departed were represented in the forms
of butterflies carried towards Elysium by the dolphin.' According to
another belief, the soul was supposed to take the form of a bee, an
old tradition telling us that 'the bees alone of all animals descended
from Paradise.' In the Engadine, in Switzerland, it is believed that
the souls of men emigrate from the world and return to it in the forms
of bees. In this district bees are considered messengers of death. When
someone dies, the bee is invoked as follows, 'almost as if requesting
the soul of the departed,' says De Gubernatis, 'to watch for ever over
the living':[160]
Bienchen, unser Herr ist todt,
Verlass mich nicht in meiner Noth.
In Russia gnats and flies are often looked upon as equally spiritual
creatures. 'In Little Russia,' says Mr. Ralston,[161] 'the old women of
a family will often, after returning from a funeral, sit up all night
watching a dish in which water and honey in it have been placed, in
the belief that the spirit of their dead relative will come in the form
of a fly, and sip the proffered liquid.'
Among North American tribes we are told how the Ojibways believe that
innumerable spirits appear in the varied forms of insect life,[162]
while some tribes supposed that 'most souls went to a common resort
near their living habitat, but returned in the daytime in the shape of
flies in order to get something to eat.'[163]
FOOTNOTES:
[159] Tylor's _Primitive Culture_, i. p. 437.
[160] _Zoological Mythology_, ii. p. 218.
[161] _Folk-songs of the Russian People_, p. 118.
[162] Dorman's _Primitive Superstitions_, p. 23.
[163] _Ibid._ p. 42.