Kaleidoscope III 
On the Butterfly
In some parts of Central Georgia and elsewhere in the American South, it was believed that a girl who wishes for a new dress should, upon seeing a butterfly, seize it and bite off its head. The next morning, she would have a new dress the colour of the butterfly’s wings. It was also believed, in that part of the world, that when a butterfly lights on a person, it’s a sign she’ll die soon. It’s not clear if one superstition cancels out the other. If it doesn’t, one supposes she will have a new outfit for the grave.
In Ireland, one Thomas O’Sullivan of Derrymore West, County Kerry says that should a small butterfly fly around a person, that person will get a letter.[i] And, says James Brogan of Foxford, County Mayo, if a butterfly flies around the globe of a lamp, it’s a sign that a lot of money will come to the house.[ii] John Broderick, of Slieveanore, however, interprets the same happening as an omen of impending death. In Luighseach Ní Chonmhaighe’s collection of folk cures, she records that among some of the ‘older people’, it was believed that catching a butterfly and keeping it in a bag until it died was a cure for toothache.[iii]
Less profitably, according to wisdom collected by Eilín Ní Súilliobáin in Glashananoon, County Kerry, meeting a butterfly in Winter is the sign of a devil coming.[iv] (Ní Súilliobáin’s informant also advises that it’s said where there are three Marys in one house, one of them will die. Of that, the informant is irresistibly correct. In fact, one, day, all of them will die.)
I have never heard of any association of the butterfly with the devil and yet, in N.W. Thomas’s 1906 essay, ‘The Scapegoat in European Folklore’, he relates a Westphalian tradition which is not so distinct from the beliefs of County Kerry, albeit a season later, whereupon evils are expelled from houses by the driving out of the Sommervogel or butterfly: “On the 22nd of February the children go from house to house knocking on them with hammers and singing doggerel rhymes in which they bid the Sommervogel depart”.[v]
And there’s an old story recorded in the Lanercost Chronicle, a history of the north of England between the thirteen and fourteenth centuries, where the Bishop of Winchester, Peter des Roches, hunting in his forests, comes across a mansion he’s never seen before.[vi] He’s invited inside where a great feast is given for him. His host reveals himself to be the King Arthur of legend. When des Roches asks Arthur if he is saved, i.e. a person of faith, the man replies that he is, and thus removes in the mind of the bishop the suspicion that his host is a devilish illusion. Such a disguise was not uncommon in those days. When the bishop asks for a sign that this is really the king of legend, he is granted the power that whenever he opens his closed fist, a butterfly emerges from it. That’s how Peter des Roches, Bishop of Winchester, became known as ‘The Bishop of the Butterfly’.
Anthony Gagliardi, a symbolepologist (a term he coined himself), identified at least seventy-four lepidopteral symbols in Western art.[vii] From his thesis, ‘The Butterfly and Moth as Symbols in Western Art’ (1976), I offer a small selection of these symbols, in order to demonstrate the sheer range of associations: ‘Beauty of Nature’, ‘Heavenly or Fairy-Tale’, ‘Flame’, ‘Female, Femininity’, ‘Homosexuality’, ‘Way to a New Dress’, ‘Omen of Birth’, ‘Death, Omen of Death’, ‘Spokesman for the Raven’, ‘Guardian of Tobacco’, ‘Magical or Mythical Beings’, ‘Omen of Good Luck’, ‘Rejection of Industrial Society’, ‘God of Rain’, ‘Good Aim with a Gun’, ‘Helping to Cheat in Gambling’, and, of course, ‘Soul’.
The butterfly is, in fact, a symbol for almost anything. Many are mimics and camouflages, and some are aposematic, which is to say they make every effort to make themselves appear unappetising, toxic, not worth predation. What they are, they don’t want you to know; what you think they appear to be, they are something else. Nevertheless, common across many cultures, all but one continent and several millennia, is the association of the butterfly with the soul. For the ancient Greeks, Psyche was a term that meant both ‘soul’ and ‘butterfly’. It may also be rendered as ‘breath’, ‘life’ or ‘ghost’.
Its lifecycle is one of the first things schoolchildren learn. Its metamorphosis and emergence from the dry husk of the chrysalis, from mundanity and terrestrialism to beauty and freedom and flight lends itself to all kinds of metaphors of which a good few are to be found underpinning the philosophies of self-help books and are almost invariably mawkish and trite. The life of the butterfly is a particularly effective metaphor in the Christian tradition (resurrection, new life, the supersession of the earthly body).
It is less that butterflies are harbingers, I suspect, and more that they are precisely or nearly coincidental with the events with which they’re superstitiously bound: a letter arriving from a distant cousin say, or finding oneself named a beneficiary in the will and testament of a long-forgotten and miserly great aunt. In the days of Thomas O’Sullivan and James Brogan, news couldn’t arrive without the door opening. Butterflies are everywhere in the summertime.
And yet, for all the things a butterfly is held to represent, the connection to the soul is the most unshakeable. In recent years, scientists appear to have proven that, in the caterpillar / butterfly itself, there is a faculty that transcends morphology. Caterpillars’ memories survive metamorphosis. In this process, the caterpillar’s body breaks down into a kind of lepidopteral soup, which is then reconfigured within the chrysalis into the creature that is the butterfly. It has been a source of curiosity to what extent any aspect of the caterpillar survives to become the butterfly
In a paper published in 2008, Researchers at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., offered Manduca sexta caterpillars (the Tobacco Hornworm) the choice of two areas within a y-shaped pipe, one of clear air and the other of ethyl acetate.[viii] When they chose the latter, they were given a ‘mild’ electric shock. Weeks later, as butterflies, seventy-seven percent of them avoided the ethyl acetate junction, suggesting that memory, in some form, survives. And if memory survives such a profound transition, might the soul, should you have one, survive death?
This association between the butterfly and the soul is why my cousin Holly said what she said, sitting on the black leather sofa in my father’s living room. “And here he is now”, she said, part sarcasm, as a perfectly white butterfly flitted its way across the room. It had entered through the window – the blinds and curtains were open to air the place – and made its way, jittery but purposeful, straight for me. I gave way and it darted behind me and carried on to the kitchen where I had prepared four cups of tea. It was two o’clock in the afternoon, the sun was blazing.
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Less than twelve hours earlier, my father died. I missed two telephone calls from the ward. The third woke me in my hotel bed at 4.25am. I knew what I was about to learn when I answered the call, the irrevocable, life-changing fact I would acquire, so I let it ring longer than I ought to have. I took a few deep breaths of the old world. His condition changed rather rapidly, the nurse told me. His English, to my ear, had a Russian hinterland, nasally here and there, the vowels of Belfast creeping in. And then he passed.
Bríd and I lay in bed until dawn arrived full of blistering confidence. I had had a cycle of sleep, four hours; enough to function but not to excel. I felt like a counterfeit battery: upright, plausibly liveried, but with nothing reliable within and liable, at any moment, to run dry. We dressed for the sun, went down to breakfast, got in the car. As I drove to the hospital, I looked hard at the world for signs of its difference. There were none to be observed. None, either on the way out of the suburbs to my father’s house.
Rather than come via Belfast, Holly and my uncle Noel had driven the backroads of County Down, from Loughbrickland (Dromore—Ballynahinch—Saintfield) to the house. Each had been working from the depths of the morning: Noel on airport runs and commuter fares; Holly in the service station shop. Except for my wife and my brother, my uncle was the first to know his brother was dead. He made sure the other relatives were informed. They had come to plan the arrangements for the wake, the funeral, the burial and so on.
I was weary, my emotional bandwidth was narrow to the point of numbness. I was not yet grieving. If death is an impact, grief is a bruise. It is a tenderness of many degrees and hues. Sometimes, it shines. It is the work of time and, thus, has a syntax. It is its own language which must be learned and relearned as its moods and declensions develop and mutate.
I boiled the kettle, arranged biscuits on a plate. It is customary that the biscuits are refused upon presentation and eventually accepted at the second or third invitation. This custom was observed. (This is not a funeral custom.) I was happier by far to attend to tasks than to sit in lamentation: cleaning, preparing refreshments. What we had before us was a problem to be solved. Grief would come later, in private. (One meaning, in fact, of prīvātum, carries the sense of grieving, i.e. that one would retire from public life to mourn privately within one’s household.) Though it had been tested, the unromantic, coldly rational, self-protective stoicism I’d adopted over the previous five days was still in power, though a coup was certain.
And yet, for all that pragmatism and clear-sightedness with which I had prepared for his death and with which I now intended to administrate it, the instant the butterfly flew through the window, the same thought came to my mind: and here he is now. I knew then that someone must say it. To fail to do so would be an error of convention: not saying ‘Bless You’ after a sneeze. Death is governed by conventions, not always are they rational.
The arrangements were coming into focus. He would be buried in Rathfriland, where his parents and brothers are buried, not far from where he grew up. This necessitated a funeral mass. My father was not religious, though he had in recent years taken to wearing a monkish, roughly hewn wooden cross on a cord around his neck. I don’t know where it came from. It dangled there alongside the electronic personal alarm with which he could alert medical services if he fell. He had been brought up as a Catholic, though this commitment dwindled, especially in early adulthood where Saturday nights started to precede Sunday mornings. As he got older, faith systems of all kinds fell away completely. He was comfortable with the mystery.
While my father’s community background, as censuses and job applications euphemistically call it, was Catholic, my brother and I had been brought up as Protestants. My mother’s tradition. This was a decision undertaken purely because of where we lived: a village whose demography had Catholicism profoundly in the minority. Had they elected to live somewhere else and had my mother’s family not been so few, we would have grown up with a different set of spiritual customs.
Although we had attended funeral masses for relatives on my father’s side, I found them mysterious and curious occasions. We did not know how or when to respond to the priest’s calls, nor did we participate in the eucharist, that famous point of difference between the two traditions. Since we attended masses sporadically, we had no practical processional or logistical instinct for how they worked.
My uncle sat in the reclining armchair my father wasn’t well enough to use. It faced the television and a stopped cuckoo clock. He wore short shirt sleeves. As our conversation progressed and more tea was served, we found ourselves at the gentlest of impasses. For fear of offending the other, neither party, myself and my wife; my uncle and cousin, could persuade the other that their vision was the right one.
The concern, I inferred, among my father’s siblings, was that my brother and I would prefer a non-religious or humanist ceremony, that the proper routines and rituals of mourning, as they knew them, would be interrupted or absent. That, not being Catholics ourselves, we might underestimate or disregard the significance of the rites. The ultimate concern was for my father’s laying to rest and the eternal wellbeing of his soul, as they knew it. Out of politeness, they would not advocate for the kind of service they wished for, at the risk of offending us.
On the other hand, I couldn’t have implied that I didn’t care, that as far as I was concerned, any service, religious or not, would be a strange exercise in ritual and symbol, dreadfully but necessarily public. I have no desire to offend to devalue the faiths of friends and family members. Nor could I say that my father wouldn’t have cared. A few weeks before, when it had become clear his condition was entering its final stages, he said that we could throw him in a ditch for all it would matter to him. It was the kind of joke a worried man makes to save face. He didn’t mean it. What I cared about was that he be buried next to his brothers, that his body was in earth he knew, that he was not alone there.
Whatever you think is right, I told my uncle. We don’t know how things are done there. It’s his community, he lives there, things ought to be done according to local convention. No, no, no, he’d say so kindly, holding up his hands. You’re the boss here, whatever you think is right. And eventually, through negotiated politeness, we arrived at a funeral mass which satisfied all parties. The grave digger and the man who was responsible for the plots were different men, but my uncle knew both. A plot was available; a favour had been called in. There would be a singer to arrange too, for the psalms, not to mention the Priest. My uncle would make the phone calls.
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When they left, I stood for a long time at the back door, looking out into the field. McMordie’s herd of cattle lay there in the sunshine; knees tucked under themselves. A calf, though I couldn’t see it, was crying out, in distended lows, in pain, or for something it didn’t have: its mother, its siblings. It cried out again and again until it too became a symbol.
The dead can no longer make meanings for themselves. Those who survive them, unwilling, quite yet to accept such abject powerlessness, make meanings for their dead. Butterflies, a lost calf. None of these things, ghosts neither, are examples of the soul’s enduring agency. The opposite is true. The true subject of death, the living, having to confront for the first time uncanny inertia of the dead, fails to. The lifeforce, the sense of being, we expect is still in the world, is distributed among the animals. They become symbols.
In The Disappearance of Rituals (2020) the philosopher Byung Chul-Han says:
Symbol (Greek: symbolon) originally referred to the sign of recognition between guest-friends (tessera hospitalis). One guest-friend broke a clay tablet in two, kept one half for himself and gave the other half to another as a sign of guest-friendship. Thus, a symbol serves the purpose of recognition.[ix]
Let’s say the lowing calf is a symbol, let’s say the butterfly is, in Chul-Han’s formation, ‘a sign of recognition’. Who recognises who? I do not recognise the butterfly, nor does it recognise me. I recognise myself in disparate parts: sceptical and superstitious, faithless and faithful, child and adult, son and son. They recognise each other, these guest-friends, as if they had undergone the most extraordinary transformation, or were about to.
[i] https://www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/4687705/4685858/4706872
[ii] https://www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/4428066/4374465
[iii] https://www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/4725689/4687576/4714126
[iv] https://www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/4613720/4612523
[v] Thomas, N. W. “The Scape-Goat in European Folklore.” Folklore, vol. 17, no. 3, 1906, pp. 258–87. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1254422. Accessed 4 Jan. 2026.
[vi] Loomis, Roger Sherman. “Arthurian Tradition and Folklore.” Folklore, vol. 69, no. 1, 1958, pp. 1–25. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1259210. Accessed 4 Jan. 2026.
[vii] Gagliardi, Ronald Anthony. “The Butterfly and Moth as Symbols in Western Art.” ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 1976. Print.
[viii] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0001736
[ix] Han, Byung-Chul. The Disappearance of Rituals. Polity Press, 2020.
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Kaleidoscope III