The earliest writers about our butterflies were concerned with a matter to which few today give any thought. They wanted to know what butterflies were for. They must have some purpose, they reasoned, for otherwise God would never have created them. This was a problem because unlike, say, bees, butterflies had very little to offer to mankind. The Puritan physician Thomas Moffet had got hold of a medicinal recipe in which the ‘venomous dung’ of butterflies could be mixed with aniseed, hog’s blood and goat’s cheese to produce an effective cure.1 But butterfly dung, venomous or not, is hard to come by. Lacking anything more useful to fall back on, men of learning were reduced to suggesting other reasons why God should have sent us the butterfly. Again, Moffet thought he had the answer. By being ‘painted in colours more impressive than any robes’, butterflies ‘pulled down’ sinful pride, whilst in the shortness of their lives they taught us to be mindful of our own failing condition. Butterflies both chided and warned. Everyone should be humble and ready for death, said Thomas Moffet’s butterfly.2
By the time John Ray was writing his History of Insects, in the 1690s, it was possible to believe that God had given us butterflies purely for our delight. As Ray famously expressed it:
You ask what is the use of butterflies? I reply to adorn the world and delight the eyes of men: to brighten the countryside like so many golden jewels. To contemplate their exquisite beauty and variety is to experience the truest pleasure. To gaze enquiringly at such elegance of colour and form devised by the ingenuity of nature and painted by her artist’s pencil is to acknowledge and adore the imprint of the art of God.3
John Ray saw in the works of nature a reflection of the mind of God. To him butterflies were entirely benign, apart from the notorious cabbage whites. Some of his contemporaries were equally enthralled by the early stages of the butterfly’s life cycle, the caterpillar and chrysalis, which were less beautiful but had other things to teach us. By mixing Christian philosophy with older, classical ideas of ‘metamorphosis’, they saw in the progression from lowly grub to ‘angelic’ butterfly a mirror of the human soul as it journeyed from birth to death and beyond it to resurrection. That, quite as much as their obvious beauty, is what first led people to take an interest in butterflies. The transformative power of that metaphor is just as strong in our own secular age. The lowly earth-bound grub and the celestial butterfly will go on feeding the imagination for as long as literature exists.
Naturalists today are less concerned with the mind of the Creator and more with what biological role butterflies might play. What difference would it make if every butterfly died out tomorrow? Quite possibly, very little. Yes, butterflies are pollinators but much less importantly than bees.4 Even plants that seem designed for the tongues of butterflies, with their sugar syrup deep inside a long tube, depend more on day-flying moths, such as burnets, than butterflies. Presumably certain host-specific parasites would follow their butterfly victims to extinction. Possibly some crab spiders might go hungry. But, in Britain at least, no other form of life seems to depend on the survival of butterflies. The answer, in human-centred terms, is still the same as John Ray’s: that butterflies are ‘good’ insects because they make us happy.
That is not to assert that butterflies are biologically useless. The adults, and still more their caterpillars and chrysalids, are food for birds, mice, lizards and frogs, as well as a vast number of predatory insects and spiders. Butterflies are neither more nor less ‘necessary’ than most other forms of life. They represent a way of life that evolved with flowering plants and has flourished for millions of years. Success, not usefulness, is the yardstick of evolution. You could sum it all up by saying that butterflies exist because they can.
People seem to have wondered about butterflies, and butterfly-like moths, since the days when we wore skins and lived in caves. There is, for example, a cave painting in the Pyrenees which was once thought to be of owls but which is a much better match for another nocturnal creature, the Eyed Hawkmoth.5 Not far away in a second cave is another crude outline that resembles another insect with eyes in its wings: the Peacock butterfly. Possibly it was the eyes that did it for these thoughtful cave artists: those unblinking orbs that stare out at the world with seeming hostility. Perhaps the men of the Stone Age incorporated these fearfully eyed insects into their philosophy of the world and its mysteries. We will probably never know.
Stylised butterflies reappear in certain artefacts of the Minoan civilisation in Crete around 4,000 years ago. The Minoans had evidently noted the similarity of a butterfly’s shape to one of the key emblems of their culture, the double-bladed axe or labrys. The meaning of this axe is disputed; evidently it was a religious symbol of some kind, for images and remains of such axes have been unearthed in temple locations; they seem to be the approved representation of the thunder god or earth mother. But their effect was to draw butterflies into the belief systems of the Minoans. There was, by implication, something divine in the wings of a butterfly.6
The ancient Greeks took things a step further by explicitly equating butterflies with their idea of the human soul – so much so that butterflies and souls shared the same word: psyche.7 Some of the images used to portray this relationship are disturbing. On one painted jar from the Attic period, around 600 BC, two naked black-painted figures are taking part in some obscene rite. The one on the left plays the reed pipes while drops of semen fall from his erect phallus … and promptly turn into a butterfly.8 The philosopher Heraclitus held that the soul was an exhalation of fluid. Other philosophers, including Plato, believed that soul and semen were in some way connected, and the design on this antique pot seems to be making the same point. This belief was long-lasting, for the priapic man and the butterfly pop up again in stone-cut images from Roman times.
Butterflies also appear in the tombs of ancient Egypt, notably on a fragment of wall plaster now in the British Museum. It was formerly part of the tomb of one Nebamun, a ‘counter of grain’ who lived around 1400 BC.9 It shows an everyday hunting scene in the Nile valley. Nebamun has left the counting of his grain to have a day out with his family, catching birds in the marshes. He is obviously having a good day for there are birds all around, including shrikes and egrets, three of which he has caught by the legs (while his cat has grabbed another by the wing). The kerfuffle has also disturbed a number of large reddish butterflies with white spots in the corners of their wings. They flutter above the lotus lilies and papyrus reeds which Nebamun’s wife is collecting, perhaps to arrange in a vase back in Memphis. These are well-observed real butterflies, identifiable as the Plain Tiger, Danaus chrysippus, a migrant related to the Monarch which is still to be found in Africa and the Middle East today. Perhaps, by including them so prominently in his tomb chapel, the grain counter was hoping the butterflies would accompany him into the hereafter. He obviously liked butterflies. Perhaps, since human beings have always differentiated familiar kinds of animals, Nebamun even had a special name for his Plain Tigers.
We also find identifiable butterflies among the ruins of Pompeii. Among the mosaics that once adorned the floors of the wealthier houses preserved under the volcanic ash of ad 70 is one of a skull on top of fortune’s wheel. Memento mori or ‘remember you will die’ is the merry message. Sandwiched between skull and wheel is a butterfly with apparently iridescent wings patterned with blobs of blue and half-moons of yellow and white. Again the artist appears to have drawn his inspiration from a real butterfly; it seems to be his best shot at reproducing the pattern and purple iridescence of the Lesser Purple Emperor, Apatura ilia.10 Skulls and butterflies appear together in similar compositions from antiquity to the Renaissance. They symbolise death and the afterlife; the transformation from earthly grub to heavenly wings that we must all hope to attain when our time is up.
Butterflies are fairly frequent ornaments on the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages. Brown or white ones flutter in the foliage that surrounds the painted illuminations in the Hastings Book of Hours, a work of devotion made around 1480 for Lord Hastings (he who lost his head in Shakespeare’s Richard III).11
More sinister butterflies appear in the famous triptych of Hieronymous Bosch, The Garden of Delights, painted around 1500. They are painted with great care and accuracy even though their natural bodies have been replaced by those of little demons. On the central panel a creature with the forewings of a Small Tortoiseshell sips nectar from a cardoon (a large blue thistle). All around it scores of sinners are having the time of their lives, making love, gobbling strawberries and riding in a cavalcade of fantastic animals. Bosch’s precise meaning is not always clear but he seems to have chosen the butterfly, as well as his bright jays, hoopoes and woodpeckers, as symbols of the temptations of the flesh.12 Bosch’s sinners are attracted both to the beauty of their human partners and to all the fantastic animals, birds and flowers around them. But beyond the carnival of pleasure we can see, although they cannot, where it is all leading. Hell is just round the corner, on the third panel, awaiting their quailing souls. An alternative interpretation might be that Bosch’s tortoiseshell butterfly offers the promise of salvation but that none of the sinners are interested because they are far too busy sinning. This is where it all leads, explains Bosch, with a sigh and a roll of his eyes, as he dips his brush into the red pot to paint another demon.
To make the point even more explicit, the beasts and birds of the ‘garden’ have ghastly counterpoints in the hell panel. Here resides our second butterfly, a demonic Meadow Brown. It seems to be officiating at a wedding – except that, by contrast with the diaphanous young women of the central panel, this bride is hideous. The sombre-coloured Meadow Brown seems to have been associated with the underworld. According to Franz Schrank, a German entomologist writing in 1801, it was the child of ‘dusky Proserpina’, the queen of Hades.13 In consigning the butterfly to the genus Maniola, meaning ‘little ghost’, Schrank may also have been playing on the word ‘mania’, a mad frenzy of the sort that certainly animates The Garden of Earthly Delights. Bosch’s Meadow Brown is a devil from hell, and as it turns its hideous beaked head towards the cowering bridegroom-soul you can almost hear it saying, ‘I told you so.’
According to the story told by the Christian fathers, the rebel angels lost their bright wings when they were evicted from heaven and thereafter took on an ugly form emblematic of their wickedness. Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c.1525–69) captures that moment in his painting Fall of the Rebel Angels. High up among the clouds, the host of the wicked is being beaten back by a swarm of angels led by St Michael (distinguished by his red cross). The rebels are turning into various slithering or flapping forms in front of our eyes, some with the wings of insects, others more like bats. But their leader, Lucifer, still wears his original, bright wings.14 They are those of a European Swallowtail, although the artist has exaggerated the length of the tails perhaps for sinister effect. Bruegel may be reminding us of the beauty Lucifer once had, back in his glory days before the fall (Lucifer means ‘the bringer of light’). In a moment he will lose his bright wings and turn into the horned, bat-like creature we know so well.
The polymathic German artist and engraver Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) could draw plants and animals in extraordinarily realistic detail, but also, like Bruegel, he could include insects in his pictures to make a moral point. In his large canvas The Adoration of the Magi, it is easy to miss the two butterflies fluttering close to the skirts of the Virgin Mary. The pale one is a rather faded Painted Lady, a species Dürer might have known as the ‘Belladonna’. The other is that ‘gilded butterfly’, the Clouded Yellow; and, whether or not by coincidence, this butterfly is a male. The artist’s positioning suggests that their purpose is to echo the Virgin and Child, and thereby underline the message that lies at the heart of the picture. Dürer would have known his Greek philosophy, which held that each human body contained a soul symbolised by the butterfly. But the butterfly was also a well-known metaphor for the transience of life and the inevitability of death. Earthly existence is as brief as the life of a butterfly; only the soul is immortal. In allowing butterflies into his picture, Dürer is reminding us that although the Adoration was but an instant in time, the glory of God lasts for ever. The image is both transient and timeless.15
There is a common thread running through these emblematic butterflies from ancient times to the European Renaissance. Indeed, the thread runs on into early modern times as we have already noted in the case of the Red Admiral. Throughout the Dutch Golden Age, painted butterflies act as coded references to Christian beliefs about life and death, salvation and damnation. The butterfly might symbolise goodness or evil, depending on the species and its role in the composition, but either way they were brought in to add depth and meaning.
It seems, then, as if artists have long seen something spiritual in the butterfly. They are set apart from other winged life by their colours and graceful flight; they are the closest thing the natural world offers to our idea of the spirit. To a variety of cultures from ancient times to the near-present, butterflies have represented the visible part of the human soul.
I am uncomfortable about the idea of a soul. When I was a child they told me not only that I had one but that it was the most precious part of me. When I died my body would decay but my soul would be whisked off either to heaven or to hell depending on how things went. I did not like the sound of that. Even as a child I would much rather have been properly dead than hang about indefinitely as a disembodied wraith. But, as I discovered, there were other possible options. Some said it was more likely that my soul would be recycled into some other living creature, a nice girl’s pet guinea pig, if I was good, or, if not, maybe a starved, beaten donkey. Or an earwig, or the lowly worm. Buddhism seemed to apportion rewards and punishments in a similar way to Christianity. After a while, I began to doubt whether my soul, if it existed, was of any interest to divine beings of any hue, assuming they existed. The concept of a soul seemed to make no sense without God; ergo, if God did not exist then neither did the soul. Unless of course you believed in the supernatural, and you stopped doing that the day you caught Dad instead of Santa tiptoeing in with the Christmas presents and stumbling on the mat.
For today’s earthly sceptic, the soul is a metaphor, a convenient word for our deepest and most intense feelings – love, desire, doubt, suffering. But even on that reduced definition, you constantly meet people who seem to manage all right without one. No one alive has ever seen a soul and so no one can say with any confidence what it looks like. This was a problem for medieval artists. Since they could not depict the genuine thing they had to find some embodiment, some visual metaphor. The obvious place to look for a soul-symbol was the natural world.
For the equally unimaginable Holy Spirit, the Bible offered artists a suitable metaphor in the dove. Perhaps this choice had something to do with the bird’s soft expression, or its consoling cooing, or the possession of wings that resemble those of imagined angels. As Bible readers will know, at the moment Jesus was baptised in the River Jordan the Spirit of God descended from the parted clouds in the form of a dove, surrounded, according to St Matthew, by playful flickers of lightning. Another dove returned to Noah in the Ark carrying in its beak an olive branch to inform the patriarch that the flood waters were subsiding and that it was nearly time to let the animals out. Both dove and olive branch are emblems of peace.
Visualising the soul offers a tougher challenge because it is rooted within us, not left to flutter outside like a bird. Soul is an expression of feeling, a thing of the mind, close to the idea of a dream. Psychology takes its name from the Greek word for ‘soul’, psyche. According to Freud, the psyche is ever present in the unconscious, to be released in dreams when deep feelings well up like bubbles from mud at the bottom of a pond. Psychologists are to dreams what medicine is to the body, but not even Freud could inform us what the psyche looked like. The Bible is no help either, and neither is Socrates who seems to have invented the idea of a non-physical presence lurking within us. It was Aristotle, the ‘natural philosopher’, who first made an explicit connection between the soul and the butterfly.16 He noted how the butterfly progresses from condensed dew – his explanation for their origin – to the greedy crawling caterpillar, then through an apparently ‘dead’ coffin stage, the pupa (nekydallos or ‘little corpse’), and on to the climactic moment when the creature creeps from its ‘tomb’, unfurls its brilliant wings and takes to the skies. Aristotle saw in this transformation a revelation of how the sensitive soul (anima in Latin) propels the insect along its complicated journey from worm to the perfect imago. So it was, he taught, with all life, including the lives of human beings. Unlike butterflies, we are blessed with reason, but, in much the same way as the butterfly’s journey from crawling worm to winged flight, so the human soul journeys towards perfection in its eventual release from the body. Hence we live our earthly lives in the sinful caterpillar state and it is only after the death of the body that our soul finally escapes into the spirit world.
This immortal soul was often represented by a butterfly. One such butterfly sits on the tomb of Beethoven in Vienna as a symbol of the immortality of great art. When classically trained artists wished to create an image of Psyche, they gave her the form of a beautiful young woman with a pair of insect wings – the round, veined wings of a butterfly or moth. In some adaptations she is shown wingless but with a white butterfly hovering suggestively nearby. As the artist saw her, Psyche was a sort of double being, a combination of a flawless female body and a perfect white butterfly. And even when rational people ceased to believe in this stuff, artists such as Canova continued to sculpt her image. For, quite apart from anything else, the naked woman-butterfly was lovely to look at.
Even back in the 1590s, long before science had banished the obscurities of superstition, Thomas Moffet could scoff at the ‘silly people’ who insisted that ‘the souls of the dead did fly in the night seeking light’.17 Moffet’s religion told him to frown on non-biblical explanations, and the idea of ghosts hanging about in the darkness seemed to him to be a joke. So it does to us, at least until some moment of crisis or disaster, such as the sudden death of a loved one. Then, at least for a short while, we feel the need to look beyond the rational and hope there is some existence beyond earthly life after all.
Religious people endeavour to search beyond themselves to make sense of life, to look for consolation or redemption, towards some external, heavenly power for hope or forgiveness. It is human to want to feel that death is not final; that something happens beyond it, on the far side, even if it is not necessarily heaven or hell. A swarm of migrant butterflies over the Western Front during the First World War got many soldiers thinking of dead comrades and passing souls; there was an added poignancy to the fact that the butterflies were unaffected by the war, their beauty still unblemished.18 Bereaved mothers have sometimes seen in a visiting moth the soul of their recently dead child. Moths, after all, live in the darkness but seek the light.
Many poets and writers from ancient times to the present day have alluded to the anima that seems to dwell inside a butterfly or moth. None did so more hauntingly than Virginia Woolf who saw in a dying moth a glimpse of this ‘divine energy’ at work in a small, insignificant body, ‘as if someone had taken a tiny bead of pure life and decking it as lightly as possible with down and feathers, had set it dancing and zig-zagging to show us the true nature of life’.19 It seemed to her that some external force was at work in its flutterings at the window followed by a sudden surrender to death. Was this what Aristotle saw too? In Virginia’s case, the moth seems to have been part of a train of thought that ended in the river a few weeks later, when she drowned herself. Her last book, The Death of the Moth and Other Essays, was published posthumously.
Moths baffle us with their strange habits. Butterflies we can watch on their daily rounds, feeding from flowers, basking on warm stones, even going to bed in the evening when some of them roost communally and turn the grass stalks into a butterfly dormitory. We relate to butterflies because we too enjoy drinking, basking and sleeping. But the lives of moths, being creatures of the night, are hidden from us except at odd moments when we find them, huddled and inert, on the window pane, or under the porch light. Moths risk death – indeed, they seem to welcome it – in their helpless attraction to the flames of candles. We have forgotten now what every home once knew: the smell of singed moth. And not just the smell. W. H. Hudson described the sound of a burning moth as ‘indistinct, faint [like] a dream in the night’.20 Round and round the burning candle they go, like the moons around Jupiter (suggested Nabokov), drawing closer and closer to their fiery destiny until, at length getting stuck in the hot candle grease, they achieve their apparent desire and frazzle. Of course we have the advantage of knowing that the moth ‘wants’ nothing of the sort. Artificial light simply distorts its ability to navigate using natural beacons such as the moon, and so the insect is drawn to its doom as helplessly and inevitably as a spider going down the plughole.21 But it is the nature of folklore to draw the wrong conclusions from correctly observed behaviour and to assume that the moth is committing suicide. Some compared the flaming insect to a soul drawn heavenward by the divine light. Others saw in it the trials awaiting the Christian on his journey to God: Joan of Arc in the flames, perhaps (and before leaving her there we might recall the legend that swarms of white butterflies accompanied her standard into battle). Don Marquis, in his guise as a cockroach narrator, claimed to have heard from the moth itself that ‘It is better to be happy for a moment/and be burned up with beauty/ than to live for a long time …’22
Miriam Rothschild greatly admired a painting by Balthus titled La Phalène (The Moth). At first it is hard to spot the moth in this very odd picture. What we see instead is a pubescent young girl standing naked in her bedroom, reaching out towards the oil lamp. And then we notice it, a supernatural moth, more spirit than insect, glittering in the light of the lamp. Meanwhile, completely ignored, a second, less conspicuous, far more realistic moth is quietly crawling up the bedclothes.23 Balthus never explained his paintings but he seems to be suggesting that there are two ways of looking at things: the dream and the reality. For philosophers and poets, and sometimes artists too, it was the dream that had the greater emotional impact. Psychic moths and surreal butterflies excite our imaginings; they draw forth thoughts from the depths. Real moths are much more easily ignored. They can be left to the entomologist and the illustrator.
Perhaps it was a sign of growing scepticism when the British ceased to see moths and butterflies as souls and turned them into fairies. The Victorians liked fairies, not because they necessarily believed in them, but because, like science-fiction addicts in the twentieth century, they enjoyed fantasy worlds. Victorian fairies took human form; in their enchanted, night-time world, they glowed faintly, with an incandescent light. Some artists showed fairies with brightly coloured wings, often copied from a real butterfly or moth: the eyed wings of the Emperor Moth were a favourite. Actual butterflies sometimes joined the fun as winged fairy-horses, pulling an acorn-sized chariot through the air. The artist Joseph Noel Paton was inspired by A Midsummer Night’s Dream to paint two huge canvases that swarm with fairies and more-or-less realistic bugs all so mixed up that it is hard to tell which is which.24 One of the Fairy Queen’s attendants has the wings of a Swallowtail, recalling Bruegel’s rebel angel except that this angel is comely and would indeed grace a centrefold in Playboy. The Fairy King wears a butterfly hat. Of course it is all a dream and so they are excused the earthly limitations of science.
I used to dream about butterflies. They are my own proof that we dream in colour. My night-time visitors were intensely coloured. The Red Admirals flickered with fiery red; the exotic Graphium swallowtails were as jungle-green and light-catching as they are in life, and the shine of the morphos, those great blue butterflies named after the god of sleep, winked on and off as they do under the South American sun. I think my butterfly dreams were about longing. I would stand beneath a great flowering tree, a veritable Tree of Life, half-blinded by its scent, watching the clouds of butterflies drawn to the blossom. Mostly, I remember, they were familiar species but in unlikely combinations – emperors, swallowtails and fritillaries all sharing the same flowers. But sometimes – especially in deep, smothered, mothy dreams – the birdwings would come, with even larger, wildly iridescent forms that never existed outside my sleeping imagination. The bush became a Christmas tree of living lights. But if these were dreams of desire, what was it that I desired? To catch them, possibly. At least I remember sometimes leaving that phantasmagoric tree for a moment to rush home and fetch my kite net. It might have rounded off things nicely to bag those dream-butterflies and set them all in a row, but they were always just out of reach, or maybe there was a hole in the net. Mostly I just watched them and was glad.
I am no psychologist and my interpretation of dreams is plain and straightforward. I loved butterflies and at one time my love for them took the form of wanting to possess them. They were not, in my view, metaphors for anything else, nor disguises for wishes and desires unconnected with butterflies. But, awaking from such dreams, I did wonder what I, like anyone else who has ever collected butterflies, was really seeking. Did we kid ourselves that it was in pursuit of a legitimate scientific objective? Was it a childhood fantasy that would not let go? Or was it at bottom some feral, atavistic instinct of the same kind that makes us want to shoot animals or catch fish – or even twitch birds? Was it, in another sense, about chasing a dream? We all want places where we can be ourselves. It might be, for those of a more gregarious temperament, a football match or a club dance. For me, in my mixed-up teens, it was to be out there among the butterflies. I had dream-butterflies fluttering around inside my head even when I was out in some wood or hillside stalking real ones. Even now there are encounters with butterflies that I seem to remember but which were almost certainly only dreams. And possibly the other way round. When I first encountered a great morpho butterfly in languid flight along the forest path in Costa Rica, flashing like a police car’s blue lamp with every trip of its wings, I had the distinct sensation of dreaming. It was the same when, watching a Purple Emperor basking with outstretched wings, the sun suddenly ignited its blinding iridescence, I felt the urge to pinch myself. But the effect depends on being alone with your thoughts. In company, reality reasserts itself immediately. Friends are there to stop you dreaming.
Miriam Rothschild once combed the anthologies for words that had been used to describe butterflies. This was her list:
Simple
Gilded
Angelic
Joyous
Careless
Idle
Dizzy
Chaste
Languid
Silly
Peerless
Elegant25
To which I would add ‘gentle’ and ‘worthless’. Among butterfly metaphors we find:
Grace
Elegance
The soul
Naturalness
Freedom
Happiness
Purity
Transformation
Vulnerability
Resurrection
Hope
I knew a distinguished nature conservationist who let it be known that he was fond of frogs. Word got about and whenever anyone wished to give him a present it was invariably something appropriately amphibious. Soon the poor man could hardly escape the glare of plaster frogs from every shelf; his house was stuffed full of froggery. By the same token my parents’ home ended up with butterfly images everywhere, on biscuit tins and jars, on wall calendars and knick-knacks. My birthday card invariably incorporated a butterfly; they thought it would please me. There was even a case of real butterflies, chosen for their ‘autumn tints’, above the telephone in the hallway which reminded me of Philip Larkin’s line, ‘The case of butterflies so rich it looks / As if all summer settled there and died.’26
I once made a list of all the butterfly images I could find in a supermarket, on organic food, on the healthcare shelves and, appropriately enough, on slabs of butter. A butterfly has a unique shape which we recognise instantly; a simple silhouette is enough. We associate them with sunshine and nature and all that they imply about wholesomeness and health. One of the things which butterflies help to advertise is naturalness. The Marbled White on the shampoo bottle, for instance, hints that the product contains more natural ingredients and fewer chemical additives than its rivals, and no doubt leaves your hair smelling fresh and outdoorsy too. We do not need to know anything about real Marbled Whites to get the message.
Another butterfly – a Monarch – was used to advertise the Open University. On one of the posters an intelligent-looking, middle-aged woman is thinking hard. She is presumably wondering whether she should, as the advert puts it, ‘join the Open University and change her life’. The butterfly fluttering nearby symbolises knowledge, obviously enough, but it also suggests transformation and the freedom which knowledge brings. The best images of this kind are the ones that create the desired response in the consumer immediately without needing to spell it out. Advertisers are traffickers in human souls; they are canny observers of social trends. Their research tells them what people want and they hire artists to create appropriate metaphors of desire. The exact meaning of these billboard butterflies can be left ambiguous. It might be freedom or joy or nature or anything else loosely associated with butterflies, but the message is always positive. Butterflies sell.
Of course real butterflies are not ‘free’ in any meaningful sense. They lack free will and are prisoners of their instincts and of their genes. No real-life butterfly is happy or sad, nor is it ‘chaste’ or ‘hopeful’, nor ‘idle’ nor ‘angelic’. Butterflies are not even particularly ‘fragile’; they can absorb a lot of damage, as the faded and tattered survivors at the end of the season remind us. But a butterfly does have wings and it can fly. Many of us must have longed, sometimes, for a similar set of wings to float away from a trapped existence, like Ria, the Wendy Craig character in the seventies sitcom called – for that reason – Butterflies. Van Gogh must have had the same idea when he painted The Prison Courtyard in which convicts tramp in a circle within the high, oppressive walls of a prison yard. What tugs the heartstrings most are the tiny white butterflies fluttering high above their stooped, grey-capped heads. Are they a symbol of freedom or do they represent life beyond this living death?
Butterflies also stand in some vague but powerful way for self-realisation. Everyone likes to be healthy. A few years ago, Natural England, the government’s nature conservation body, was earnestly peddling the notion of nature as a kind of ‘well-being’ spa – a ‘green gym’ – the idea being that the closer your contact with nature, the healthier you will be (Natural England’s medical advisor, rather happily, was a Dr Bird). Others promote the New Age idea that you can learn more about yourself through nature. Learn from the butterfly, I read, on one self-help website. If only you stop to listen, butterflies have the power to teach you about your inner feelings and so make the right choices in life. For example, by watching the Small Tortoiseshells and Peacocks in the garden you can compare your life with theirs and ask yourself hard questions. Are you are as lively as they are? Are you equally happy and carefree, or as fulfilled? In this representation, the flight of butterflies seems in some mystical way interconnected with our own psyche. It informs us that change does not have to be ‘traumatic’. A further way in which the New Age butterfly can help is in therapeutic exercise. You could, for example, try wrapping yourself in a blanket to make your own ‘cocoon’, then slowly release the folds and emerge like a butterfly. Feel better now?
Well, if it works for you, then it works. Faith, they say, is nine parts of the cure. Alternatively you might agree with Mark Twain that ‘when we remember that we are all mad, mysteries disappear and life stands explained’.27
Perhaps butterflies still stand in some way for the soul. We have become consumers and self-believers, but we also seek something beyond ordinary existence. We are, despite everything, still followers of the metaphorical butterfly.