Short excerpt taken from: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25102579-beetle
For the stone shall cry out of the wall, and the beetle out
of the timber shall answer it.
Habakkuk 2:11
Even the briefest perusal of the beetle’s appearance in diverse
cultures reveals that this animal has represented many things
to many people. The earliest meanings of the beetle, however,
were largely symbolic and based in mythology. To some extent,
even in modern secular societies beetles retain traces of their
archaic significance. This is perhaps unsurprising, since most
of human history has unfolded in natural environments where
a non-scientific engagement with other animals has been the
norm. Insects have long held associations with the supernatural
and the magical, in no small part because their origins and life
cycles remained mysterious for a very long time. Until at least
the end of the seventeenth century in Europe, for example, many
insects were believed to ‘spontaneously generate’ from dead and
decaying matter.
Considered as an order, the beetles inhabit a diversity of mythical
roles. Beetles loom large in the history of mythology and religion,
and the case of the scarab beetle (Scarabaeidae) is an especially
salient one in this regard. Significantly, the scarab beetle represents
an instance of parallel mythology – its symbolic expression of
creation, renewal and rebirth appears across disparate cultures
through time, from ancient Egypt to the African Congo, and from
early Christian symbols of Jesus and the Resurrection, to a Chinese
symbol of autogenesis.1
The case of the scarab’s similar reception by diverse cultures
makes it tempting to suggest that this particular beetle has ‘spoken’
a profound, acultural message to us, merely by undergoing the
routine stages of its life cycle. Did the idea of life after death predate,
and evolve independently from, observations of insect
metamorphosis in early human history? Or is the very notion of
an immortal soul – essential to many of the world’s religions –
drawn directly from a symbolic interpretation of witnessed insect
life cycles? Charles L. Hogue, founder of the relatively obscure
research field known as ‘cultural entomology’, has claimed that the
changes visible in developmental metamorphosis led unrelated
cultures to a parallel adoption of winged adult insects as symbols
of the soul.2While this is an interesting possibility to consider, it
may ultimately be, to evoke another animal expression, a case of
‘the chicken or the egg’. What can at least be said is that observations
of insects ‘resurrected’ from the apparent death of the cocoon or
pupal stage have reinforced various religious convictions that death
is merely a preliminary stage to the fulfilment of a more ‘perfect’
form or state. In this sense (and others), insects do indeed hold an
essential place in the history of religion.
Among the many insects to have inspired the production of
cultural artefacts, it is the beetles who seem to have exerted the
earliest influence. The oldest known sculpture of an insect portrays
a beetle, thought to be a burying beetle (Nicrophorus).3 The burying
beetles (also known as the sexton beetles) are members of the family
Silphidae (carrion beetles), and bury the corpses of small mammals
as a food source for their larvae. Most are black with red markings
on their elytra, and they are notable in that both males and females
care for the brood. Fashioned from coal some 25,000 to 30,000
years ago, the burying beetle artefact was designed to be worn as
a pendant, probably around the neck.
A beetle-shaped lignite pendant dated from the Upper
Palaeolithic period (about 10,000 to 20,000 years ago) also
survives.4 Carved into the shape of a buprestid beetle, it too was
almost certainly made to be worn around the neck, possibly as an
amulet. Buprestids are metallic-looking, often colourful woodboring
beetles, also known as ‘jewel beetles’ owing to their shiny,
highly attractive appearance. The buprestids are among the most
prolific families of beetles, and considering their iridescent hue it
is unsurprising that they caught the attention of early humans.
The buprestid beetle pendant, found at Arcy-sur-Cure in Burgundy,
France, and the burying beetle made of coal, are good physical
evidence that Coleoptera held some significance in the very early
cultural lives of human beings. While it is difficult to speculate
about the precise meanings attached to these artefacts by the
cultures and individuals that produced them, the very existence
of the objects does suggest that the beetles they represent were
seen as embodiments of important powers or values that could be
contained, or at least expressed, by reproductions of their form.
On a more superficial level, these beetles (especially, perhaps, the
buprestids) are simply nice to look at, and the promotion of visual
pleasure in the observation of nature is a historically entrenched,
and deeply important, cultural practice.
The entomologist Yves Cambefort suggests that one way to
understand examples of beetles in ancient cultures is by turning to
the findings of contemporary ethnoentomology, a field which examines
the cultural place of insects in indigenous cultures. Generally
speaking, it is held that for indigenous cultures, beetles have tended
to assume importance both as a food source and because of their
ability to fly. These are physical aspects that resonate with deeper
significances. In many indigenous cultures, shamans are acknow -
ledged as being capable of addressing issues in both the terrestrial
and celestial ‘worlds’ by either ascending or descending into other,
less visible domains – much like various species of beetles.5
In order to grasp what the beetle meant (and continues to mean)
for traditional, indigenous and shamanic cultures, we must first
appreciate that, within such cultures, the beetle is seen as a symbolic
manifestation of divine or occult principles. Many of these principles
relate to shamanic experiences that are systematically excluded
from modern Western cultures. As Cambefort notes, a number of
shamanic cultures incorporate beetles into their creation myths.
In some native South American tribes, a large scarab named Aksak
is said to have modelled men and women from clay. In the creation
myths of the Sumatran Toba, a large scarab was thought to have
brought a ball of matter from the sky in order to form the world
itself. In some pre-Aryan cultures of India and Southeast Asia, the
primeval maker of the world is a diving beetle.6 Similarly, a Cherokee
myth tells of a water beetle that dived into a watery Lower World,
bringing back mud to make the earth, from which the mountains
and valleys were formed.7 The Bushongo of the Democratic Republic
of Congo provide a creation account in which, in the beginning,
there was only water and darkness. The supreme creator, Bumba,
stricken by stomach pain, vomited the world into existence. This
took place in stages: first came the sun, the moon and the stars,
followed by various animals, and eventually human beings. The
animals vomited by Bumba then proceeded to create other animals
of their kind: the scarab was the original insect, and hence created
all other insects.8 According to a myth of the Cochiti Pueblo people,
the Milky Way was formed by a pinacate beetle (Eleodes), who was
responsible for placing stars in the sky. Because of arrogance and
carelessness, the stars were dropped, hence forming the Milky
Way. So ashamed was the beetle at what he had done that even
today the beetle hides his face in the dirt when approached – here
is an insect myth that explains not only insect behaviour, but also
the origin of our own galaxy.9
The wings of jewel beetles were used to adorn some objects
recovered from the tomb of Tutankhamun (fourteenth century bc),
while in Japan the seventh-century Tamamushi shrine in the Temple
of Horyu-ji was thoroughly covered with buprestid elytra. In a
Chinese Taoist text on meditation, ‘The Secret of the Golden Flower’,
the scarab beetle appears as a symbol of the quest to achieve spiritual
immortality:
The scarab rolls his pellet, and life is born in it as an effect
of nondispersed work of spiritual concentration. Now, even
in manure an embryo can develop and cast his ‘terrestrial’
skins, why would the dwelling of our celestial heart not be
able to generate a body too, if we concentrate our spirit on
it?10
The scarab or dung beetle (Scarabaeus sacer) is undoubtedly
the most widely recognized sacred beetle, worshipped most prom -
inently by the ancient Egyptians in a characteristically cryptic
manner. The Egyptians did not make the same distinctions between
beetles as do modern coleopterists, meaning that dung beetles of
numerous genera, including Kheper, Scarabaeus, Gymnopleurus,
Copris and Catharsius (all Scarabaeinae) played important and
prominent roles in the mythology of ancient Egypt.11 For the
Egyptians, the dung beetle came to represent the concept of ‘becoming’,
symbolizing cheper, meaning ‘to become, to come into being;
the being, the form’, and the god Cheper or Khepri is regarded as
one of the many forms taken by the god Ra, who is often portrayed
either with a scarab above his head, or with a scarab in place of a
human head.12
As grand and enchanting as the Egyptian deification of the humble
dung beetle may seem, it was based on a fundamental
misperception of the insect’s life cycle. It was widely believed that
dung beetles were exclusively male and reproduced asexually – this
established a correspondence with (male) deities who had ‘brought
themselves into existence’. Additionally, the scarab beetle’s habit
of forming a sphere from dung and rolling it across the ground
before burying it (and himself ) was understood as symbolic of the
sun’s passage across the sky and subsequent ‘burial’ in the Earth,
before being reborn the following day (or in the scarab beetle’s
case, emerging from the ground fifteen to eighteen weeks later).
This had been the standard interpretation of the sacred scarab
beetle’s place in Egyptian culture, at least since Plutarch’s firstcentury
On the Worship of Isis and Osiris:
As for the Beetills, they hold, that throughout all their kinds
there is no female, but all the males do blow or cast their seed
into a certain globus or round matter in the form of balls,
which they drive from them and roll to and fro contrariwise,
like as the Sun, when he moveth himself from the West to the
East, seemeth to turn about the Heaven clean contrary.13
We now know that the male beetle buries the dung ball as a
food store in a nest, burrowed either at a location within rolling
distance, or directly beneath the dung heap itself. The young hatches
from an egg, which is laid into another, pear-shaped ball made by
the male or the female, fashioned by the female in an underground
chamber of the nest. From here, the larva will then typically emerge
from the brood ball as an adult and begin the cycle again. Sadly,
the Egyptians seem to have remained completely ignorant of the
female scarab beetle and her subterranean labours, believing that
the male beetle simply plants his seed in the dung ball, from which
his offspring was thought to later emerge. This allowed the
Egyptians to associate their view of the dung beetle with the divine
power Khepri, the morning sun reborn each day. The beetle was
also associated with Atum, to whom the creation of the universe
was ascribed, and who was also self-engendered.14
Because the dung beetle was so strongly coupled with the concept
of rebirth, carvings of its image – known generally as scarabs
– became immensely popular in ancient Egypt, and later throughout
the Mediterranean region, where they were mass-produced as
generic ‘lucky charms’. The Romans would wear talismanic rings
bearing images of the scarab, and for some time it was believed
that scarabs carved from green emerald could improve eyesight;
hence it was customary for engravers of precious stones to gaze
upon the image of the beetle at regular intervals throughout the
day.15 In Egypt, scarabs were often placed with the dead in burial
chambers (often over the heart), usually with an inscription from
the Book of the Dead on their flat underside. A typical inscription
on the heart scarab translates as ‘O my heart, rise not up against
me as witness,’ a plea intended to ensure forgiveness from Osiris,
god of the underworld and judge of the dead.16
One of the earliest documented reproductions of the scarab
beetle is in the form of a small alabaster case, dating from the
early first dynasty (around 3,000 bc), which, according to the
British Egyptologist Flinders Petrie, was designed to be attached
to a necklace and might have been made to contain a true beetle.17
Scarab images were also engraved on seals, which were used to
establish authenticity and ownership of property. Although some
scarabs were fashioned from gold, silver or bronze, and others
from many kinds of stone, most were made of talc, which in its
natural state is soft and easy to carve. It would then be dipped
into a hot liquid glaze, colouring the scarab blue or green and
creating a glossy sheen while solidifying it.18 The trouble with
scarabs, as anyone who has attempted to study them quickly
discovers, is that there are so many and, with the exception of
those made of glazed composition in moulds, no two are alike.19
In this sense, the scarabs mirror the problem of diversity presented
by the beetles themselves. There are nine well-defined phases in
the history of scarab making, spanning from the end of the Old
Kingdom to the early Eighteenth Dynasty, with each phase pro -
ducing its own characteristic scarabs.20
There are some suggestions, however, that the scarab beetle’s
influence on ancient cultures of the Mediterranean, Middle East
and North Africa extends well beyond the urge to craft seals and
amulets in their likeness. In 1975 Hogue observed in passing that
the mummy-like pupa probably had been seen to represent the
death of the earthbound larva, while the dramatic metamorphosis
into a resplendent, flying adult similarly represented a kind of
miraculous resurrection.21 Cambefort followed up this comparison
in the 1980s, asserting that, in all probability, the Egyptian mummy
is actually an emulation of the scarab pupa, being a temporary
condition intended to protect the dead body and the
transformations (or khepru) it must undergo before resurrection.22
Furthermore, he observed that a truncated dung heap (from which
some adult scarab beetles emerge) resembles a cross-section of a
pyramid, meaning that these most powerful of architectural
achievements should be understood as elaborate models of faecal
deposits.23 It is not clear, however, whether Cambefort’s inter -
pretation (which does not seem widely shared among Egyptologists)
is based on current knowledge of how the Egyptians actually
regarded their own mummification practices, or is a novel per -
ception based on superficial resemblances. In the absence of
compelling evidence of the former, the latter seems more likely.
There seems to be little evidence that the Egyptians studied or
understood the pupal stage of the scarab beetle’s metamorphosis.
Cambefort observes that ‘some indications suggest’ Egyptian priests
got the idea to examine what happened to the beetle’s dung ball
when it was buried beneath the ground, and that they ‘probably’
made the entomological observation of metamorphosis, pre-dating
those of the French entomologist and great popularizer of insect
life Jean-Henri Fabre by about 5,000 years.24
Even so, the idea that the most famous and enduring of Egyptian
religious and architectural achievements ultimately owe their inspir -
ation to the beetle cannot be ruled out altogether. Entomologists,
both amateur and professional, have often been tempted to draw
comparisons between the feats of engineering and construction
performed by insects and those of human beings. Fabre wrote of
the scarab beetle:
One would never weary of admiring the variety of tools
wherewith they are supplied, whether for shifting, cutting
up and shaping the stercoral matter or for excavating deep
burrows in which they will seclude themselves with their
booty. This equipment resembles a technical museum where
every digging-implement is represented. It includes things
that seem copied from those appertaining to human industry
and others of so original a type that they might well serve
us as models for new inventions.25
Another, perhaps even more dramatic hypothesis regarding
the scarab beetle’s influence on human culture is offered by the
biologist Gerhard Scholtz, who suggests that the scarab’s use of
‘wheels’ (that is, the balls of dung it rolls across the ground) inspired
humans in the Middle East to invent the wheel itself. Given that
domesticated hooved animals were kept in the region at the time,
and that scarabs are attracted to their dung, it is possible that shepherds
observed the ball-rolling beetles over time and from this
drew inspiration for the wheel. The invention of the wheel was particularly
important because it combined the mythological aspect
of round objects with a practical purpose.26 Furthermore, although
human beings have a long history of turning observations of nature
into technological ends, the wheel is generally regarded as something
we came up with on our own, as a ‘nature-independent
cultural achievement’.27 Scholtz’s theory presents an intriguing
(but ultimately speculative) argument for the most widely applied
technological accomplishment of human civilization having been
fundamentally inspired by the observation of beetles rolling balls
of livestock faeces across the ground. A more deflating explanation
of the foremost ‘nature-independent’ invention is, perhaps, difficult
to imagine. It also raises the question of why the Egyptians did not
manufacture their own wheels, based on their observations of the
scarab beetle’s efforts – such an invention may have proved somewhat
useful in the construction of the pyramids, among other endeavours.
This kind of cultural ambiguity seems to be an essential quality
of beetles – while they hover and crawl on the periphery of our
cultivated human ‘world’, they consistently intimate a more
profound degree of involvement in our cultural history than we
may care to acknowledge. Few of us would readily associate the
beetle with historical conceptions of the Virgin Mary, for example.
Yet the association is a well-established one, especially in the
European folk tradition. In his pioneering work of 1865 on
the history of insects in human culture, Frank Cowan outlines the
traditional significance of the ‘ladybird’ (the Coccinellidae family).
In Scandinavia, this beetle is dedicated to the Virgin Mary, and is
generally known as Nyckelpiga (‘our Lady’s key-maid’), and in
Sweden more particularly as Jungfru Marias Gullhöna – the Virgin
Mary’s golden hen. In Germany, it has been called Frauen or Marienkäfer
(lady beetles of the Virgin Mary), and in France is known as
vaches Dieu (cows of the Lord) and bêtes de la Vierge (animals of the
Virgin). Its various English names – ladybird, ladybug, ladyfly,
ladycow, ladyclock and ladycouch (a Scottish name) – also reference
this dedication.28
The term ‘lady-bird’ appears in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet
(1597), where it carries the potentially slanderous meaning of ‘tart’
or ‘whore’,29 when exclaimed by Lady Capulet’s nurse:
Now by my maidenhead – at twelve year old –
I bade her come. What lamb! What lady-bird!
God forbid! Where’s this girl? What Juliet! (i.3)
The description of the Coccinella as ‘ladies’ appears in print at
least as early as the English poet Michael Drayton’s The Muses
Elizium viii: The Eighth Nimphall (1630), which relates the efforts
of three nymphs to prepare for the marriage of one of their own,
Tita, to a fairy, or ‘fay’. One of the nymphs, Mertilla, is concerned
that they have forgotten Tita’s buskins (knee-high cloth or leather
boots), to which another, Claia, replies:
We had, for those I’ll fit her now,
They shall be of the lady-cow:
The dainty shell upon her backe
Of crimson strew’d with spots of blacke;
Which as she holds a stately pace,
Her leg will wonderfully grace.30
Ladybird folklore is especially prominent in Germany, where
ornaments in their likeness are used even today to decorate
Christmas trees. Here, the beetles themselves are considered a sign
of good luck, as they are in a number of other European countries,
including England. The German tradition seems to stem from an
aphid attack on wine grapes – to which the farmers responded by
praying to the Virgin Mary to help save their crops. Soon afterwards,
the crops were saved by the small red beetles, which devoured
almost all the aphids and thus saved not only the crops, but the
grape industry itself. The farmers concluded that their prayers to
Mary, also known as ‘Our Lady’, had been answered, and so in her
honour the beetles were named Merienkäfer (Merienmeaning Mary,
and Käfer meaning beetle), which soon became ‘ladybird’ or ‘ladybug’
in the u.s.31
Ladybirds thus embody both religious and agricultural concerns
– a quality transposed onto a number of other insects throughout
history and across cultures (the biblical locust springs to mind).
The German dedication to the ladybird as a divine omen was tested
in 2009, however, when large numbers of an Asian ladybird species,
Harmonia axyridis, arrived in Hamburg and other areas of northern
Germany. The sudden influx was explained as a result of unusually
humid summer days – and perhaps, ultimately, as a sign of global
warming. The first European sighting of the Asian ladybird was in
Belgium in 2001, and since that time it has proceeded to spread
across much of Europe. These immigrants from the east, despite
inhabiting the maligned category of ‘foreign invasive species’,
actually ensure local aphid levels are kept in check, to the great
benefit of farmers.32 One can imagine how reverently their appearance
would have been regarded in the religious (and entomologically
primitive) climate of seventeenth-century Europe.
Perhaps the most familiar folk tradition relating to the ladybird,
at least to English readers, is found in a popular nursery rhyme:
‘Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home / Your house is on fire, your
children will burn!’ Dating from the early eighteenth century, this
verse, despite its whimsical nature, actually relates to a biological
fact: the larvae of the ladybird tend to feed on the lice or aphids
that live on the vines of hop plants, and fire is a traditional means
with which to destroy these aphids. When the fire ignites the plants,
however, the ladybirds’ ‘children’, too, are thus endangered.33
While some beetles may embody the very essence of holy ben -
evolence and grace, others represent quite the opposite. A European
rove beetle, Ocypus olens, is commonly known as the Devil’s coachhorse.
A long, black beetle, beneficial to farmers in its consumption
of wireworms (the larvae of click beetles), it typically adopts a
threatening stance when confronted, raising its tail in the manner
of a scorpion and showcasing its mandibles. An Irish folk legend,
told in the counties of Wicklow and Waterford, describes this beetle
(in Irish, ‘daol’) as the Devil incarnate:
The day before Our Lord’s betrayal He came to a field where
the people were sowing corn. He blessed the work, and as
a result the crop grew up miraculously, so that when the
Jews searching for Our Lord next day came to the spot they
found a field of wheat. They inquired if the Saviour had gone
that way, and were told He had passed when the corn was
being sowed. ‘That is too long ago,’ they said, and turned
back. Then the Evil One, taking the form of a Darragh Daol,
put up his head and said, ‘Yesterday, yesterday,’ and set His
enemies on His track. Wherefore the Dar Daol should be
killed whensoever met.34
There is, however, only one correct way to kill the Dar Daol – with
fire. Any object used to crush it, whether one’s thumb, boot, a stone
or stick, will afterwards occasion mortal injury to man or animal
with only the slightest blow.35
In various European countries, and at least since the time of
the ancient Greeks, the common dor beetle (Geotrupes stercorarius),
a dung beetle, has also been associated with the Devil. In The Peace,
a comedy by the Athenian playwright Aristophanes, staged in 421
bc, the countryman Trygaeus has his slaves feed a dor beetle on
the dung of asses until it is large enough for him to ride into the
heavens for a conference with Zeus. The Greeks regarded the dor
beetle as the ‘Devil’s steed’, and it was similarly regarded in the
folklore of central Europe. In Carinthia, in southern Austria, it is
known as a Hexenkäfer, or witch beetle, and it is believed that if a
farmer’s wife needs help all she needs to do is keep a dor beetle in
her armpit. Three weeks later, a small man – no taller than a human
thumb – will hatch, and then do all the work required by the
farmer’s wife. But he must never be taken into church, because to
do so will cause a fire.36
Dor beetles have also been traditionally used as weather forecasters
and fortune tellers. Various European tales tell of the dor
beetle as a familiar of witches, associate it with ghostly apparitions
and allege its ability to conjure treasure. One story recounts how,
after being driven from a house by exorcism, a particularly vengeful
dor beetle responded by suffocating the officiating priest’s cow.
Yet despite these exuberant associations with the black arts, a
French legend tells of a dor beetle that drank the blood of Christ
at the foot of the cross at Golgotha – a tale which is almost certainly
based on the fact that, when excited, the dor beetle produces a
drop of red fluid. They are also known in some parts of Austria as
‘our Lord’s oxen’, on account of the assistance they are thought
to have provided to Mary on her return from Egypt, hitching
themselves to the front of her wagon.37
The idea that at least some beetles reproduce asexually – and
thus have a special connection to the purity of the divine – did not
expire with the Egyptians. It was retained until at least the end of
the sixteenth century in Europe, when the systematic study of
insects was in its formative stages. Thomas Moffett’s The Theatre
of Insects is the first book dedicated to insects to have been published
in England; a Latin first edition (Insectorum sive minimorum animalium
theatrum) appeared in 1634, and the English edition in 1658. However,
the original manuscript, held at the British Library (and containing
many finely coloured illustrations, as opposed to the published
editions’ crude woodcuts), is dated 1589. The manuscript has a
complicated history, and represents a collection and arrangement
of work produced by preceding sixteenth-century figures, including
Thomas Penny, Conrad Gessner and Edward Wotton, rather than
solely original work by Moffett. The Theatre of Insects indicates that
beetle autogenesis was still held as a matter of fact by some European
natural philosophers of the time. Moffett discusses a beetle with a
‘Buls horn’ – known today as the elephant beetle:
Like to Beetles it hath no female, but it shapes its own form
it self. It produceth its young one from the ground by it self,
which Joach Camerarius did elegantly express, when he sent
to Pennius [Thomas Penny] the shape of this Insect out of
the storehouse of natural things of the Duke of Saxony; with
the Verses:
A Hee begat me not, nor yet did I proceed
From any Female, but myself I breed.38
In an example of the (often complicated) culture of exchange
that existed between natural philosophers of the time, the image
of the elephant beetle presented by Moffett is derived from a speci -
men originally sent by Joachim Camerarius to the English physician
and student of insects Thomas Penny, who reproduced its likeness.
The couplet accompanying the specimen, written by Camerarius,
was later reproduced, in Latin, by the Flemish miniaturist Joris
Hoefnagel, a friend of Camerarius, to accompany his own illustration,
not of an elephant beetle but a stag beetle, which Moffett
claims was copied from a depiction in the Duke of Saxony’s
Kunstkammer (cabinet of curiosities).39 The original manuscript of
the Theatre contains a pasted-in image of the elephant beetle, drawn
by Penny some time prior to 1589, and apparently copied by
Hoefnagel and presented in his Archetypa of 1592.
The misguided view of the beetle as asexual – in particular, the
stag beetle – allowed it to function as an effective, if subtle, referent
of Christ. For an observer to infer this symbolic meaning of the
stag beetle, they would require (false) knowledge of its reproductive
cycle – which would seem to limit the beetle’s symbolic meaning
to a comparatively small number of natural philosophers. Within
the philosophical context of much European natural history illustration
around 1600, the fusion of the Antique and Christian
traditions led to a distinct, intellectual approach to animals, an
approach focused on knowing as well as representing.40 Natural
historians were now producing images intended to facilitate know -
ledge of what the images depicted, rather than as mere adornments
to illuminated manuscripts. This new relationship of knowledge
and the image was especially suited to the accurate, ‘intellectual’
portrayal of the smallest of God’s creations then known to exist:
the insects.
One of the most famous insect images to have been produced
within this mode is Stag Beetle, a watercolour by the German artist
Albrecht Dürer. Finished in 1505, it is usually regarded as preempting
the kind of reverent attention to insects developed by
subsequent artists. Dürer had written that ‘it is indeed true that
art is omnipresent in nature, and the true artist is he who can bring
it out’. Consequently Stag Beetle presents a vivid image of the natural
subject: poised, purposeful and dignified, it conveys a lifelike
countenance and casts a convincing shadow across the canvas,
giving the figure a formal depth lacking in contemporary images
of insects, most of which appeared in the borders of printed,
devotional prose. Dürer had painted the stag beetle (Lucanus cervus)
at least twice before, however. It appears in an explicitly religious
scene, The Virgin among a Multitude of Animals (1503), in the bottom
left of the frame, facing the centre of the scene, and again in The
Adoration of the Magi (1504), which portrays the infant Christ
receiving gifts from the magi, or ‘wise men’; on the step in the
bottom right of the frame, an enlarged stag beetle faces away from
the scene. In both paintings, the beetle’s presence is subtle, but
conspicuous nevertheless.
It was Dürer’s Stag Beetle, in particular, that captivated those
interested in representing insects in the final quarter of the sixteenth
century, when a revival of interest in Dürer’s nature studies was
sparked by a copy of Stag Beetle in 1574 by Hans Hoffmann.41 From
this period onwards, the image was widely emulated by artists and
students of both insects and other assorted ‘microfauna’. There is
good reason to suspect that this image is probably the oldest
European picture of a beetle which can be reliably identified to the
species.42 This makes Stag Beetle a highly significant intersection
of the allegedly distinct arenas of artistic and scientific illustrations
of insects, showing that much of what counts as a ‘scientific’ image
has its roots in aesthetics.
Hoefnagel was one of many artists to copy Dürer’s beetle, but
rather than merely riding on Dürer’s coat-tails, he advanced the
accurate, ‘faithful’ illustration of insects in its entirety. Hoefnagel
was the first painter to raise insects in their various phenotypes to
the status of independent pictorial subjects.43 Recognizing the
power of portraying the singular insect in careful detail, Hoefnagel
exemplifies the emergence of what would become modern
entomological illustration, but he was still deeply committed to
conveying the theological significance of his natural subjects –
especially insects. Although all natural subjects were of theological
importance (since nature was held to be the most tangible
expression of the Creator), this was not simply a case of ‘painting
of beetle = reference to Christ’. The question of the symbolic content
of insect depictions must take into account the contemporary belief
that each animal, even the smallest, contains the totality of the
plan of creation within itself. Since even the tiniest animal is to be
seen as an emanation of Creation, they always point beyond
themselves towards the whole.44
Many of the mottoes that accompany the images in Hoefnagel’s
Archetypa studiaque patris Georgii Hoefnagelii (1592), reflecting on
the tragic brevity of life, are drawn from Erasmus’s Adagia (first
published in 1500, but expanded significantly afterwards). Erasmus
held that the beetle was ‘a symbol of baseless fear, because the insect
has a habit of suddenly flying in at nightfall with a horrible buzzing
noise’.45 The stag beetle was taken up by a number of other artists
during the seventeenth century, such as the German still-life painters
Georg Flegel and Peter Binoit, and the Dutch draughtsman Claes
Janszoon Visscher, who copied Hoefnagel’s illustrations. It also
appears conspicuously in later works, such as August Johann Rösel
von Rosenhof ’s Insecten-Belustigung (1746–61).
It is difficult to know at what point the stag beetle ‘lost’ its
Christian connotations, or to what extent the artists intended its
image to function in this way. Retrospective interpretations of
symbolism in art are often fraught with difficulties; some, for
example, have interpreted the stag beetle in Dürer’s The Virgin
among a Multitude of Animals as a symbol of evil.46 What can be
said is that insects retained – and indeed, with the development
and application of the microscope, gained – theological significance
into the seventeenth century. The pioneering Dutch microscopist
Jan Swammerdam, upon dissecting a stag beetle in 1673, wrote to
the Royal Society in London that ‘Everywhere and in the humblest
of creatures the traces of divine wisdom and supreme skill are made
known.’47 With the dawning of what is commonly referred to as
the Scientific Revolution, the beetle was poised to take on a new
dimension of importance – retaining its emblematic significance,
it was also becoming a ‘specimen’, a Latin term meaning ‘something
that indicates’, itself from specere, meaning ‘to perceive with the
eyes’. With the seventeenth-century appearance of the microscope,
and the steady development of standardized natural history
illustration and collection practices, the beetle was now subject to
a new kind of gaze, which in turn was transforming it into a new
kind of animal – an animal of science.
For the stone shall cry out of the wall, and the beetle out
of the timber shall answer it.
Habakkuk 2:11
Even the briefest perusal of the beetle’s appearance in diverse
cultures reveals that this animal has represented many things
to many people. The earliest meanings of the beetle, however,
were largely symbolic and based in mythology. To some extent,
even in modern secular societies beetles retain traces of their
archaic significance. This is perhaps unsurprising, since most
of human history has unfolded in natural environments where
a non-scientific engagement with other animals has been the
norm. Insects have long held associations with the supernatural
and the magical, in no small part because their origins and life
cycles remained mysterious for a very long time. Until at least
the end of the seventeenth century in Europe, for example, many
insects were believed to ‘spontaneously generate’ from dead and
decaying matter.
Considered as an order, the beetles inhabit a diversity of mythical
roles. Beetles loom large in the history of mythology and religion,
and the case of the scarab beetle (Scarabaeidae) is an especially
salient one in this regard. Significantly, the scarab beetle represents
an instance of parallel mythology – its symbolic expression of
creation, renewal and rebirth appears across disparate cultures
through time, from ancient Egypt to the African Congo, and from
early Christian symbols of Jesus and the Resurrection, to a Chinese
symbol of autogenesis.1
The case of the scarab’s similar reception by diverse cultures
makes it tempting to suggest that this particular beetle has ‘spoken’
a profound, acultural message to us, merely by undergoing the
routine stages of its life cycle. Did the idea of life after death predate,
and evolve independently from, observations of insect
metamorphosis in early human history? Or is the very notion of
an immortal soul – essential to many of the world’s religions –
drawn directly from a symbolic interpretation of witnessed insect
life cycles? Charles L. Hogue, founder of the relatively obscure
research field known as ‘cultural entomology’, has claimed that the
changes visible in developmental metamorphosis led unrelated
cultures to a parallel adoption of winged adult insects as symbols
of the soul.2While this is an interesting possibility to consider, it
may ultimately be, to evoke another animal expression, a case of
‘the chicken or the egg’. What can at least be said is that observations
of insects ‘resurrected’ from the apparent death of the cocoon or
pupal stage have reinforced various religious convictions that death
is merely a preliminary stage to the fulfilment of a more ‘perfect’
form or state. In this sense (and others), insects do indeed hold an
essential place in the history of religion.
Among the many insects to have inspired the production of
cultural artefacts, it is the beetles who seem to have exerted the
earliest influence. The oldest known sculpture of an insect portrays
a beetle, thought to be a burying beetle (Nicrophorus).3 The burying
beetles (also known as the sexton beetles) are members of the family
Silphidae (carrion beetles), and bury the corpses of small mammals
as a food source for their larvae. Most are black with red markings
on their elytra, and they are notable in that both males and females
care for the brood. Fashioned from coal some 25,000 to 30,000
years ago, the burying beetle artefact was designed to be worn as
a pendant, probably around the neck.
A beetle-shaped lignite pendant dated from the Upper
Palaeolithic period (about 10,000 to 20,000 years ago) also
survives.4 Carved into the shape of a buprestid beetle, it too was
almost certainly made to be worn around the neck, possibly as an
amulet. Buprestids are metallic-looking, often colourful woodboring
beetles, also known as ‘jewel beetles’ owing to their shiny,
highly attractive appearance. The buprestids are among the most
prolific families of beetles, and considering their iridescent hue it
is unsurprising that they caught the attention of early humans.
The buprestid beetle pendant, found at Arcy-sur-Cure in Burgundy,
France, and the burying beetle made of coal, are good physical
evidence that Coleoptera held some significance in the very early
cultural lives of human beings. While it is difficult to speculate
about the precise meanings attached to these artefacts by the
cultures and individuals that produced them, the very existence
of the objects does suggest that the beetles they represent were
seen as embodiments of important powers or values that could be
contained, or at least expressed, by reproductions of their form.
On a more superficial level, these beetles (especially, perhaps, the
buprestids) are simply nice to look at, and the promotion of visual
pleasure in the observation of nature is a historically entrenched,
and deeply important, cultural practice.
The entomologist Yves Cambefort suggests that one way to
understand examples of beetles in ancient cultures is by turning to
the findings of contemporary ethnoentomology, a field which examines
the cultural place of insects in indigenous cultures. Generally
speaking, it is held that for indigenous cultures, beetles have tended
to assume importance both as a food source and because of their
ability to fly. These are physical aspects that resonate with deeper
significances. In many indigenous cultures, shamans are acknow -
ledged as being capable of addressing issues in both the terrestrial
and celestial ‘worlds’ by either ascending or descending into other,
less visible domains – much like various species of beetles.5
In order to grasp what the beetle meant (and continues to mean)
for traditional, indigenous and shamanic cultures, we must first
appreciate that, within such cultures, the beetle is seen as a symbolic
manifestation of divine or occult principles. Many of these principles
relate to shamanic experiences that are systematically excluded
from modern Western cultures. As Cambefort notes, a number of
shamanic cultures incorporate beetles into their creation myths.
In some native South American tribes, a large scarab named Aksak
is said to have modelled men and women from clay. In the creation
myths of the Sumatran Toba, a large scarab was thought to have
brought a ball of matter from the sky in order to form the world
itself. In some pre-Aryan cultures of India and Southeast Asia, the
primeval maker of the world is a diving beetle.6 Similarly, a Cherokee
myth tells of a water beetle that dived into a watery Lower World,
bringing back mud to make the earth, from which the mountains
and valleys were formed.7 The Bushongo of the Democratic Republic
of Congo provide a creation account in which, in the beginning,
there was only water and darkness. The supreme creator, Bumba,
stricken by stomach pain, vomited the world into existence. This
took place in stages: first came the sun, the moon and the stars,
followed by various animals, and eventually human beings. The
animals vomited by Bumba then proceeded to create other animals
of their kind: the scarab was the original insect, and hence created
all other insects.8 According to a myth of the Cochiti Pueblo people,
the Milky Way was formed by a pinacate beetle (Eleodes), who was
responsible for placing stars in the sky. Because of arrogance and
carelessness, the stars were dropped, hence forming the Milky
Way. So ashamed was the beetle at what he had done that even
today the beetle hides his face in the dirt when approached – here
is an insect myth that explains not only insect behaviour, but also
the origin of our own galaxy.9
The wings of jewel beetles were used to adorn some objects
recovered from the tomb of Tutankhamun (fourteenth century bc),
while in Japan the seventh-century Tamamushi shrine in the Temple
of Horyu-ji was thoroughly covered with buprestid elytra. In a
Chinese Taoist text on meditation, ‘The Secret of the Golden Flower’,
the scarab beetle appears as a symbol of the quest to achieve spiritual
immortality:
The scarab rolls his pellet, and life is born in it as an effect
of nondispersed work of spiritual concentration. Now, even
in manure an embryo can develop and cast his ‘terrestrial’
skins, why would the dwelling of our celestial heart not be
able to generate a body too, if we concentrate our spirit on
it?10
The scarab or dung beetle (Scarabaeus sacer) is undoubtedly
the most widely recognized sacred beetle, worshipped most prom -
inently by the ancient Egyptians in a characteristically cryptic
manner. The Egyptians did not make the same distinctions between
beetles as do modern coleopterists, meaning that dung beetles of
numerous genera, including Kheper, Scarabaeus, Gymnopleurus,
Copris and Catharsius (all Scarabaeinae) played important and
prominent roles in the mythology of ancient Egypt.11 For the
Egyptians, the dung beetle came to represent the concept of ‘becoming’,
symbolizing cheper, meaning ‘to become, to come into being;
the being, the form’, and the god Cheper or Khepri is regarded as
one of the many forms taken by the god Ra, who is often portrayed
either with a scarab above his head, or with a scarab in place of a
human head.12
As grand and enchanting as the Egyptian deification of the humble
dung beetle may seem, it was based on a fundamental
misperception of the insect’s life cycle. It was widely believed that
dung beetles were exclusively male and reproduced asexually – this
established a correspondence with (male) deities who had ‘brought
themselves into existence’. Additionally, the scarab beetle’s habit
of forming a sphere from dung and rolling it across the ground
before burying it (and himself ) was understood as symbolic of the
sun’s passage across the sky and subsequent ‘burial’ in the Earth,
before being reborn the following day (or in the scarab beetle’s
case, emerging from the ground fifteen to eighteen weeks later).
This had been the standard interpretation of the sacred scarab
beetle’s place in Egyptian culture, at least since Plutarch’s firstcentury
On the Worship of Isis and Osiris:
As for the Beetills, they hold, that throughout all their kinds
there is no female, but all the males do blow or cast their seed
into a certain globus or round matter in the form of balls,
which they drive from them and roll to and fro contrariwise,
like as the Sun, when he moveth himself from the West to the
East, seemeth to turn about the Heaven clean contrary.13
We now know that the male beetle buries the dung ball as a
food store in a nest, burrowed either at a location within rolling
distance, or directly beneath the dung heap itself. The young hatches
from an egg, which is laid into another, pear-shaped ball made by
the male or the female, fashioned by the female in an underground
chamber of the nest. From here, the larva will then typically emerge
from the brood ball as an adult and begin the cycle again. Sadly,
the Egyptians seem to have remained completely ignorant of the
female scarab beetle and her subterranean labours, believing that
the male beetle simply plants his seed in the dung ball, from which
his offspring was thought to later emerge. This allowed the
Egyptians to associate their view of the dung beetle with the divine
power Khepri, the morning sun reborn each day. The beetle was
also associated with Atum, to whom the creation of the universe
was ascribed, and who was also self-engendered.14
Because the dung beetle was so strongly coupled with the concept
of rebirth, carvings of its image – known generally as scarabs
– became immensely popular in ancient Egypt, and later throughout
the Mediterranean region, where they were mass-produced as
generic ‘lucky charms’. The Romans would wear talismanic rings
bearing images of the scarab, and for some time it was believed
that scarabs carved from green emerald could improve eyesight;
hence it was customary for engravers of precious stones to gaze
upon the image of the beetle at regular intervals throughout the
day.15 In Egypt, scarabs were often placed with the dead in burial
chambers (often over the heart), usually with an inscription from
the Book of the Dead on their flat underside. A typical inscription
on the heart scarab translates as ‘O my heart, rise not up against
me as witness,’ a plea intended to ensure forgiveness from Osiris,
god of the underworld and judge of the dead.16
One of the earliest documented reproductions of the scarab
beetle is in the form of a small alabaster case, dating from the
early first dynasty (around 3,000 bc), which, according to the
British Egyptologist Flinders Petrie, was designed to be attached
to a necklace and might have been made to contain a true beetle.17
Scarab images were also engraved on seals, which were used to
establish authenticity and ownership of property. Although some
scarabs were fashioned from gold, silver or bronze, and others
from many kinds of stone, most were made of talc, which in its
natural state is soft and easy to carve. It would then be dipped
into a hot liquid glaze, colouring the scarab blue or green and
creating a glossy sheen while solidifying it.18 The trouble with
scarabs, as anyone who has attempted to study them quickly
discovers, is that there are so many and, with the exception of
those made of glazed composition in moulds, no two are alike.19
In this sense, the scarabs mirror the problem of diversity presented
by the beetles themselves. There are nine well-defined phases in
the history of scarab making, spanning from the end of the Old
Kingdom to the early Eighteenth Dynasty, with each phase pro -
ducing its own characteristic scarabs.20
There are some suggestions, however, that the scarab beetle’s
influence on ancient cultures of the Mediterranean, Middle East
and North Africa extends well beyond the urge to craft seals and
amulets in their likeness. In 1975 Hogue observed in passing that
the mummy-like pupa probably had been seen to represent the
death of the earthbound larva, while the dramatic metamorphosis
into a resplendent, flying adult similarly represented a kind of
miraculous resurrection.21 Cambefort followed up this comparison
in the 1980s, asserting that, in all probability, the Egyptian mummy
is actually an emulation of the scarab pupa, being a temporary
condition intended to protect the dead body and the
transformations (or khepru) it must undergo before resurrection.22
Furthermore, he observed that a truncated dung heap (from which
some adult scarab beetles emerge) resembles a cross-section of a
pyramid, meaning that these most powerful of architectural
achievements should be understood as elaborate models of faecal
deposits.23 It is not clear, however, whether Cambefort’s inter -
pretation (which does not seem widely shared among Egyptologists)
is based on current knowledge of how the Egyptians actually
regarded their own mummification practices, or is a novel per -
ception based on superficial resemblances. In the absence of
compelling evidence of the former, the latter seems more likely.
There seems to be little evidence that the Egyptians studied or
understood the pupal stage of the scarab beetle’s metamorphosis.
Cambefort observes that ‘some indications suggest’ Egyptian priests
got the idea to examine what happened to the beetle’s dung ball
when it was buried beneath the ground, and that they ‘probably’
made the entomological observation of metamorphosis, pre-dating
those of the French entomologist and great popularizer of insect
life Jean-Henri Fabre by about 5,000 years.24
Even so, the idea that the most famous and enduring of Egyptian
religious and architectural achievements ultimately owe their inspir -
ation to the beetle cannot be ruled out altogether. Entomologists,
both amateur and professional, have often been tempted to draw
comparisons between the feats of engineering and construction
performed by insects and those of human beings. Fabre wrote of
the scarab beetle:
One would never weary of admiring the variety of tools
wherewith they are supplied, whether for shifting, cutting
up and shaping the stercoral matter or for excavating deep
burrows in which they will seclude themselves with their
booty. This equipment resembles a technical museum where
every digging-implement is represented. It includes things
that seem copied from those appertaining to human industry
and others of so original a type that they might well serve
us as models for new inventions.25
Another, perhaps even more dramatic hypothesis regarding
the scarab beetle’s influence on human culture is offered by the
biologist Gerhard Scholtz, who suggests that the scarab’s use of
‘wheels’ (that is, the balls of dung it rolls across the ground) inspired
humans in the Middle East to invent the wheel itself. Given that
domesticated hooved animals were kept in the region at the time,
and that scarabs are attracted to their dung, it is possible that shepherds
observed the ball-rolling beetles over time and from this
drew inspiration for the wheel. The invention of the wheel was particularly
important because it combined the mythological aspect
of round objects with a practical purpose.26 Furthermore, although
human beings have a long history of turning observations of nature
into technological ends, the wheel is generally regarded as something
we came up with on our own, as a ‘nature-independent
cultural achievement’.27 Scholtz’s theory presents an intriguing
(but ultimately speculative) argument for the most widely applied
technological accomplishment of human civilization having been
fundamentally inspired by the observation of beetles rolling balls
of livestock faeces across the ground. A more deflating explanation
of the foremost ‘nature-independent’ invention is, perhaps, difficult
to imagine. It also raises the question of why the Egyptians did not
manufacture their own wheels, based on their observations of the
scarab beetle’s efforts – such an invention may have proved somewhat
useful in the construction of the pyramids, among other endeavours.
This kind of cultural ambiguity seems to be an essential quality
of beetles – while they hover and crawl on the periphery of our
cultivated human ‘world’, they consistently intimate a more
profound degree of involvement in our cultural history than we
may care to acknowledge. Few of us would readily associate the
beetle with historical conceptions of the Virgin Mary, for example.
Yet the association is a well-established one, especially in the
European folk tradition. In his pioneering work of 1865 on
the history of insects in human culture, Frank Cowan outlines the
traditional significance of the ‘ladybird’ (the Coccinellidae family).
In Scandinavia, this beetle is dedicated to the Virgin Mary, and is
generally known as Nyckelpiga (‘our Lady’s key-maid’), and in
Sweden more particularly as Jungfru Marias Gullhöna – the Virgin
Mary’s golden hen. In Germany, it has been called Frauen or Marienkäfer
(lady beetles of the Virgin Mary), and in France is known as
vaches Dieu (cows of the Lord) and bêtes de la Vierge (animals of the
Virgin). Its various English names – ladybird, ladybug, ladyfly,
ladycow, ladyclock and ladycouch (a Scottish name) – also reference
this dedication.28
The term ‘lady-bird’ appears in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet
(1597), where it carries the potentially slanderous meaning of ‘tart’
or ‘whore’,29 when exclaimed by Lady Capulet’s nurse:
Now by my maidenhead – at twelve year old –
I bade her come. What lamb! What lady-bird!
God forbid! Where’s this girl? What Juliet! (i.3)
The description of the Coccinella as ‘ladies’ appears in print at
least as early as the English poet Michael Drayton’s The Muses
Elizium viii: The Eighth Nimphall (1630), which relates the efforts
of three nymphs to prepare for the marriage of one of their own,
Tita, to a fairy, or ‘fay’. One of the nymphs, Mertilla, is concerned
that they have forgotten Tita’s buskins (knee-high cloth or leather
boots), to which another, Claia, replies:
We had, for those I’ll fit her now,
They shall be of the lady-cow:
The dainty shell upon her backe
Of crimson strew’d with spots of blacke;
Which as she holds a stately pace,
Her leg will wonderfully grace.30
Ladybird folklore is especially prominent in Germany, where
ornaments in their likeness are used even today to decorate
Christmas trees. Here, the beetles themselves are considered a sign
of good luck, as they are in a number of other European countries,
including England. The German tradition seems to stem from an
aphid attack on wine grapes – to which the farmers responded by
praying to the Virgin Mary to help save their crops. Soon afterwards,
the crops were saved by the small red beetles, which devoured
almost all the aphids and thus saved not only the crops, but the
grape industry itself. The farmers concluded that their prayers to
Mary, also known as ‘Our Lady’, had been answered, and so in her
honour the beetles were named Merienkäfer (Merienmeaning Mary,
and Käfer meaning beetle), which soon became ‘ladybird’ or ‘ladybug’
in the u.s.31
Ladybirds thus embody both religious and agricultural concerns
– a quality transposed onto a number of other insects throughout
history and across cultures (the biblical locust springs to mind).
The German dedication to the ladybird as a divine omen was tested
in 2009, however, when large numbers of an Asian ladybird species,
Harmonia axyridis, arrived in Hamburg and other areas of northern
Germany. The sudden influx was explained as a result of unusually
humid summer days – and perhaps, ultimately, as a sign of global
warming. The first European sighting of the Asian ladybird was in
Belgium in 2001, and since that time it has proceeded to spread
across much of Europe. These immigrants from the east, despite
inhabiting the maligned category of ‘foreign invasive species’,
actually ensure local aphid levels are kept in check, to the great
benefit of farmers.32 One can imagine how reverently their appearance
would have been regarded in the religious (and entomologically
primitive) climate of seventeenth-century Europe.
Perhaps the most familiar folk tradition relating to the ladybird,
at least to English readers, is found in a popular nursery rhyme:
‘Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home / Your house is on fire, your
children will burn!’ Dating from the early eighteenth century, this
verse, despite its whimsical nature, actually relates to a biological
fact: the larvae of the ladybird tend to feed on the lice or aphids
that live on the vines of hop plants, and fire is a traditional means
with which to destroy these aphids. When the fire ignites the plants,
however, the ladybirds’ ‘children’, too, are thus endangered.33
While some beetles may embody the very essence of holy ben -
evolence and grace, others represent quite the opposite. A European
rove beetle, Ocypus olens, is commonly known as the Devil’s coachhorse.
A long, black beetle, beneficial to farmers in its consumption
of wireworms (the larvae of click beetles), it typically adopts a
threatening stance when confronted, raising its tail in the manner
of a scorpion and showcasing its mandibles. An Irish folk legend,
told in the counties of Wicklow and Waterford, describes this beetle
(in Irish, ‘daol’) as the Devil incarnate:
The day before Our Lord’s betrayal He came to a field where
the people were sowing corn. He blessed the work, and as
a result the crop grew up miraculously, so that when the
Jews searching for Our Lord next day came to the spot they
found a field of wheat. They inquired if the Saviour had gone
that way, and were told He had passed when the corn was
being sowed. ‘That is too long ago,’ they said, and turned
back. Then the Evil One, taking the form of a Darragh Daol,
put up his head and said, ‘Yesterday, yesterday,’ and set His
enemies on His track. Wherefore the Dar Daol should be
killed whensoever met.34
There is, however, only one correct way to kill the Dar Daol – with
fire. Any object used to crush it, whether one’s thumb, boot, a stone
or stick, will afterwards occasion mortal injury to man or animal
with only the slightest blow.35
In various European countries, and at least since the time of
the ancient Greeks, the common dor beetle (Geotrupes stercorarius),
a dung beetle, has also been associated with the Devil. In The Peace,
a comedy by the Athenian playwright Aristophanes, staged in 421
bc, the countryman Trygaeus has his slaves feed a dor beetle on
the dung of asses until it is large enough for him to ride into the
heavens for a conference with Zeus. The Greeks regarded the dor
beetle as the ‘Devil’s steed’, and it was similarly regarded in the
folklore of central Europe. In Carinthia, in southern Austria, it is
known as a Hexenkäfer, or witch beetle, and it is believed that if a
farmer’s wife needs help all she needs to do is keep a dor beetle in
her armpit. Three weeks later, a small man – no taller than a human
thumb – will hatch, and then do all the work required by the
farmer’s wife. But he must never be taken into church, because to
do so will cause a fire.36
Dor beetles have also been traditionally used as weather forecasters
and fortune tellers. Various European tales tell of the dor
beetle as a familiar of witches, associate it with ghostly apparitions
and allege its ability to conjure treasure. One story recounts how,
after being driven from a house by exorcism, a particularly vengeful
dor beetle responded by suffocating the officiating priest’s cow.
Yet despite these exuberant associations with the black arts, a
French legend tells of a dor beetle that drank the blood of Christ
at the foot of the cross at Golgotha – a tale which is almost certainly
based on the fact that, when excited, the dor beetle produces a
drop of red fluid. They are also known in some parts of Austria as
‘our Lord’s oxen’, on account of the assistance they are thought
to have provided to Mary on her return from Egypt, hitching
themselves to the front of her wagon.37
The idea that at least some beetles reproduce asexually – and
thus have a special connection to the purity of the divine – did not
expire with the Egyptians. It was retained until at least the end of
the sixteenth century in Europe, when the systematic study of
insects was in its formative stages. Thomas Moffett’s The Theatre
of Insects is the first book dedicated to insects to have been published
in England; a Latin first edition (Insectorum sive minimorum animalium
theatrum) appeared in 1634, and the English edition in 1658. However,
the original manuscript, held at the British Library (and containing
many finely coloured illustrations, as opposed to the published
editions’ crude woodcuts), is dated 1589. The manuscript has a
complicated history, and represents a collection and arrangement
of work produced by preceding sixteenth-century figures, including
Thomas Penny, Conrad Gessner and Edward Wotton, rather than
solely original work by Moffett. The Theatre of Insects indicates that
beetle autogenesis was still held as a matter of fact by some European
natural philosophers of the time. Moffett discusses a beetle with a
‘Buls horn’ – known today as the elephant beetle:
Like to Beetles it hath no female, but it shapes its own form
it self. It produceth its young one from the ground by it self,
which Joach Camerarius did elegantly express, when he sent
to Pennius [Thomas Penny] the shape of this Insect out of
the storehouse of natural things of the Duke of Saxony; with
the Verses:
A Hee begat me not, nor yet did I proceed
From any Female, but myself I breed.38
In an example of the (often complicated) culture of exchange
that existed between natural philosophers of the time, the image
of the elephant beetle presented by Moffett is derived from a speci -
men originally sent by Joachim Camerarius to the English physician
and student of insects Thomas Penny, who reproduced its likeness.
The couplet accompanying the specimen, written by Camerarius,
was later reproduced, in Latin, by the Flemish miniaturist Joris
Hoefnagel, a friend of Camerarius, to accompany his own illustration,
not of an elephant beetle but a stag beetle, which Moffett
claims was copied from a depiction in the Duke of Saxony’s
Kunstkammer (cabinet of curiosities).39 The original manuscript of
the Theatre contains a pasted-in image of the elephant beetle, drawn
by Penny some time prior to 1589, and apparently copied by
Hoefnagel and presented in his Archetypa of 1592.
The misguided view of the beetle as asexual – in particular, the
stag beetle – allowed it to function as an effective, if subtle, referent
of Christ. For an observer to infer this symbolic meaning of the
stag beetle, they would require (false) knowledge of its reproductive
cycle – which would seem to limit the beetle’s symbolic meaning
to a comparatively small number of natural philosophers. Within
the philosophical context of much European natural history illustration
around 1600, the fusion of the Antique and Christian
traditions led to a distinct, intellectual approach to animals, an
approach focused on knowing as well as representing.40 Natural
historians were now producing images intended to facilitate know -
ledge of what the images depicted, rather than as mere adornments
to illuminated manuscripts. This new relationship of knowledge
and the image was especially suited to the accurate, ‘intellectual’
portrayal of the smallest of God’s creations then known to exist:
the insects.
One of the most famous insect images to have been produced
within this mode is Stag Beetle, a watercolour by the German artist
Albrecht Dürer. Finished in 1505, it is usually regarded as preempting
the kind of reverent attention to insects developed by
subsequent artists. Dürer had written that ‘it is indeed true that
art is omnipresent in nature, and the true artist is he who can bring
it out’. Consequently Stag Beetle presents a vivid image of the natural
subject: poised, purposeful and dignified, it conveys a lifelike
countenance and casts a convincing shadow across the canvas,
giving the figure a formal depth lacking in contemporary images
of insects, most of which appeared in the borders of printed,
devotional prose. Dürer had painted the stag beetle (Lucanus cervus)
at least twice before, however. It appears in an explicitly religious
scene, The Virgin among a Multitude of Animals (1503), in the bottom
left of the frame, facing the centre of the scene, and again in The
Adoration of the Magi (1504), which portrays the infant Christ
receiving gifts from the magi, or ‘wise men’; on the step in the
bottom right of the frame, an enlarged stag beetle faces away from
the scene. In both paintings, the beetle’s presence is subtle, but
conspicuous nevertheless.
It was Dürer’s Stag Beetle, in particular, that captivated those
interested in representing insects in the final quarter of the sixteenth
century, when a revival of interest in Dürer’s nature studies was
sparked by a copy of Stag Beetle in 1574 by Hans Hoffmann.41 From
this period onwards, the image was widely emulated by artists and
students of both insects and other assorted ‘microfauna’. There is
good reason to suspect that this image is probably the oldest
European picture of a beetle which can be reliably identified to the
species.42 This makes Stag Beetle a highly significant intersection
of the allegedly distinct arenas of artistic and scientific illustrations
of insects, showing that much of what counts as a ‘scientific’ image
has its roots in aesthetics.
Hoefnagel was one of many artists to copy Dürer’s beetle, but
rather than merely riding on Dürer’s coat-tails, he advanced the
accurate, ‘faithful’ illustration of insects in its entirety. Hoefnagel
was the first painter to raise insects in their various phenotypes to
the status of independent pictorial subjects.43 Recognizing the
power of portraying the singular insect in careful detail, Hoefnagel
exemplifies the emergence of what would become modern
entomological illustration, but he was still deeply committed to
conveying the theological significance of his natural subjects –
especially insects. Although all natural subjects were of theological
importance (since nature was held to be the most tangible
expression of the Creator), this was not simply a case of ‘painting
of beetle = reference to Christ’. The question of the symbolic content
of insect depictions must take into account the contemporary belief
that each animal, even the smallest, contains the totality of the
plan of creation within itself. Since even the tiniest animal is to be
seen as an emanation of Creation, they always point beyond
themselves towards the whole.44
Many of the mottoes that accompany the images in Hoefnagel’s
Archetypa studiaque patris Georgii Hoefnagelii (1592), reflecting on
the tragic brevity of life, are drawn from Erasmus’s Adagia (first
published in 1500, but expanded significantly afterwards). Erasmus
held that the beetle was ‘a symbol of baseless fear, because the insect
has a habit of suddenly flying in at nightfall with a horrible buzzing
noise’.45 The stag beetle was taken up by a number of other artists
during the seventeenth century, such as the German still-life painters
Georg Flegel and Peter Binoit, and the Dutch draughtsman Claes
Janszoon Visscher, who copied Hoefnagel’s illustrations. It also
appears conspicuously in later works, such as August Johann Rösel
von Rosenhof ’s Insecten-Belustigung (1746–61).
It is difficult to know at what point the stag beetle ‘lost’ its
Christian connotations, or to what extent the artists intended its
image to function in this way. Retrospective interpretations of
symbolism in art are often fraught with difficulties; some, for
example, have interpreted the stag beetle in Dürer’s The Virgin
among a Multitude of Animals as a symbol of evil.46 What can be
said is that insects retained – and indeed, with the development
and application of the microscope, gained – theological significance
into the seventeenth century. The pioneering Dutch microscopist
Jan Swammerdam, upon dissecting a stag beetle in 1673, wrote to
the Royal Society in London that ‘Everywhere and in the humblest
of creatures the traces of divine wisdom and supreme skill are made
known.’47 With the dawning of what is commonly referred to as
the Scientific Revolution, the beetle was poised to take on a new
dimension of importance – retaining its emblematic significance,
it was also becoming a ‘specimen’, a Latin term meaning ‘something
that indicates’, itself from specere, meaning ‘to perceive with the
eyes’. With the seventeenth-century appearance of the microscope,
and the steady development of standardized natural history
illustration and collection practices, the beetle was now subject to
a new kind of gaze, which in turn was transforming it into a new
kind of animal – an animal of science.
