Butterfly symbolism

The butterfly as a soul in Japan

Lafcadio Hearn’s essay on butterflies in Kwaidan (1904) sets out the Japanese beliefs he knew. The soul of a living person may wander in the form of a butterfly, and so a butterfly that comes into the guest-room and settles behind the bamboo screen means that the person you love most is on the way. A butterfly may also be the soul of someone who has died: souls, Hearn wrote, take butterfly shape to announce that they have left the body, “and for this reason any butterfly which enters a house ought to be kindly treated.” Swarms could frighten. When Taira no Masakado was preparing his revolt, so many butterflies appeared in Kyoto that people took them for a portent of evil.

Hearn retells the story of Takahama, an old man at whose deathbed a large white butterfly settled on the pillow. His nephew chased it to a woman’s tomb bearing the name Akiko, the girl Takahama was to have married fifty years before, and the nephew’s mother explained: Akiko had come for him, and the white butterfly was her soul. Hearn thought most Japanese butterfly literature, outside some poetry, came from China.

Chuang Tzŭ’s butterfly dream

The Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzŭ (Zhuangzi) tells of dreaming that he was a butterfly, “fluttering hither and thither”, and waking unsure “whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man” (Herbert Giles’s translation, 1889). Hearn records that the story is known in Japan, where the philosopher is called Sōshū, and that Japanese poets and painters took professional names such as Chōmu, “Butterfly-Dream”.

Psyche, soul and butterfly in Greek

In ancient Greek one word covered both. Liddell and Scott’s lexicon gives psyche as the departed spirit or ghost in Homer, the immaterial and immortal soul from Pindar on, and, in Aristotle’s History of Animals, “butterfly or moth”. Angelo de Gubernatis, in his Zoological Mythology, called the butterfly a funeral emblem “with promises of resurrection and transformation”, and described the souls of the dead shown as butterflies carried towards Elysium by a dolphin.

Soul butterflies in eastern Europe

Dyer’s The Ghost World (1893) gathers eastern European beliefs. The Slavs, he wrote, took the butterfly as an emblem of the soul, and in the government of Yaroslaw one of its names was dushichka, a pet form of dusha, “soul”. Bulgarians believed that at death the soul became a butterfly and stayed on the nearest tree until the funeral was over. In Bohemia, if the first butterfly a man saw in spring was white, he would die within the year.

Monarchs and the Day of the Dead

The monarchs that migrate to Mexico arrive around 1 and 2 November, the Day of the Dead. The US Fish and Wildlife Service notes that customs vary, but that to many the returning monarch is the souls of the dead coming back to visit. The National Park Service, writing from South Texas, says it has long been believed there that monarchs are the returning spirits of dead relatives.

The Zuni butterfly and summer

Frank Hamilton Cushing recorded in 1886 that Zuni potters painted the “sacred butterfly” on prayer-meal bowls in place of the Dragonfly symbolism, or alternating with it, for the goodness of summer. The Zunis, he wrote, think butterflies and migrating birds bring the warm season from the “Land of everlasting summer.”

White, yellow, black and monarch butterflies

The folklore collections give a white butterfly opposite readings. In Kentucky it is a wedding: Daniel and Lucy Thomas recorded in 1920 that if the first butterfly of the season is white, you will go to a wedding before the season is over, and the Frank C. Brown collection of North Carolina folklore cites the same belief from Illinois. The same collection cites a white butterfly coming into the house as a sign of death in Maryland, and a white first butterfly of spring as a sign of death in Illinois, as Dyer found it in Bohemia. One of the haiku Hearn translated asks, of a white butterfly on a pink, whose spirit it is. Lincolnshire schoolboys, the dialect scholar Elizabeth Mary Wright recorded, once killed every white butterfly they could find, because in the long war with France they took them for the French.

A yellow butterfly is weather in Kentucky: yellow butterflies in autumn show that within ten days there will be frost enough to turn the leaves their colour. We found no folklore source for the joy or the illness that websites promise from a yellow butterfly, or for a black butterfly as such. The black witch, a large dark moth of the Americas, is the insect that Mexican and Caribbean folklore treats as a harbinger of death (Moth symbolism). The monarch’s meaning is the Day of the Dead’s.

What a butterfly landing on you is said to mean

Kentucky and North Carolina beliefs read a butterfly as news. In Kentucky a butterfly that settles on you means a new sweetheart, or a new suit of clothes, and one on your shoulder is good luck. In North Carolina a butterfly coming into the house means a member of the family will leave it, and the collection’s editors note that the older reports split between leaving by marriage and leaving by death. The idea, common online, that a butterfly is a sign from someone who has died is close to the Japanese and Mexican beliefs above, but we found no source that dates the modern form.

Butterflies in dreams

The one dream reading in the folklore we used comes from Tennessee: to dream of a butterfly means success in marriage (McGlasson, cited in the Brown collection).

Paper butterflies at Japanese weddings

The large paper butterflies at Japanese weddings, the o-chō and mé-chō, carry no ghostly meaning, Hearn wrote. They express “the joy of living union”, and the hope that the couple will go through life like a pair of butterflies in a garden, never far apart.

Related animals

Many of the soul beliefs attach to the Moth symbolism as well, and Liddell and Scott’s psyche covers both. Dyer records the souls of the dead returning as bees in the Swiss Engadine (Bee symbolism).