Dragonfly symbolism

The island of the dragonfly

One of the old names of Japan is Akitsushima, written with the character for the dragonfly, which was anciently called akitsu. The Nihongi tells how the Emperor Jimmu climbed a hill, looked over the land and said that it resembled “a dragon-fly licking its hinder parts”, and that the country took its name from this. Hearn, retelling the tradition in 1901, called the dragonfly an emblem of the Empire “even to this day”.

W. G. Aston, the Nihongi’s translator, read the name differently. Its real meaning, he wrote in 1896, is “region of harvests”, and “it has nothing to do with akitsu, the dragon-fly”. The dragonfly was a simile: a dragonfly with its tail touching its mouth makes a ring, like the plain of Yamato inside its ring of mountains, and later historians turned it into Japan as a dragonfly with outstretched wings. Hearn allowed that the name may have been suggested by an older Akitsushima meaning “The Land of Rich Harvests”.

Dragonflies of the ancestors at Bon

Hearn recorded that from the thirteenth to the fifteenth day of the old seventh month, the Bon festival, dragonflies are said to carry the Hotoke-Sama, the spirits of the ancestors, back to their former homes. Children are forbidden to harm them then, especially any that come into the house, and an old saying warns that a child who catches dragonflies will never “obtain knowledge”. One name for the insect is Shōryō-yamma, “the Dragon-fly of the Ancestral Spirits”. The oldest surviving poem about a dragonfly, by Hearn’s account, is the Emperor Yuriaku’s, in praise of one that caught and ate a gadfly that had bitten his arm.

Dragonflies and rain at Zuni

The Zuni Artist Resource Team lists dragonflies among the water symbols of traditional Zuni design, with tadpoles, frogs and the rain bird. Frank Hamilton Cushing explained the set in 1886: the tadpole of spring pools stands for the spring rains, the dragonfly, which hovers over pools in summer, for the rains of summer, and the frog for the rains of the later seasons, “for all these pools are due to rain fall.”

The devil’s darning-needle and the snake doctor

Wright’s Rustic Speech and Folk-Lore (1913) gives devil’s darning-needle as a Lancashire name for the dragonfly. In Kentucky, Daniel and Lucy Thomas recorded in 1920, the “snake-doctor” warns snakes of danger and shows them where to find food; it is bad luck to kill one, and if one lights on your fishing line the fish will not bite.

What a dragonfly landing on you is said to mean

The only answer in the folklore we found is the Kentucky angler’s: a dragonfly on the line means the fish will not bite. We found no source for the meanings that spiritual websites give a dragonfly landing on you, such as change or a message from someone who has died. The nearest recorded tradition is the Japanese belief that dragonflies carry the ancestors at Bon.

René Lalique’s dragonfly woman

René Lalique’s “Dragonfly” corsage ornament was shown with great success at the Paris Exposition of 1900 and is now in the Museu Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon. It is an enormous dragonfly in gold and enamel, with a woman’s bust emerging from the insect’s open mouth; the museum describes it as the female figure joined to “the insect she transforms into”.

Related animals

Zuni potters paint the dragonfly with the tadpole and the Frog symbolism, and sometimes paint the Butterfly symbolism in its place. The Kentucky name snake-doctor makes it the Snake symbolism’s helper.