Rainbow Dust by Peter Marren

Author:Peter Marren
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448190195
Publisher: Random House

9.

Fire and Brimstone

Butterflies and the Imagination

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

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