“We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.”
—Carl Sagan
I carry a butterfly in my soul. It arrived one Prince Edward Island summer, when my brother and sister and I found a caterpillar in my grandparents’ garden. My grandfather helped us put the caterpillar in a jar, then added a leaf for it to eat. He knew the kind that would make the caterpillar happy as it underwent its metamorphosis—a word I hadn’t yet learned—as it built its chrysalis and began its transformation. Bandaddy poked holes in the lid for air and placed the jar on a kitchen shelf. He promised us that, if we waited, there would be a butterfly.
I don’t remember the wait. I don’t remember checking the jar or ever asking if it was time for the butterfly to emerge. Perhaps we checked once to see the chrysalis hanging from the lid, but as my brother said recently, that memory is “hazy.” Maybe I just saw a chrysalis on television or in a book. Really, it was Bandaddy who did the waiting, like many grown-ups, parents, grandparents, and teachers who carry butterflies in their own souls hoping to share them with the children they love. He was the one who kept tabs on the creature’s progress while we read in the front room, went to swimming lessons, and walked the roadside looking for empty bottles to turn in for cash so we could attend the Old Home Week fair at the end of August. Still, I remember the day Bandaddy opened the jar to reveal a white butterfly (at least I remember it as white) ready to be set free in the summer air. Because we had left the waiting to Bandaddy, the butterfly’s eventual appearance felt like magic, and our grandfather was the magician.
I suspect that many of us carry such butterflies in our souls, in memory of loved ones who passed onto us their own wonder at these living symbols of transformation. Butterflies have long been associated with the marvelous and metaphysical, not just carried within our souls but often emblems of the human soul itself. In his History of the Animals (4th century BCE), Aristotle writes of “the winged creature we call the psyche or butterfly.” At the same time, “psyche” was and remains the Greek word for soul. Psyche is also the name of the Greco-Roman goddess of the soul. In Metamorphoses, a 2nd century CE work by the Roman writer Apuleius, Psyche is the wife of Cupid (the Greek Eros), a human”woman granted immortality by Zeus. In many works of Greek and Roman art, Psyche is depicted with butterfly wings, or in the presence of a butterfly.
The association of butterflies with the soul is evident in many other cultures as well. In Irish folklore, butterflies were often viewed as carrying the souls of the dead, especially dead children. Writing in Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland, Lady Wilde describes a butterfly lingering at a grave as embodying the occupant’s departed soul. In Japan too, the souls of the dead are supposed to visit loved ones in the form of butterflies. Butterflies are also present in Christian symbolism, especially in medieval illuminated manuscripts where they represent resurrection. The metaphysical association with butterflies continues even into the sciences. Santiago Ramon y Cajal, an early researcher in neuroscience, referred to the complex net of neurons in the human brain as the “butterflies of the soul.”
The delicate butterfly, living for only days or weeks, is also emblematic of life’s transience and fragility. As the planet warms and their habitats become degraded, butterflies are among the first creatures to display the effects on our ailing ecosystem.
My grandfather is gone now. Years after that butterfly summer, during his final illness, I watched him go through his own metamorphosis, from the man who woke before everyone else to someone who spent his days lying on the couch. His was the first death of a loved one I would experience, and my soul carries the memory of the butterfly that rose out of the shelter Bandaddy had prepared for it in that long-ago kitchen. My grandfather was not delicate or fanciful or fragile. He was a farmer and a lobsterman; in later life he worked in the local jail. He was also a man who had the soul to nurture a caterpillar into a butterfly to delight three heedless children.
And it’s my grandfather’s soul I seek now, when I watch the butterflies flutter over autumn streets, alight on the milkweed plants in neighborhood gardens, or rise from fields of wildflowers on a Prince Edward Island Sumsmer day.
