Departed souls, according to a Cornish piece of folk-lore, are occasionally said to take the form of moths, and in Yorkshire, writes a correspondent of ‘Notes and Queries,’ ‘the country people used, and perhaps do still, call night-flying white moths, especially the Hepialus humuli, which feeds while in the grub state on the roots of docks and other coarse plants, “souls.”’ By the Slavonians the butterfly seems to have been universally accepted as an emblem of the soul. Mr. Ralston, in his ‘Songs of the Russian People’ (p. 117), says that in the Government of Yaroslaw one of its names is dushichka, a caressing diminutive of dusha, the soul. In that of Kherson it is believed that if the usual alms are not distributed at a funeral, the dead man’s soul will reveal itself to its relatives in the form of a moth flying about the flame of a candle. The day after receiving such a warning visit they call together the poor and distribute food among them. In Bohemia there is a popular tradition that if the first butterfly a man sees in the spring-time is a white one, he is destined to die within the year. According to a Servian belief, the soul of a witch often leaves her body while she is asleep, and flies abroad in the shape of a butterfly. If, during its absence, her body be turned round, so that her feet are placed where her head was before, the soul will not be able to find her mouth, and so will be shut out from her body. Thereupon the witch will die. The Bulgarians believe that at death the soul assumes the form of a butterfly, and flits about on the nearest tree till the funeral is over. The Karens of Burma ‘will run about pretending to catch a sick man’s wandering soul, or, as they say with the ancient Greeks, his “butterfly,” and at last drop it down upon his head.’[159] The idea is an old one, and, as Gubernatis remarks in his ‘Zoological Mythology’ (ii. 213), ‘the butterfly was both a phallic symbol and a funereal one, with promises of resurrection and transformation; the souls of the departed were represented in the forms of butterflies carried towards Elysium by the dolphin.’ According to another belief, the soul was supposed to take the form of a bee, an old tradition telling us that ‘the bees alone of all animals descended from Paradise.’ In the Engadine, in Switzerland, it is believed that the souls of men emigrate from the world and return to it in the forms of bees. In this district bees are considered messengers of death. When someone dies, the bee is invoked as follows, ‘almost as if requesting the soul of the departed,’ says De Gubernatis, ‘to watch for ever over the living’:[160]

In Russia gnats and flies are often looked upon as equally spiritual creatures. ‘In Little Russia,’ says Mr. Ralston,[161] ‘the old women of a family will often, after returning from a funeral, sit up all night watching a dish in which water and honey in it have been placed, in the belief that the spirit of their dead relative will come in the form of a fly, and sip the proffered liquid.’

Among North American tribes we are told how the Ojibways believe that innumerable spirits appear in the varied forms of insect life,[162] while some tribes supposed that ‘most souls went to a common resort near their living habitat, but returned in the daytime in the shape of flies in order to get something to eat.’[163]