Curious Facts in the History of Insects; Including Spiders and Scorpions.: A Complete Collection of the Legends, Superstitions, Beliefs, and Ominous Signs Connected with Insects; Together with Their Uses in Medicine, Art, and as Food; and a Summary of Their Remarkable Injuries and Appearances. — John Shaqi
Curious Facts in the History of Insects; Including Spiders and Scorpions.: A Complete Collection of the Legends, Superstitions, Beliefs, and Ominous Signs Connected with Insects; Together with Their Uses in Medicine, Art, and as Food; and a Summary of Their Remarkable Injuries and Appearances.Cowan, Frank
History
Curious Facts in the History of Insects; Including Spiders and Scorpions.: A Complete Collection of the Legends, Superstitions, Beliefs, and Ominous Signs Connected with Insects; Together with Their Uses in Medicine, Art, and as Food; and a Summary of Their Remarkable Injuries and Appearances.
Cowan, Frank
Insects
2. The Sun.--P. Valerianus supposes this insect to have been a symbol of
the sun, because of the angular projection from its head resembling
rays, and from the thirty joints of the six tarsi of its feet answering
to the days of an (ordinary) solar month.[58] According to Plutarch, it
was because these insects cast the seed of generation into round balls
of dung, as a genial nidus, and roll them backward with their feet,
while they themselves look directly forward. And as the sun appears to
proceed in the heavens in a course contrary to the signs, thus the
Scarabæi turn their balls toward the west, while they themselves
continue creeping toward the east; by the first of these motions
exhibiting the diurnal, and by the second the annual, motion of the
earth and the planets.[59] Porphyry gives the same reason as Plutarch
why the beetle was considered, as he calls it, “a living image of the
sun.”[60] Horapollo assigns two reasons for the Scarab being taken as
an emblem of the sun. He tells us there are three species of beetles:
one of which has the form of a cat, and is radiated;[61] and this one
from a supposed analogy the Egyptians have dedicated to the Sun,
because, first, the statue of the Deity of Heliopolis (City of the Sun)
has the form of a cat![62] In this, however, Wilkinson asserts, that
Horapollo is wrong; for the Deity of Heliopolis, under the form of a
cat, was the emblem of Bubastis, and not of Rê, a type of the sun; and
the presence of her statue is explained by the custom of each city
assigning to the Divinities of neighboring places a conspicuous post in
its own temples; and Bubastis was one of the principal contemplar
Deities of Heliopolis.[63] The second reason of Horapollo is, that this
insect has thirty fingers, which correspond to the thirty days of a
solar month.[64]
3. The Moon.--The second of the three species of beetles, described by
Horapollo, has, according to this writer, two horns, and the character
of a bull; and it was consecrated to the moon; whence the Egyptians say,
that the bull in the heavens is the elevation of this Goddess. This
statement of beetle “with two horns” (the _Copris Isidis_) consecrated
to the moon, Wilkinson says is not confirmed by the sculptures where it
is never introduced.[65]
It is said the Egyptians believed that the pellet of the Scarabæus
remained in the ground for a period of twenty-eight days. May not this
have some connection with their choosing the insect as a symbol of the
moon which divides the year into months of twenty-eight days each; or,
of the month itself (of which we shall notice it was also a symbol) for
the same reason? I have seen, too, a Scarabæus engraved upon a seal, the
joints of whose tarsi numbered but twenty-eight.
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