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
Moufet says: “Our North, as well as our West countrymen, call it (the
Moth, _Phalaina_) _Saule_, _i.e._ _Psychen, Animam_, the soul; because
some silly people in old time did fancy that the souls of the dead did
fly about in the night seeking light.”[838] “Pliny commends a goat’s
liver to drive them away, yet he shews not the means to use it.”[839]
One of the most highly prized curiosities in the collection of Horace
Walpole, was the silver bell with which the popes used to curse the
caterpillars. This bell was the work of Benvenuto Cellini, one of the
most extraordinary men of his extraordinary age, and the relievos on it
representing caterpillars, butterflies, and other insects, are said to
have been wonderfully executed.[840]
In Purchas’s Pilgrims, we read of worms being sprinkled with holy water
to kill them.[841]
Apuleius says, that if you take the caterpillars from another garden,
and boil them in water with anethum, and let them cool, and besprinkle
the herbs, you will destroy the existing caterpillars.[842]
Pliny says, that “if a woman having a catamenia strips herself naked,
and walks round a field of wheat, the caterpillars, worms, beetles, and
other vermin, will fall off the ears of the grain!” This important
discovery, according to Metrodurus of Scepsos, was first made in
Cappadocia; where, in consequence of such multitudes of “Cantharides”
being found to breed there, it was the practice for women to walk
through the middle of the fields with their garments tucked up above the
thighs.[843] Columella[844] has described this practice in verse, and
Ælian[845] also mentions it. Pliny says further that in other places,
again, it is the usage of women to go barefoot, with the hair disheveled
and the girdle loose: due precaution, however, he seriously observes,
must be taken that this is not done at sunrise, for if so the crop will
wither and dry up.[846] Apuleius,[847] Columella,[848] and
Palladius[849] relate the same story. Constantinus, likewise, whose
verses, as translated in Moufet’s Theater of Insects, are as follows:
But if against this plague no art prevail,
The Trojan arts will do’t, when others fail.
A woman barefoot with her hair untied,
And naked breasts must walk as if she cried,
And after Venus’ sports she must surround
Ten times, the garden beds and orchard ground.
When she hath done, ’tis wonderful to see,
The caterpillars fall off from the tree,
As fast as drops of rain, when with a crook,
For acorns or apples the tree is shook.[850]
This remarkable superstitious remedy for destroying caterpillars was
frequently practiced by the Indians of America. Schoolcraft, treating of
the peculiar superstitions connected with the menstrual lodge of these
people, says:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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