Beetles in Folklore and Mythology
by Beetles are often found near garbage, around excrement, and in dank areas. People usually associate beetles with filth, squalor, and decay, yet myth often regards these qualities are often a preliminary stage to the creation of life.
Lady Bird, Lady Bird,
Fly away home,
Your house is on fire,
Your children will burn. (Baring-Gould, p. 209) The verse may refer to the ladybug’s association with the sun, which could be partly due to the bright orange or red on its back. Another theory is that the lines refer to the burning of hop vines after harvest to clear the fields. Sometimes, if the request is made in additional verses, people have believed the insect will fly to one’s sweetheart. In traditional rural societies, the cycle of putrefaction and renewed life was evident in yearly routines such as fertilizing the land, but it is experienced less intimately in urban life of the twentieth century. The beetle, a form of “vermin,” sometimes appears as a symbol of unredeemed filth. In the story “Metamorphosis” by the German-Jewish writer Franz Kafka (first published in 1915), a traveling salesman named Gregor Samsa, subject to degrading demands from both family and work, woke up one day to find he had been changed into a giant insect. Some readers take it for a cockroach, which is now perhaps most intimately associated with squalor and decay. The creature in Kafka’s story is indeterminate, but the description of it as lying on its hard back with legs kicking helplessly in the air suggests a beetle. Gregor struggled to communicate what remained of his humanity, until his family eventually tired of caring for him, so he died of neglect and was thrown out in the trash.
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