"Butterfly" in English

Middle English buterflie, Old English buttorfleoge (written citation 1000 C.E.)

The Oxford English Dictionary notes some old Dutch words "botervlieg" and "boterschijte", and conjectures that butterflies' excrement may have been thought to resemble butter, hence giving the name "butter-shit", then "butter-fly".

Webster's Third New International Dictionary says perhaps the word comes from the notion that butterflies, or witches in that form, stole milk and butter (see German "Schmetterling" below).

"Butterfly" in other languages

Note that the human Psyche was lovers with the god Eros (at least until she did the forbidden, gazing on his sleeping form, invisible save by the oil lamp she lit); compare the sexual butterfly images in Nabokov's _Ada_.

There may also be a connection, based on shape, of butterflies with the Minoan labrys, or double axe of the Labyrinth.

Note that the priestly garments described in Exodus 28:36 include the petalon or ziz, a plate of gold attached to the miter, which shines with God's approval of a propitious sacrifice.

Possibly derived from "pteroda" by anaptyxis and lambdacism:
p tero da -> petaloudia
where "ptero" of course means wing, and has come home to roost once again in butterflies in the scientific name Lepidoptera.

Compare the ladybug or ladybird, "Our Lady's bird":

Swedish "Marias Nyckelpiga" = "Mary's maidservant's key"

German "Marienkafer" = "Mary's chafer/beetle"

German "Himmelskuchlichen"

French "Bete a bon Dieu"

Spanish "Vaquilla de Dios"

Russian "Bozhia korovka" = "God's little cow"

Hindu "Indragopa"

(cf. Iona & Peter Opie, Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes_, s.v. "Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home").

(As an aside, "schmettern", among other things, means "to ring out, to warble, to twitter" -- an aural analogue of how butterflies look in flight? Latin "pipilo/are" means "to twitter, to chirp", after all. But the German, to my ears, sounds more like the sound a butterfly makes as a Prussian sort accelerates down the autobahn mashing it into a smear on the windshield.)

"Tagfalter" is another name for butterfly, perhaps meaning "day-hinge" or "day-folder", and "Nachtfalter" is a moth. These make semantic sense, or the "falter" part may instead reflect the Old High German "fifaltra" derived from the Latin.

I do not know whether I was a man dreaming I was a butterfly,
or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I was a man.
--Chuang Tse

"Moth"

"Caterpillar"

Or is it from "piller", meaning "pillager/ravager", and "cate", meaning "food" (root of today's "caterer"), as caterpillars devour leaves?

I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpillar, and the palmerworm, my great army which I send among you.
-- Joel 2:25

Thus English caterpillar is a hairy cat, and the French is a hairy dog. Meanwhile, the word "chenille" in English means a kind of thick fuzzy yarn that looks like a caterpillar!

Related words in English

According to Mircea Eliade's Encyclopedia of Religion, "In Madagascar and among the Naga of Manipur, some trace their ancestry from a butterfly. According to the Pima of North America, at the time of beginning the creator, Chiowotmahki, assumed the form of a butterfly and flew over the world until he found a suitable place for mankind. The Maori of New Zealand believe that the soul returns to earth after death as a butterfly, and in the Solomon Islands a dying person, who has a choice as to what he will become after death, often chooses to become a butterfly. In Islamic Sufism, the moth that immolates itself in the candle flame is the soul losing itself in the divine fire."

Harking back to the ancient Greek Psyche as butterfly, there is an interesting coincidence in Aztec and Mayan mythology. Itzpapalotl is the goddess of the Obsidian Butterfly, which is to say, of the soul embedded in stone. The seemingly antinomian idea is that the free butterfly/soul is released from the body by the sacrificial blade of obsidian, and simultaneously captured or contained in it. Itzpapalotl is a counterpart of the god Tezcatlipoca of the Smoking Mirror; "tezcat" means "obsidian knife". The butterfly is also an attribute of Xochipilli, the god of flowers and vegetation, and is also associated with flickering firelight. (I suppose these names are Nahuatl.)

What's next for these flying souls? Metamorphosis? Transfiguration? Perhaps the *beat*ification of butterfly wings?
(And as for "Lepid*opera*", let's not forget Puccini's Madama Butterfly...)

I would like to thank Daniel A Rabuzzi and Doug Olcott, and Irina Neyman for help in researching this article, and Carroll Bishop, Michael Matola, and Anno Siegel for additional ideas.

Matthew Rabuzzi rabuzzi@patch.tandem.com

Matthew Rabuzzi has been a word lover and amateur etymologist ever since his first spelling bee in grade school. When not immersed in the dictionary, he writes database software at Tandem Computers, Cupertino California.