The soul takes flight

Last month, at Edinburgh School of Art, I was interested to come across a student who’d chosen Marlowe’s Dr Faustus as her end-of-year degree project. In the wonderful stage costume she’d designed for its central figure were three gloriously embroidered butterflies fluttering around his hat. Bats, yes, moths, maybe, but what exactly was the significance of butterflies to a man bound for subterranean hell? The answer is in Rainbow Dust, Peter Marren’s superbly distilled statement on our national obsession with butterflies.

It turns out that western civilisation has projected a stream of ideas and meanings on to these creatures that have made them fertile artistic territory for centuries. As metaphors for transient beauty and brief pleasure, they are peculiarly fitting motifs for Marlowe’s tragic character. Yet they can be found making similar moral commentary on human experience in works as varied as Hieronymus Bosch’s ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’ and the kaleidoscope collages of Damien Hirst.

But butterflies are also suggestive of higher human ideals. The ancient Greek name for the insects was the same as their word for soul — ‘psyche’. This was not just a chance association: the adult insect is, after all, a creature that turns from lowly larval ‘worm’ into one of the most beautiful of all life forms. Marren is insightful on all this psychology, but he is equally adept at exploring our scientific investigations of butterflies.

The creatures have been acquired and fetishised by naturalists for centuries. The author is not at all squeamish about the carnage inflicted by early collectors, having begun his own career as a child who killed the things he loved. In fact, he argues for indulgence of this youthful destructive phase because it often blossoms into strong moral feeling.