BUTTERFLIES WITH HUMAN EYES

789

It thus appears that the popular idea of butterflies as human souls,
so widely diffused in the remotest regions of the globe, had become a formal
feature of the Minoan religion. In the heroic Age of Classical Greece the
dead are likened to bats and birds.1 But the very name for the insect, V^X7?.
the 'soul' or 'life' of man, and the part which its personification, Psyche,
plays later in Hellenic mythology, point to the survival and resurgence
of the earlier underlying folklore of 'Greece before the Greeks'. To the
Cretan peasant to-day butterflies are still ' little souls '.

Both at Mycenae and in Crete itself,2 the butterfly, as the symbol
of life after death, naturally plays a conspicuous part
in jewellery designed for funereal use. The thin em-
bossed gold plates presenting this motive with their
small perforations for attachment may have been
either sewn on to the grave-cloths or riveted to
coffins. The religious value of the type is further
illustrated by the appearance of summary figures
of butterflies on seal-stones of the amuletic or talis-
manic class. These may either have served as
charms to secure long life or as a protection against
ghosts.

The butterfly hovering over the Elysian blooms
that rise beside the lily-crowned figure has the ap-
pearance of having six wings, Fig. 514. These are coloured successively
yellow and blue, the yellow of the lowest pair showing two large red eyes,
and each wing terminates in a slightly knobbed point, common to most of
this decorative class as seen both in Crete and in the Mycenae tombs.

The eyes on these soul butterflies, to which such prominence is here Symbolic
given—taken over from certain Lepidoptera 3—seem to have played a special *
part in Minoan popular fancy. On a clay seal-impression from the ' Little
Palace' at Knossos we see them actually transformed into human eyes
(Fig. 515).' This leads us in turn to a design on a remarkable gold signet-
ring found in a built tomb at Isopata,5 where a similar eye appears in the
background of a scene depicting a ritual dance held in honour of the Goddess

1 Compare Od. xi. 605, 633, and xxiv. 5. features were taken over from the eyed hawk-

moth (Smerinthus ocellatus).

4 Repeated here from P. of M., i, p. 705,
Fig. 529,^.

5 A. E., Tomb of the Double Axes, are., p. 10,
Fig. 16 {Arch., lxv). Cf., too, Ring of Nestor,
&-■<:., p. 58, Fig. 51.

Fig. 515. Seal-im-
pression from ' Little
Palace ', Knossos, show-
ing Butterflies' Wings
with Human Eyes.

2 E. g. the butterfly plates from a tomb at
Phaestos, Mon. Ant., xiv, 1904, p. 6or, Fig.
66.

3 The large size of the body in this and
other cases, and the well-marked bars that
often appear on it suggest that at times certain