Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/229

 " Bnfio-/;/o- i)L the Fly^ 203

well ; " every movement of the sympathetic fly was regarded in silent awe, and as he appeared cheerful or dejected." so would the event be favourable or not. " The guardian fly" was supposed to be immortal ; " he might sometimes appear dead, but ... it was only a transmigration into a similar form, which made little alteration on the real identity." ^*

We may, then, regard the Oxford "fly" as the guardian of Strowell, whose movements boded good or bad luck. But why should an insect be so important.^ I suggest that it embodied the godling or water-sprite of the well. The author of Narcissus says that the "fly" was a metamor- phosed maiden, such a one perhaps as the Romano-British well-goddess Coventina, to whom a shrine was erected on the "wall of Hadrian." ^^ The belief that sprites or dis- embodied personalities might appear in the form of insects is found in many parts of Britain and the Continent. In Cornwall, "the moths, which some regard as departed souls, others as fairies, are called Pisgicsr^^ In Armagh "a girl chasing a butterfly was chid by her companions, saying, " that may be the soul of your grandfather." " ^' In Nor- thumberland "red butterflies were killed, being accounted witches." ^^

Ancient Greek artists represented the human soul as a butterfly ; in fact, one species of butterfly is described by Aristotle as "^vx/i, soul.^^ Grimm states that "the dragon- fly is called enchanted maid,"^^ that the demon-lovers of witches appear to them in the form of butterflies, and that

'^Sir J. Sinclair, SdiUstual Account of Scot land (1794), vol. xii., pp. 464-5.

^^ Archacolo^ia Aeliana, 2nd S., vol. \\n., passim.

" R. Hunt, Popular /Romances of the West of England, ist S. (1865), p. 68.

vol. ii., p. ?>l.
 * ' W. S. Mason, A Statistical Account, or Parochial Stu-vey of Ireland (1^16),

'* The Denhain Tracts, vol. ii., p. 325.

"J. G. Frazer, Taboo, (iQli), p. 26.

-•* Stallybrass, op. cit, vol. iii., p. 1029.