Why Cowan Made the Butterfly an Emblem of the Soul

In Curious Facts in the History of Insects, Cowan describes a butterfly that, after its egg and larval stages, spends a time enclosed and seemingly dead before breaking free in “new life” and “the most beautiful attire”^[1]. The enclosure is like a coffin in his account, making the butterfly’s emergence a vivid image of life following an apparent death^[2].

Cowan attributes this image first to the Egyptians: they regarded the butterfly as a fitting picture of the human soul and the immortality to which it aspired^[3]. He says the figure of Psyche, the Soul, was originally a butterfly and was later depicted as a winged female child^[4]. In his telling, the Egyptians also associated the image particularly with Osiris, who left a coffin-like confinement and experienced renewed life; Cowan says the symbol then passed to the Greeks and Romans^[5]. This is Cowan’s account of a cultural belief about the soul, not a biological claim that a butterfly dies and returns to life^[6].