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Interconnectivity: Animals Mourning Together in Modern Stories and Mythology

Joslyn C, Author

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Non-Human Animals and Mythology

Dragonfly:









Butterfly:

Filial piety

Origin: Japanese Mythology

“A young man whose work and hobby was gardening married
a girl with an identical interest in plant life. They
lived only for each other and their shrubs and plants, but in middle age they
had a son, who happily inherited his parents’ love of flowers.

          
The parents lied within days of one another in old age, when their son was still a youth.
The boy looked after his parents’ garden and the plants in it more carefully
than ever, is that were possible, for he felt they contained the spirits of his
dead mother and father. During the first spring following their death he saw
each say two butterflies in the garden. Gentle person that he was, he
cultivated plants on which he saw the butterflies liked to settle, and as
spring turned into summer he dreamed one night that his parents had come back
to the garden and were walking round it together, looking at each plant
carefully, as gardeners will. Suddenly the couple in the dream turned into
butterflies and in this form continued to examine each flower. The next
morning, the same pair of butterflies were, as usual, in the garden and the boy
knew then that the soul of his parents rested in the butterflies and that in
that way they still enjoyed their garden.”

[Source: Juliet Piggott. "Men and Animals." Japanese
Mythology
. Feltham: Hamlyn, 1969. 113. Print.]



"The White Butterfly"

Origin: Japanese Mythology




“There was a man who died in his seventies. He had lived alone for years and was a recluse                                                     but as the illness which proved to be his last one worsened he invited the widow of his only
brother and her son, his nephew, to come to him. He was fond of both, though he
saw them seldom

           
One day,while sitting with his uncle, the young man saw an enormous white butterfly
come into the room. It fluttered, then perched upon the old man’s pillow. The
nephew tried to brush it away but it persisted. Fearing it would make the sick
man restless, he went on trying to make it fly out of the house. Then the youth
wondered whether it might not be an evil spirit, so unnatural was its behavior,
circling his uncle’s bedding. At this point the butterfly suddenly, of its own
accord, flew straight out the window. The boy’s suspicions were thoroughly
aroused and he followed it. His patient was asleep and could be left with
safety.

         
The white butterfly flew swiftly straight to the local cemetery, which was just across
the road from the house. It went directly to a tomb and then vanished. As it
had disappeared, the nephew returned to the house, having noticed that the old
but fairly recently tended grave where the butterfly had vanished was inscribed
with the name Akiko.

     
He has been away only a few minutes, but during that interval his uncle had died. Later
when he described to his mother the visit of the butterfly just before his
uncle’s death and his chase of the insect, she told him that as a young man her
brother-in-law and a girl named Akiko had been deeply in love, but Akiko had
died just before the day arranged for their wedding. He had bought a house near
her grave, looked after the tomb carefully for over fifty years, and never
spoken of his half century of mourning to anyone. His sister-in-law knew well
the cause of his self-imposed seclusion and respected it: she herself had been
a young and happy bride at the time of Akiko’s betrothal and subsequent death.
The woman had no doubt at all that it was Akiko’s spirit in the form of a white
butterfly which had come to fetch the spirit of the man she loved at the close
of his moral life.”

[Source: Juliet Piggott. "Men and Animals." Japanese Mythology. Feltham: Hamlyn, 1969. 135. Print.]

 



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