The death's-head hawkmoth: Atropos, Acheron and a skull on its back
The name given by naturalists, the skull pattern, the squeaking cry and the lines of Keats: why the death's-head hawkmoth became an omen of death.
Few creatures bear a symbol as explicit on their bodies as the death's-head hawkmoth, a large nocturnal moth found in Africa and Europe. On the back of its thorax it shows a pale pattern that recalls a skull, and when disturbed it emits a shrill sound, like a squeak. It is no surprise that an insect with these features was long considered a messenger of misfortune and received a scientific name laden with references to death.
A name from the world of the dead
Linnaeus described it in 1758 under the name Sphinx atropos, and the insect was later placed in the genus Acherontia, now in use. Both names point to Greek mythology. Atropos is one of the three Moirai, already named by Hesiod in the Theogony beside Clotho and Lachesis: she is the one who cuts the thread of life and who cannot be turned back, as her very name indicates.
Acheron, on the other hand, is one of the rivers of the underworld, crossed by the souls of the dead according to Greek and later Dantean tradition. The naturalists who named the insect knew the classics well and chose its names on the basis of the pattern on the thorax: a skull could only evoke death, fate and the journey to the afterlife.
An insect that speaks and steals honey
Two unusual habits add to the moth's sinister fame. The first is its cry: the adult produces a shrill sound by pushing air through its pharynx, a phenomenon rare among moths which naturalists studied at length. In a culture that read the signs of nature as messages, an insect with a skull on its back that seemed to lament in the night inevitably aroused fear.
The second habit concerns bees. The death's-head hawkmoth enters hives to feed on honey, often without being driven off by the bees, a behaviour biologists explain partly by the scent of its cuticle. The caterpillars, large and conspicuous, live on plants such as the potato and other members of the nightshade family, and the species reaches Europe every summer through migrations from Africa.
From omen to literature
In the European countryside the appearance of this moth in the house was often interpreted as a bad omen, sometimes as the announcement of an illness or a bereavement. The popular name, similar in many languages, fixed the link with the skull: in English death's-head hawkmoth, in German Totenkopfschwärmer, in French sphinx tête de mort.
Romantic literature took up the image. John Keats, in his Ode on Melancholy of 1819, urges the reader not to let the death-moth become one's «mournful Psyche», one's grieving soul. The line plays on the double meaning of the Greek psyche, which meant both soul and butterfly. In the twentieth century cinema and posters renewed its fame as an icon of the uncanny.
The death's-head hawkmoth shows how nature can offer, almost by chance, a ready-made symbol. A pattern on the thorax, an unusual sound and a curious habit were enough to turn a migratory insect into an emblem of mortality. Today it is seen with different eyes, as one of the most fascinating moths in Europe, but its name still tells the story of the fears it inspired.