Customer Reviews

The Spirit of Butterflies: Myth, Magic, and Art

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This book succeeds both as a tremendous joy for the general reader and a serious treatment of its subject. It is perhaps the best, maybe the only, book on the market right now treating its subject well and completely. Exceeding the breadth of its title, the book actually treats the cultural significance of butterflies throughout history. This is no small feat. Butterflies have been taken by many cultures to inculcate hope, rebirth, transformation and transcendence, matters at the heart of mankind's internal concern for many millennia. Despite its masterful photography and copious illustrations, Ms. Manos-Jones's production immediately belies any notion that it is simply a "coffee table book". The chapter titles well illustrate the book's topical landscape-- for example "The Sacred Butterfly", "The Artful Butterfly", "The Verbal Butterfly", [famous] "Butterfly People", and so on. By the time you've gotten through each of the ten chapters, be you butterfly buff or butterfly scholar, you will probably be surprised that, concerning this topic, you "didn't know the half of it". It is important to point out that Ms. Manos-Jones brings to this book a well-informed knowledge both of butterflies and world environmental issues. In life, she wears another hat-- as an environmentalist associated with the important Michoacan Reforestation Fund-- a premier conservation group working to protect Monarch butterfly overwintering habitats in Mexico. Given these credentials, the book is a really wedding of Ms. Manos-Jones' professional level expertise on conservation and the pure love of her subject-- butterflies. This book can be recommended wholeheartedly to the general reader and the informed butterfly enthusiast alike. I imagine that a few scholars and historians will want to dig into it as well.

Every culture known to man throughout the rise and fall of civilizations, has carried a myth or symbol about the butterfly. Evidence of this includes the myth of Eros and Psyche, ancient Mycenean gold relics, wall ornaments of Teotihuacan in Mexico, the Japanese paintings, the Native American legend. This book captures the collective ethos of this powerful universal symbol well. It is well-illustrated.

So, what does all of this mean? Why is it such a recurring and powerful symbol in the collective psyche?

The spirit of the butterfly is the transformative symbol of the regeneration of love which can fly. Love gives you the wings to fly, to be free. This notion of the beauty of love with its gossamer wings, is something that is more precious than anything, for it allows one's heart to open within it where the seed may be born to flower. This flower may blossom fully into joy beyond one's own conscious power to imagine. The seed that may open up and spring up within one's heart can be a form of transformation that does last forever. This is a form of one's own opening to a current within one's own being, a current that can magnetize others when it is fully open. That power to magnetize is something that we are all born with, but that few seldom realize because they are not open to their own feeling in their heart of being free and at one with others.

That is what this book is about and why it is meaningful in capturing the essence of a universal symbol.

Until I read this book I thought that only Nabokov could write about butterflies at such a level
Maraleen, all my compliments brava!!