Many superstitions surround the dragonfly. Some of them are reported in a brilliantly illustrated book by entomologists Forrest L. Mitchell and James L. Lasswell entitled A Dazzle of Dragonflies. One such belief is that dragonflies are poisonous and that their sting is fatal. They are said to be servants to snakes and the devil. Still today, one common name for the dragonfly in the U.S. is “devil’s darning needle.” They are to be avoided at all costs. The book’s authors assure us that these beliefs aren’t true, but they also admit that dragonfly lore is beyond their expertise. Truth can be powerful medicine, although many people resist it. But stories can be powerful medicine, too–or powerful poison.
Native American writer Thomas King (The Truth about Stories) tells us that we are our stories. We have to be careful with them because, as he says, they contain “relationships that help to define the nature of the universe and how cultures understand the world in which they exist.” Truth would seem to eliminate the need for stories, reducing existence to little more than biological and physical facts, which is fine if you’re a rock, an ocean wave or a fruit fly. But since we’re self-aware, self-conscious humans we need stories to define who we are. We might say that fiction is our truth–that it provides meaning, purpose, direction to our lives.
Truth is, Dragonfly might be poisonous after all. He can make people fearful and angry. He can fill them with shame. He can, it is said, sew up the fingers and mouths of nagging women, mouthy children and men who cuss up a blue storm. One story says he can fly right into your ear and penetrate your brain. It’s true … I swear! He really can! In fact, he has just penetrated your brain and is waiting there now for your response. The dragonfly is a trickster, though. A.R. Campbell (Bats, Mosquitoes, and Dollars) referred to the dragonfly in 1925 as “man’s best friend in the insect world” (qtd. in Mitchell, Lasswell). He can cure malaria by eating mosquitoes. I swear … this, too, is true.
The devil may be in your own mind, and so may the healer … the good and bad together, says a Lakota man I know about. A constant refrain in King’s book, referred to above, is that (in my partly paraphrased, partly quoted version) you may do whatever you want with the story–scoff at it, dismiss it, forget about it. Just don’t say that if you had heard it earlier you would have lived your life differently. “You’ve heard it now.”
Amazing what we will see if we just start looking and asking questions. One thing leads to another, connections are made, knowledge and understanding expand. Maybe the world makes a little more sense, or maybe we just learn to appreciate common motifs interpreted through different perspectives. As I was looking at images of the Greek god Apollo, I noticed this one with a black bird in it and immediately thought of Rainbow Crow who became blackened by soot bringing fire from the Creator to his animal pals slowly freezing to death on earth (see last post). I figured the bird must have some meaning, so I Googled it.
How does a trained skeptic write about a “mythology” he doesn’t quite believe in or comprehend because he stands outside of the culture that produced it? I’m not just talking about Native American stories, either. In school, we often study stories as if they were lifeless insects impaled through the heart by long, sharp needles affixing them to a bed of white cotton. It isn’t often possible to immerse ourselves in living oral traditions we aren’t part of, and even if we could we’d always be outsiders to some degree, ethnographers rather than full participants. Still, we might learn something by exploring the ironies, the distance between illusions and reality … we might even lessen the gap a little among skeptics and believers—assuming this is a worthy goal, and I believe it is.
Journey of the Dragonfly 