Mother Shipton

The witch on a moth's wing

I do like a good moth. Especially the ones that have the decency to fly around during the day. Usually a bit more understated, less obvious than their butterfly relatives, but if anything I prefer their subtlety and the often amazing intricacy of their wing patterns.

In the UK (and a good chunk of Europe and Russia and beyond, to be fair) there’s a specific set of day-flying moths that you can find if you go to the right sort of place in the summer - the right sort of grassland with some flowers, basically.

Full disclosure, my actual favourite amongst this little moth community is the Burnet Companion:

which I’ve got a very soft spot for. Lovely little thing imo. But one of the others you’ll sometimes find in the same sort of place has a nice little story to tell.

The Mother Shipton moth (Callistege mi):

Unshowy but kind of elegant. What we’re particularly interested in is the pattern on the upper surface of its forewings:

Which shows up particularly clearly here:

This bit of it here:

Resemble anything? Well, here’s a statue in the town of Knaresborough, in the north of England. I think it’s kind of awesome. A great addition to your market place.

It’s a statue of the original Mother Shipton, a 16th century herbalist, prophetess and (alleged) witch. She had a pretty remarkable, and in some ways sad, life, though which of the stories about her are real and which are later embellishments is a bit hard to figure out. Given the era, elements of misogyny, superstition and a low tolerance for physical difference probably coloured how she was seen and presented at the time, but here’s a near contemporary engraving of her:

We might suspect that’s a bit of a caricature - a stereotypical depiction of a ‘witch’ as a ‘hag’ - but who knows. Other portrayals are less clichéd. Anyway, the stereotype is why the Mother Shipton moth is called, in English, what it is, for the similarity of its wing pattern to what people imagined a witch’s face looked like in profile:

Honestly don’t know whether it jumps out to people who aren’t primed to see it - I already knew what I was looking for before I ever saw the moth, so to me it’s obvious the moth has a ‘monsterified’ face on its wing. Neither the moth nor Mother Shipton herself count as monsters, obviously, and honestly I think if you see this fluttering around a sunny meadow in the height of summer, what you should really be thinking is ‘oh, what a pleasantly complex yet muted wing pattern that moth has’: