Phalenai
The moth, phalena—Greek for devourer set in Roman letters—Moffett calls it, lies “hid all the day time under leaves” (note 2). The History describes some thirty-nine phalenai, and these, the first four, are the largest. Moffett gives two views, top- and under-side, of the first, “the King of Butterflies,” on the recto [Figure One] (note 2). Like the water-clock and the field-kricket, the king is one bug turned wing-over-wing. The page preserve instants: with each view, a different moment. The righted king may live, but his flipped double—six legs pulled tight to its breast—is surely dead. On the verso, Moffett pictures three phalenai more [Figure Two]. The uppermost is the king’s “Queen, delicate, tender, fine, all beset with pearls and precious stones” (note 3). It is as though Moffett continues, “Nature in adorning of this had spent her whole painters shop” (note 4). Here, the artist God reaches his apogee. There is perhaps no created thing so beautiful as these bugs. And yet, in The History, black and paper’s dun-white must suffice. Beneath the queen are the third phalena—with its “divers pieces ... of watry Amethyst”—and the fourth, whose wings are “full of long black little veins” (note 5). The queen and fourth phalena, legs apart, tensed, are yet alive. The third phalena—no telling whether it is dead—is marked “with an eye, the sight or apple whereof is browne, the half-circle white” (note 6). Each of the phalenai, save perhaps the fourth, holds two eyes or more in its wings. On the recto, the eye of the first king’s right forewing meets its queen’s, shadowing through the leaf [Figure Three]. The queen’s second eye, her left, presents on the king’s right, between his fore- and hind-wings. Each eye seems to find the gaze of another. In its turn, the king bleeds to the verso. Through the leaf, it joins the queen, third, and fourth phalenai. With the king showing in the verso, the four bugs bleed to a single phalena. The reader sees this composite insect—at once from topside and right, and top again, bottom, and left. This assemblage of views lends the bug a sense of motion. The new phalena wings, or tumbles, between the leaf’s two faces, and the paper grown deep is air lit up.
note 1. Thomas Moffett, trans. John Rowland, The History of Four-Footed Beasts, Serpents, and Insects (London: Ellen Cotes for George Sawbridge, Thomas Williams, and Thomas Johnson, 1658), 958.
note 2. Ibid, 959.
note 3. Ibid.
note 4. Ibid.
note 5. Ibid, 960.
note 6. Ibid.