Cancer, the dung beetle

As I searched around in an old box for some­thing else, I came upon a small sculp­ture of a dung bee­tle made of clay. My daugh­ter fash­ioned it a few years back as part of her Human­i­ties class at Colum­bus Alter­na­tive High School. “A waste of pre­cious class time bet­ter spent on read­ing and math,” you say? Just look up at the night­time sky, and you will see that time spend study­ing dung bee­tles is time well spent.

The con­stel­la­tion of the Dung Bee­tle takes a posi­tion of honor this time of year as it scut­tles almost over­head at around 10:30 p.m. Nes­tled in the cen­ter of the bee­tle in the place where its heart might be is a pretty fuzzy patch eas­ily vis­i­ble to the unaided eye. In binoc­u­lars, the fuzz resolves into a glo­ri­ously beau­ti­ful clus­ter of stars.

These days, we don’t call the con­stel­la­tion a bug. By the time of the flow­er­ing of ancient Greek civ­i­liza­tion, the bug had become Can­cer, the Crab, pow­er­ful house­hold pet of Hera, queen of all the gods.

The bee­tle in the sky goes back much far­ther than that. Since long before human his­tory, on sunny days the dung bee­tle has spun its drop­pings up tiny, sandy hills and allowed them to drop down again, By repeat­ing the process many times, the bee­tle is able to cre­ate balls of dung much larger than itself. Most remark­ably, the insect lays its eggs in the spheres. As the sun’s rays dry them out, the bee­tle rolls them into its tiny, under­ground lair. Out of its own excre­ment, the proud legacy of the dung bee­tle is passed on to a new gen­er­a­tion as baby bee­tles eat their way out.

“Gross,” you say? Four thou­sand years ago, the dung bee­tle seemed noth­ing short of godly. The ancient Egyp­tians saw it rolling its dung in the bright sun­shine and hypoth­e­sized that this must be the way the sun moves across the sky. The sun was an impor­tant god — Ra, the giver of light and life. They didn’t real­ize that the bee­tle laid its eggs in its drop­pings. They thought that some­how the bug pro­duced life spon­ta­neously from dung infused with Ra’s glo­ri­ous glow.

Above all, the ancient Egyp­tians craved immor­tal­ity, and so they came to wor­ship the bug. It became for them a sym­bol of the great cycle of life — of death and rebirth, of end­ings and new begin­nings, of the degen­er­a­tion that comes from old age and regen­er­a­tion of birth.

They believed that peo­ple were born again after death. The human body was thus care­fully pre­served through a long and com­plex embalm­ing process. Upon the breasts of their great pharaohs was placed an artis­tic rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the bee­tle. Some­times, among other steps of the embalm­ing process, the heart was removed from the corpse and replaced with a carv­ing of the bug.

The next year after she gave me her bee­tle, I had the honor to stand in a pharaoh’s crypt with my daugh­ter. We looked up together to see a dung bee­tle rolling the sun along the path of the Milky Way as it stretched across the sky like the back­bone of god.

The bug lives in our own cul­ture to this very day. As it was so long ago, it is called a scarab. I am often amazed to see how many peo­ple, oth­er­wise unaware of the ancient antecedents of the prac­tice, wear­ing the lovely insect as a neck­lace, right above the human heart.

And as I type these lines, nes­tled in my breast pocket, close to my heart, is a lump of clay fash­ioned into a scarab by my daugh­ter. Out of that bug flows inspi­ra­tion and power and a kind of immor­tal­ity. They flow from the ancient sands of Egypt. They have wended their inex­orable way through the stars to a small class­room in the heart of the state where we all live.

Tom Burns is the direc­tor of Perkins Obser­va­tory. He can be reached at tlburns@owu.edu.

Posted by Tom Burns on Feb 17 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.