Dance of the Dung Beetles

Their role in our changing world

Marcus Byrne, Helen Lunn

• Publisher: Wits University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781776142361
• Topic: Biowissenschaften
• Subtopic: Naturgeschichte

In this sweeping history of more than 3 000 years, beginning with Ancient Egypt, scientist Marcus Byrne and writer, Helen Lunn capture the diversity of dung beetles and their unique behaviour patterns. Dung beetles' fortunes have followed the shifts from a world dominated by a religion that symbolically incorporated them into some of its key concepts of rebirth, to a world in which science has largely separated itself from religion and alchemy. With over 6 000 species found throughout the world, these unassuming but remarkable creatures are fundamental to some of humanity's most cherished beliefs and have been ever present in religion, art, literature, science and the environment. They are at the centre of current gene research, play an important role in keeping our planet healthy, and some nocturnal dung beetles have been found to navigate by the starry skies. Outlining the development of science from the point of view of the humble dung beetle is what makes this charming story of immense interest to general readers and entomologists alike.

CHAPTER ONE

When the dung beetle wore golden shoes

DEATH IS NOT A SUBJECT one expects to find at the beginning of a book on dung beetles. The idea of someone’s great-great granny wandering around with dead dung beetles dangling from her ears is equally strange, but the two subjects are not unrelated. The Victorians in their grand obsession with Egypt, death and loss shared a number of ideas with the ancient Egyptians from whom they took the association of dung beetles with death. The difference in the case of the Victorians was that they had a monotheistic religious template for death, which differed from the Egyptians’ rich animist pantheon of gods. Moreover, instead of wearing scarabs made out of stone, the Victorians frequently wore the real thing. Quite how the hapless beetles found themselves adorning the earlobes of respectable ladies is part of a story that began seven thousand years ago in Egypt, and which came full circle with the nineteenth-century invasion of Egypt by Napoléon and the subsequent development of Egyptomania. It was the two subjects of death and resurrection that made dung beetles so significant in ancient Egypt.

Although the family of dung beetles comes in a huge array of sizes, bizarre shapes and iridescent colours (with some so small you can barely see them) it is the smaller subfamily of true dung beetles that earned these insects their central role in Egypt. What made them so important to the Egyptians was their intimate relationship with dung, which promoted them to godliness. This makes the idea of dainty/fastidious Victorian women boldly wearing such creatures as ornaments seem even odder. The Victorians, however, viewed dung beetles and nature in general as a window onto the mystery of creation and as a distraction from the ugliness of industrial society, so perhaps they did not consider the faecal associations of their entomological jewellery too closely. The same cannot be said for the ancient Egyptians, who were very aware of the dung-rolling proclivities of the beetles. It is this improbable and intriguing relationship between an insect known for its relationship to ‘filth’ and the beliefs of one of the most enduring civilisations known to humankind that is our point of departure.

Why would a creature that subsists on the most unappealing end product of other living creatures be the one insect (as opposed to so many others) singled out for sacred recognition? And why primarily the ball-rolling species? On the other side of the world, the early culture of the Paraguayan Lengua-Maskoy people also gave ball-rolling dung beetles a mythological role. The dung balls seem to have been the clincher almost every time; this is not completely surprising, given that the balls of fresh faeces the beetles sculpt in full view are usually so beautifully spherical and (relative to the size of the beetle), evidence of remarkable strength. Although the handsome rollers are the most obvious component of the dung beetle fauna, only about ten per cent of tropical dung beetles actually roll balls, and that percentage declines as one moves towards the poles. The other species are either dung dwellers (like the beautiful Oniticellus formosus) or tunnellers (which are by far the largest contingent of the dung beetle fauna). Tunnellers commute between the dung/soil interface and their underground nest, so they are rarely seen unless one is prepared to poke through poo. It seems, however, that only a few species of rollers in the huge subfamily of over six thousand species lie at the core of the myths and beliefs that surround these beetles. It is their visible burying of the balls of dung in the earth (together with a seemingly miraculous reappearance from that same earth) that earned the beetles singular significance in certain early mythologies and belief systems.

Dung beetles and their balls have made sufficient impression on humans to feature in creation myths on more than one continent. Among the Bushongo people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Africa, the scarab was seen as the original insect which created all other insects. This is an unusual variation on other creation myths, in which the scarab’s dung-rolling activities usually feature more prominently. In South America the Chaca Indians (who, along with the Lengua-Maskoy, lived in the area of present-day Columbia) gave their dung rollers a singularly important role. For them the dung beetle was the potter, a giant beetle known as Aksak, who created nothing less than man and woman.¹ This creation myth is still present among Indian tribes resident in Bolivia’s Gran Chaco country, but has no resurrection counterpoint as found in Egyptian mythology. Instead, relatives generally destroy memories of their dead, who are believed to turn into animals – except for the shamans whose souls live among the stars of the Milky Way. For the Toba of Sumatra, the dung ball symbolised the ball of matter the scarab brought from the sky in order to form the world. Clearly it was the moulding of the dung ball that was symbolically important to the Chaca and the Toba. This gives us some understanding as to why that little ball has managed to carry so much significance.

Dung is inescapably dung, however, and in other cultures it was not so much the ball as the beetle’s relationship to dung that was of importance. This earned dung beetles a place in a Chinese Taoist text, The Secret of the Golden Flower, which was based on ancient oral transmissions of an esoteric Chinese circle.² In The Secret of the Golden Flower the dung beetle was a metaphor for the transformation central to the Taoist concern with being at one with nature. This offered the means of transcending the self in order to be at one with the world. The dung ball, from which life would eventually develop, was an example of how the spirit might grow and transcend the environment in which an individual lived. This theme recurred in the writings of Christian theologians, albeit in the context of dung as a metaphor for sin. Unlike the Christian tradition, the Tao grew out of a form of animism, the beginning point for most spiritual expressions for early humankind.

While dung beetles seem unlikely role players in our complex faiths and the history of human belief systems, they were far from alone in feeding the human imagination about answers to the origins of life and the hereafter. Natural resources (in particular certain mushrooms and other psychotropic plants) were responsible for visions of other worlds beyond the immediately visible one, and fed conceptions of realms that were somehow linked to the material world. Dung beetles entered these alternative worlds simply by rolling and burying balls of dung and thus unintentionally mimicking the daily death and rebirth of the sun, the first deity.

The combination of invisible realms with the symbolism of an insect that seemed to replicate the motion of the earth is as intriguing as the raft of beliefs which followed. Both gave early humans visions and symbols, along with ways of translating the seeming chaos and uncertainty of life on the planet into digestible human interpretations and ways of thinking. The fungi and mind-altering plants consumed by the early shamanic mediums shifted their consciousness into shapes, forms and connections that defied words, but which were compelling enough that they were (and still are) believed to represent an unseen and significant reality. Meanwhile dung beetles, through their dung burial behaviour, became symbols of beliefs surrounding death and resurrection: the passage of day into night and back into day, from light into dark, and back into the light again.

It was probably shamanic journeys into both the under- and overworld that fed the earliest myths of what we now call heaven and hell. The Mayan text, the Chilam Balam of Chumayel, is one of the few manuscripts to have survived the destructive judgement of Catholic monks in South America – they burned anything that they believed referenced pagan beliefs. This almost impenetrable text, which appears to be a mix of Christian cosmogony (theories about the beginnings of the universe) and traditional Mayan beliefs, might have escaped destruction for this very reason. In this work the scarab appears as the filth of the earth, in both a material and moral sense. As such, it represented something similar to early ideas of hell as a place and feeling of primal chaos, disorder, sickness and pain, in contrast to heaven as the realm of expansion, healing and release.³ In ancient times heaven was a world accessed either through rhythmic drumming and trance dancing, through psychoactive plants or through a combination of the two. Along with dreams, those experiences were the earliest happenings that created a sense of unseen worlds, equally numinous in their inclusion of the mystery of where people disappeared to after death.

Although the dung beetle does not appear to have any place in modern mythological belief systems, the early pre-Egyptians saw them as a powerful symbol of resurrection and the creative power of the sun. It is via this route that their legacy was embedded in every major Western religion, from the time that humans first developed spiritual curiosity about where we came from, and to where we are going.

The gradual desertification of the Sahara (which began to accelerate approximately 5300 BCE) motivated small groups of nomadic hunter-gatherers to cluster increasingly around the Nile River, where they began to farm its banks and to found one of the earliest and most enduring civilisations in human history. These nascent societies created an initial foundation for the multiplicity of gods that we now identify with early Egyptian civilisation.

Death and order were central topics in these developing civilisations. In their late Neolithic burial sites at places such as Deir Tasa, there is evidence of a belief in an afterlife, with the dead being buried with bowls of food and other items thought essential to life in the hereafter.

They also established an assemblage of gods and beings they had relied on in smaller tribal groupings. As animists they appear to have seen the cosmos as a ‘Grand Chinese Opera’, populated with a limitless cast of frogs and elephants, rivers and mountains and probably beetles.⁴ Over time the pantheon of Egyptian deities incorporated everything from crocodiles and bulls to dung beetles.

Whatever early belief system one examines, it is not surprising that animals present in the local habitat were the ones invested with meaning and significant roles. The Japanese used the cicada as their symbol of resurrection in the hereafter. Life-giving animals such as the auroch (a forerunner of the cow which offered food, clothing and hides for warmth) were particularly significant in the cold climes of Europe. For the San people of Southern Africa the eland was an equivalent creature, a particularly powerful beast whose death opened up a space in which the living (through the intercession of a shaman) could connect with other realms and the spirit world.

In Egypt, the mystical animal-deities were those still seen in tomb paintings and sculptures. They ranged from fierce or dangerous creatures such as lions, crocodiles and cobras to harmless birds and insects. Different groups revered different creatures, and the ruler of each district in pre-dynastic Egypt had his own god, which explains how a number of important deities (such as Horus, the falcon god) were introduced. The beginning of dynastic Egypt circa 3100 BCE saw the consolidation of regions under one overarching ruler, a Pharaoh (king) who, like the rulers in Egypt’s pre-history, identified with one or more animal gods.

One of the defining differences between a Pharaoh and a shaman was that the latter was usually an otherwise unremarkable community member within a small social and kinship grouping, usually consisting of no more than 150 people. The shamans became priests and part of a formalised religious hierarchy, a radical contrast to the shamanic world of the egalitarian hunter-gatherer, in whose animist universe all creatures and things were able to address each other. The priest now became the intermediary to the gods, who were relied on to ensure rain and bountiful harvests. This meant the evolution of a powerful priesthood, in which the Pharaoh was the chief mediator with the gods, with the priests below them in the hierarchy. The role of the priests was to care for and mediate with the gods, who in turn would show their pleasure through the annual inundation of the Nile and plentiful harvests.

Over time priests, priestesses and god wives (wives or consorts of the Pharaoh) became enormously wealthy and powerful. As they ostensibly communicated with the gods rather than the people, a language representing the gods in the form of symbols helped to cement the concept of different deities. Shared symbols with the same meaning for all were required for group cohesion, and represented a step away from the imagery and objects used in the earlier smaller groups. Dung beetles would have been well known around the rim of the Mediterranean, with the sacred scarab, Scarabaeus sacer, occurring in Southern Europe and North Africa; the term ‘scarab’ is used as a common name for dung beetles to this day. The sacred scarab eventually rose to such popularity in ancient Egypt that, 2 500 years after its zenith, both Pliny and Plutarch commented on the beetles’ surprisingly high status.

The formalised appearance of symbolic scarabs as amulets in the early Egyptian Middle Kingdom from at least 3000 BCE suggests scarabs were already a well-established representation drawn from the natural world at the beginning of dynastic Egypt.⁵ Dung beetles were embodied in the god Khepri, a creature presented with a human body and a scarab head. His name is variously transliterated in English as Khepra, Khepera or Khepri meaning ‘itself is transforming.’ He was a magical creature, a perception reflected in the play on the name for dung beetle in Egyptian, ‘hprr’, which means ‘rising from, coming into being’ and which became ‘hpri’, the divine name Khepri: ‘It is said of Khepra, as of Horus, that [he] produced the Ma, that is the law or harmony which upholds the universe.’⁶ Khepri is a significant god because he was associated with creation and becoming, whether in this world or the next. He was a special deity from the beginning of dynastic Egypt (circa 3100 BCE) and much of his fame was put down to his particular (but misinterpreted) breeding behaviour, in which it was assumed no females were involved.

It has also been suggested that the jewel-like colours of many scarabs might have first attracted human attention (as many beautiful species still do) resulting in dresses for movie stars and grandiose ballroom ceilings being decorated by their metallic wing covers. (Prada handbags, designed by the mercurial Damien Hirst, continue this eccentric and impractical but nevertheless beautiful fashion on the runways of Europe). However, the sacred scarab (which is generally agreed upon as the model for Khepri) is not quite as colourful as some of its other scarab relatives, so brilliance is not a particularly compelling argument in this case. Its significance, since its first appearance as far back as the second prehistoric civilisation in the Nile region, derived from its ball rolling and breeding habits, and the interpretations of these behaviours.

Dung beetles were placed in jars buried alongside the dead, indicating that their ability to disappear into the earth and then re-emerge was a magical attribute that could influence the fate of the corpse. Both dried beetles and models of beetles made out of green serpentine and cut sard were found in graves at Tarkhan. Scarabs and other beetles were considered sacred and magical from the earlier part of the second prehistoric age in Egypt right down to the Christian period.⁷ Khepri’s role in Egyptian belief systems increased in significance as the pantheon of gods and their roles evolved. A correlation between the number of gods and the increasing complexity of the newly settled society is apparent, but Khepri was included from the start; his fortunes and representation (although not static) remain in one form or another throughout the very long history of Egyptian culture.

In Memphis, the ancient capital of Egypt, Khepri was associated with Ptah, who was originally the god of the earth from which it was believed humans were crafted. It was this association of creation and shaping forms from the raw material of the earth that linked him to Khepri, whose dung ball represented the daily passage of the sun and the coming into being of matter. Khepri also featured in one of the many Egyptian creation myths in which a lotus flower rises out of the waters. When its petals open, a scarab is revealed which transforms itself into a weeping boy; the boy’s tears become...