The cultural significance of ladybirds across languages

I’m not sure when I first knew about ladybirds – perhaps as a child of five or six. At that age you’re closer to the ground and so much closer to small creeping things than you’ll ever be again, able to observe them with that goggle-eyed curiosity born of novelty. The age when a lifelong passion for insects first fires up to forge you as an entomologist.

Or not, in my case.

I’m more of the etymologist persuasion, that inclination so often confused with the insecty one. Last spring, however, I was fascinated to see dozens of ladybirds on the stems and flowerheads of our Euphorbia amygdaloides var. robbiae, also known as Mrs Robb’s bonnet. That fount of all knowing, the interweb, tells me such a site for overwintering is not unusual. Ladybirds perform the useful task of snaffling aphids on an industrial scale.

Every day I get a Danish word of the day to help with my learning. One such was mariehøne, ‘ladybird’, literally ‘Mary hen’.

Which led me to ask where the ‘Mary’ part came from.

Your house is on fire

Unlike me until recently, you probably already knew that the Mary in question is Our Lady of Sorrows, the Virgin Mary. The native British ladybird typically, but not always, has seven spots. Seven is the number of Mary’s sorrows, which start with Simeon in the Temple at the time of Jesus’ presentation:

‘And Simeon blessed them, and said unto Mary his mother, Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel’

meaning that some will rise in faith and be blessed and others fall away. Then Simeon tells Mary: ‘Yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also.’ Mary, ‘Our Lady of Sorrows’ or ‘Mother of Sorrows’, Mater Dolorosa, is portrayed in the goriest versions of Catholic art pierced by seven rapiers, as in this gloriously gruesome image from the Chapel of the True Cross (CapilIa de la Vera Cruz) in Salamanca, Spain.

Aged five or six I had no idea about all that bloodthirstiness. But what I do remember is, in company with other playmates, picking ladybirds delicately up and then softly blowing them off my hand to the incantation of ‘Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home,  | Your house is on fire and your children are burnt.’ Nobody knows for sure how old it is, but it’s recorded in the earliest known book of nursery rhymes, Tom Thumb’s Pretty Song-Book of 1744, which measures a diminutive 3 x 1³⁄₄ inches, to fit snugly into a child’s paw.

And your children are burnt

Other languages load this inoffensive and beneficial insect with religiosity. In German it’s ein Marienkäfer (Mary’s beetle) and in Swedish Jungfru Maria(s) nyckelpiga (Virgin Mary’s keyholder, literally ‘key maid’). In Irish it’s bóín Dé, which I believe means ‘God’s little cow’, an association that appears in Russian too, with бoжья коровка and in Argentina with vaca de San Antón (St Antony’s cow). Presumably the spots are reminiscent of a cow’s hide.