In Steiner's reading, the butterfly is the risen plant, a creature of sunlight and air whose wing-colours mirror, in the cosmos, the play of memory within the human being.
The Butterfly is, for Rudolf Steiner, no earthly insect at all but a being woven from sunlight, lifted into the air by the planets that lie beyond the sun. Egg, caterpillar, cocoon and wing are sunlight slowly spun into matter and then set free again as colour. Read inwardly, the butterfly answers to the rising of memory in the human soul.
In Steiner's Own Words
When we look at the butterfly with its shimmering colours, we see it fluttering in the air, in the light-flooded, light-irradiated air. It is upborne by the waves of the air. It hardly contacts what is of an Earth-Moon-fluid nature. Its element is in the upper regions. And when one investigates the course of earth-evolution, it is a remarkable thing that just in the case of the small insect one arrives at very early epochs of earth-metamorphosis. What today shimmers in the light-irradiated air as the butterfly's wings was first formed in germ during old Saturn, and developed further during the time of old Sun. It was then that there arose what still today makes it possible for the butterfly to be in its very nature a creation of light and air.
What it Means Today
Steiner's butterfly is the direct heir of one image: Goethe's metamorphosis of the plant. In the 1790 essay Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen, Goethe traced a single organ, the leaf, expanding and contracting through root, stem, calyx and blossom, one form passing through many. Steiner takes that morphological eye and turns it upward. Lay the plant on its side and lift it into the air, he says, and you have the butterfly: the seed becomes the egg, the leaf becomes the creeping caterpillar, the calyx draws together into the chrysalis, and the open blossom unfolds as the coloured wing. Hence his twin verse, which the Goetheanum's natural-science section in Dornach still reads aloud: the plant is the butterfly fettered by the earth, the butterfly is the plant freed by the cosmos. Two near neighbours, one gesture; the insect hovering over the flower is meeting its own earthbound relative.
What makes this more than a poetic conceit is where Steiner carries it next, into the soul. He calls the butterfly the cosmic embodiment of memory. The momentary thought, he holds, lives in us as the bird lives in the air; but a percept that sinks down, ripens and rises again as a remembered picture follows the slower arc of egg, caterpillar and cocoon, until the memory at last flutters free, its wings shimmering with colour in an inward summer light. To watch butterflies over a meadow, on this reading, is to watch your own remembering pictured outside you, sunlight made visible as the answer to the quiet flickering of recollection within.
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