Eternal Butterfly Mama
2 min readBaby cany, Partial Late Qing Dynasty/South of Guizhou There is an ancient story in Miao communities Long long ago the cosmos was in tranquility, when the butterfly and the water bubble began a romance.Later, the butterfly gave birth to 12 eggs and out of the eleven of the eggs appeared everything and lives in the nature.
But the remaining one egg, despite 3 years’ effort of hatching by the butterfly mama, did not show any sign of hatching. So the butterfly mama asked the Jiyu Bird as the Divine Bird of the Miaos for help and another three years passed before Jiangyang, as the forefather of the human race was hatched. Since then the Miaos have tradition of regarding the butterflies as the origin of the universe and call the butterfly as Butterfly Mama. This is why in traditional Miao embroidery works there are always the butterflies and worshipping of butterfly is an eternal motif. Anyhow, different tribes and branches of Miaos have different shapes of the butterflies, some abstractand some not.
The Miaos regard the butterfly as divine and as the symbol of their ancestry, and the origin of everything in their world and their life. So under the embroidering needles, the butterfly is not only a simple butterfly. With all the butterflies on the Miao embroidery, you can feel the feeling towards the Butterfly Mama, which is more fascinating than the Mr. Liang, Miss Zhu and the Butterfly Legend popular in the Mainstream Han people. In case someone is offering an old Miao embroidery piece to you, it is the first important to identify the butterfly pattern on it If no trace is found, then you had better to be on alert. And such things happen not uncommonly.
