Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia

Author(s): Roger Caillois and John Shepley

Source: October , Winter, 1984, Vol. 31 (Winter, 1984), pp. 16-32
Published by: The MIT Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/778354

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 Mimicry and Legendary
Psychasthenia

ROGER CAILLOIS

translated by JOHN SHEPLEY

Prends garde: a jouer au

fanto"me, on le devient.

From whatever side one approaches things, the ultimate p

out in the final analysis to be that of distinction: distinctions betw
the imaginary, between waking and sleeping, between ignoran
edge, etc. - all of them, in short, distinctions in which valid con
demonstrate a keen awareness and the demand for resolution. Am
tions, there is assuredly none more clear-cut than that between
and its surroundings; at least there is none in which the tangible
separation is more immediate. So it is worthwhile to observe the
with particular attention and, within the phenomenon, what
necessary, given the present state of our knowledge, is to consid
as pathology (the word here having only a statistical meaning
facts that come under the heading of mimicry.
For some time now, for various and often undesirable reason
have been the object of those biologists with a heavy predilection
motives: some dream of proving metamorphosis, which, fortuna
phenomenon, rests on other foundations,1 others, the clear-sigh
of the famous God whose bounty extends over the whole of natu
Under these conditions, a strict method is essential. First of
portant to list these phenomena very rigorously, for experience
there are too many bad explanations pushing them toward confu
not a bad idea to adopt as much as possible a classification that re
and not to their interpretation, since the latter threatens to be

1. Alfred Russell Wallace, Darwinism, London, 1889.

2. L. Murat, Les merveilles du monde animal, 1914.

?Editions Gallimard

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 18 OCTOBER

is moreover c
mentioned, bu
prise the prey
gressor (mim
pearance (mim
the immediat
mimicry whe
tation, a conv

It has been a
took on the
Trochilium an
legs and ante
same vigorou
creature goes
fourth and fi
alarmed, its f
ing the effe
which are fr
when the Sm
when at rest,
"eyes" on a r
The butterf
prey. The cle
the jungles o
surrounded
small radial f

3. Alfred Giard
1872, and Bullet
4. Felix Le Dant
T For this essay
the descriptive
printed here, ta
published in Le m
5. Lucien Cueno
6. Weismann, V
7. This terrifyi
which do not alw
by giving it a te
it is frightened
Darwiniens, p. 1
especially in cas
nevertheless survived.

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 Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia 19

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solar green).

the plumage of an owl, while the body of the butterfly corresponds to the beak
of the same bird."8 The resemblance is so striking that the natives of Brazil affix
it to the doors of their barns as a replacement for the creature it imitates.
It is only too obvious that in the previous cases anthropomorphism plays a
decisive role: the resemblance is all in the eye of the beholder. The objective
fact is fascination, as is shown especially by Smerinthus ocellata, which does not
resemble anything frightening. Only the eye-shaped spots play a role. The
behavior of the Brazilian natives only confirms this proposition: the "eyes" of
the Caligo should probably be compared to the apotropaic Oculus indiviosus, the
evil eye that can not only harm but protect, if one turns it back against the evil
powers to which, as an organ of fascination par excellence, it naturally
belongs.9
Here the anthropomorphic argument does not apply, since the eye is the
vehicle of fascination in the whole animal kingdom. It is, on the other hand,

8. P. Vignon, "Sur le matirialisme scientifique ou mecanisme anti-tileologique," Revue de

Philosophie, 1904, p. 562. Cf. Alfred Giard, Traiti d'entomologie, vol. III, p. 201; and A. Janet, Les
papillons, Paris, 1902, pp. 331-336.
9. On the evil eye and animals as fascinators, see the famous work by Seligmann, Der bose
Blick und Verwandtes, Berlin, 1910, especially vol. II, p. 469. On the apotropaic use of the eye, see
Paul Perdrizet, Negotium perambulans in tenebris: itudes de dimonologie greco-orientale, Strasbourg, 1922.

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 20 OCTOBER

decisive for
human point
solutely conc

For the adap

amples: box
gravel; prawn
"torn seaweed
Pterophrynx
color, and th
the Aurora P
biotic lichens
grow.
One cannot distinguish Lithnius nigrocristinus of Madagascar and Flatoids
from lichens.12 We know how far the mimicry of mantises can go: their legs
simulate petals or are curved into corollas and resemble flowers, imitating by a
slight instinctive swaying the action of the wind on these latter.' 1 The Cilix com-
pressa resembles bird droppings; the Cerodeylus laceratus of Borneo with its leafy
excrescences, light olive-green in color, a stick covered with moss. Everyone
knows the Phyllia, or leaf insects, so similar to leaves, from which it is only a
step to the perfect homomorphy represented by certain butterflies: first the Oxy-
dia, which places itself at the end of a branch at right angles to its direction, the
front wings held in such a position as to present the appearance of a terminal
leaf, an appearance accentuated by a thin dark line extending crosswise over
the four wings in such a way as to simulate the leaf's principal veins.
Other species are even more improved, their hind wings being furnished
with a slender appendage that they use as a petiole, acquiring by this means "a
sort of insertion into the plant world."'14 The combination of the two wings on
each side represents the lanceolate oval characteristic of the leaf: here, too, a
spot, but longitudinal this time, continuing from one wing onto the other,
replaces the middle vein; thus "the vital organic force . . . has had to shape and
cleverly organize each of the wings since it thereby achieves a fixed form, not in
itself, but by its union with the other wing."15 These are chiefly the Coenophlebia
Archidona of Central America16 and the various kinds of Kallima in India and

10. Murat, pp. 37-38.

11. Cuenot, p. 453.
12. left fig. 114.
13. Cf. references in Roger Caillois, "La Mante Religieuse," Minotaure, no. 5 (1934), p. 26.
14. Vignon, p. 562.
15. Ibid.
16. Delage and Goldsmith, Les theories de l'volution, Paris, 1909, fig. 1, p.

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 Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia 21

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Coupling

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 22 OCTOBER

Malaysia, th
reproduces,
Longane wh
employed in
butterflies,
etc.) frequen
Among these
wings bear g
faces that gi
mold of the
including th
ing the pare
Imitations ar
upper surfac

These extr
planation, no
Even the m
observe with
by the addit
in Phyllia, m
in the larva
the word orn
The notion o
nant shade o
on its side in
recourse to c
beginning to
Ph. pulchrifo
they resemb
however, is
So if simila
disturbed by
goes on to sa
chance, bein
the shape of
mirror area

17. Murat, p. 30.

18. Remy Perrier, Cours de zoologie, fifth edition, Paris, 1912, quoted in Murat, pp. 27-28.
19. Eugene Louis Bouvier, Habitudes et metamorphoses des insectes, Paris, 1921, p. 146.

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Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia 23

unremarkable: "resemblance is therefore obtained

number of small details, each of which has nothing
be found isolated in neighboring species, but whos
extraordinary imitation of a dry leaf, more or less s
dividuals, which quite notably differ among themsel
tion like any other, astonishing because of its res
Likewise, according to this author, the Urapteryx sa
combination like any other of a characteristic atti
tegumentary rough spots, and the instinct to live on
speaking, it is hard to believe that we are dealing here
other, since all these details can be brought toget
without their contributing to some resemblance: it i
elements that is perplexing and decisive, it is their m
reciprocal topography.

Better to adopt under these conditions a shaky hy

drawn from a remark by Le Dantec,21 according to
in the ancestors of the Kallima a set of cutaneous org
tion of the imperfections of leaves, the imitating
peared once the morphological character was acqui
present case, once the resemblance was achieve
Lamarck's very law. Morphological mimicry could th
chromatic mimicry, an actual photography, but of t
photography on the level of the object and not on tha
tion in three-dimensional space with solids and vo
or better teleplasty, if one strips the word of any m

There are reasons more immediate, and at the same time less to be
suspected of sophistry, that keep mimicry from being taken for a defense reac-
tion. First of all, it would only apply to carnivores that hunt by sight and not by
smell as is often the case. Carnivores, moreover, do not generally bother with
motionless prey: immobility would thus be a better defense, and indeed insects
are exceedingly prone to employ a false corpselike rigidity.22 There are other

20. Cuenot, p. 464. In the last edition of his work (1932), Cuenot doubts that this sum of small
details could be directed by an "unknown factor," but the recourse to chance continues to seem to
him the most likely hypothesis, pp. 522-523.
21. Le Dantec, p. 143.
22. Cu6not, p. 461.

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 24 OCTOBER

m o m

...

g's'

W$>

Praying mantis devo

means: a butterf
use the tactics of
simply as a line
flower where it
so that it is only
of Judd24 and F
not at all fooled
with the foliage
invisible to man.
attitude simulate
immediately dis

23. Murat, p. 46.

24. Judd, "The Efficiency of Some Protective Adaptations in Securing Insects from Birds,"
American Naturalist, vol. XXXIII (1899), p. 461.
25. Foucher, Bull. Soc. nat. acclim. left 1916.

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 Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia 25

finds many remains of mimetic insects in the stoma

come as no surprise that such insects sometimes ha
ways to protect themselves. Conversely, some s
would thus have nothing to fear, are also mimetic.
ought to conclude with Cuenot that this is an "epip
sive utility appears to be nul."26 Delage and Goldsm
in the Kallima an "exaggeration of precautions."27
We are thus dealing with a luxury and even a da
are cases in which mimicry causes the creature
geometer-moth caterpillars simulate shoots of shru
cut them with their pruning shears.28 The case of
they browse among themselves, taking each other
way that one might accept the idea of a sort of co
mutual homophagy, the simulation of the leaf being
in this kind of totem feast.
This interpretation is not so gratuitous as it sounds: indeed, there seem to
exist in man psychological potentialities strangely corresponding to these facts.
Even putting aside the problem of totemism, which is surely too risky to ap-
proach from this point of view, there remains the huge realm of sympathetic
magic, according to which like produces like and upon which all incantational
practice is more or less based. There is no need to reproduce the facts here:
they can be found listed and classified in the classic works of Tylor, Hubert
and Mauss, and Frazer. One point, however, needs to be made, the cor-
respondence, fortunately brought to light by these authors, between the prin-
ciples of magic and those of the association of ideas: to the law of magic - things
that have once been in contact remain united-corresponds association by contiguity,
just as association by resemblance corresponds quite precisely to the attractio
similium of magic: like produces like.30 Hence the same governing principles: here
the subjective association of ideas, there the objective association of facts; here
the fortuitous or supposedly fortuitous connections of ideas, there the causal
connections of phenomena.31

26. Cuenot, p. 463. On the effectiveness of mimicry, see Davenport, "Elimination of Self-
Coloured Birds," Nature, vol. LXXVIII (1898), p. 101; and Doflein, "Uber Schutzanpas-
sung durch Aehnlichkeit," Biol. Centr., vol. XXVIII (1908), p. 243; and Pritchett, "Some Experi-
ments in Feeding Lizards with Protectively Coloured Insects," Biol. Bull., vol. V (1903), p. 271.
See also the bibliography in Cuenot, p. 467.
27. Delage and Goldsmith, p. 74.
28. Murat, p. 36.
29. Ibid., and Bouvier, pp. 142-143.
30. Of course, the same correspondence exists for association by contrast and the law of
magic: opposites act on opposites. In either realm, it is easy to reduce this case to that of resemblance.
31. Cf. Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, "Esquisse d'une theorie gendrale de la Magie," Annie
sociologique, vol. VII (1904), pp. 61-73.

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26 OCTOBER

Ell:

Olk

Mr

Prestigious magic in the Mant

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Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia 27

The point is that there remains in the "primi

tendency to imitate, combined with a belief in the e
tendency still quite strong in "civilized" man, since in
of the two conditions for the progress of his untram
complicate the problem unnecessarily, I leave asid
resemblance, which is far from being clear and plays
affectivity and, under the name of correspondence, in

This tendency, whose universality thus become

have been the determining force responsible for t
mimetic insects, at a time when their organisms we
are today, as one must suppose in any case given the
Mimicry would thus be accurately defined as an incantati
point and having caught the sorcerer in his own tra
nonsense to attribute magic to insects: the fresh appl
not to hide the profound simplicity of the thing. Wh
and fascination can the phenomena be called tha
classified precisely under the name of mimicry (inco
recall, for in my opinion the perceived resemblances
case to anthropomorphism, but there is no doubt th
tionable additions and reduced to the essential, these
their origins to those of true mimicry), phenom
reported above (the examples of the Smerinthus o
Choerocampa Elpenor caterpillar), and of which the su
the mantis in a spectral attitude, when it is a matter
no means of the least?
Recourse to the magical tendency in the search for the similar can onl
however, be an initial approximation, and it is advisable to take account of
its turn. The search for the similar would seem to be a means, if not a
termediate stage. Indeed, the end would appear to be assimilation to the surro
ings. Here instinct completes morphology: the Kallima places itself sy
metrically on a real leaf, the appendage on its hind wings in the place t
real petiole would occupy; the Oxydia alights at right angles to the end
branch because the arrangement of the spot representing the middle veining
quires it; the Clolia, Brazilian butterflies, position themselves in a row on s
stalks in such a way as to represent bell flowers, in the manner of a sprig o
of the valley, for example.32

32. Murat, p. 37.

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28 OCTOBER

It is thus a r
Other phen
contribute
themselves w
Oxyrrhynch
seaweed and
like an act of
offered to th
by Hermann
neither take
periments by
is a disturba
In short, fr
mimicry can
perception o
and represe
every momen
is formed by
and who, by
representatio
represented
object appea
since the liv
dinates, but
literally no
characteristi
spaces are ju
Fermat's spa
open, and cl
The feeling o
from its su
ticular point
mined; one
specifically of
bance in the
Here it is po
Pierre Janet

33. Bouvier, pp
requires the con
importance" (p
34. Cf. Louis La
35. In the end,

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Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia 29

.................. ................

' "'' 'i'i' i i i ii!: i i !, i ! i i i ii i i iO ! N

!i!!~i'iil~iiiiiil.. . i . . . . . . i i~iiiiiii!'U nN!ii

sm.:: :::": # ::s . . . . . . . .. . :i .ii:~ ,i iii~ li : i

? i i :i:i:!:~ i~ii!i :i :i ii~ i!ii~:i~ i i i i~i : iii :i~i : : i ? , .. .

Giant phasma.

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 30 OCTOBER

one. I will, h
wholly in ac
example with
are you? I kn

myself.36
Space T
pursue
ends by repl
dividual bre
senses. He tr
himself beco
similar to so
convulsive p
All these ex
assimilation
animal spec
violence to t
also has its
organism an
not the mer
space is elim
the individu
him: hence "t
ing of myst
else. Minkow
tinction betw
sides and pen
inside and o
are designed
This assimi
feeling of pe
species the p
animal mimi
form its fun

36. Cf. Eugene

phiques, 1932-
37. They are
psychasthenia,"
38. Eugene Min
1933, pp. 382-3
39. We have seen for what reasons it was advisable to exclude cases in which the animal
mimics another animal: resemblances poorly established objectively and phenomena of presti-
gious fascination rather than mimicry.

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 Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia 31

assimilation does not stop at the surface: the eggs

not only by their form and color, but also by their internal biological
structure.40 On the other hand, cataleptic attitudes often aid the insect in its en-
try into another realm: the immobility of weevils, while bacilliform Phasmida
let their long legs hang, and not to mention the rigidity of geometer-moth cater-
pillars standing bolt upright, which cannot fail to suggest hysterical contrac-
tion.41 On the other hand, is not the automatic swaying of mantises com-
parable to a tic?
Among others in literature, Gustave Flaubert seems to have understood
the meaning of the phenomenon, when he ends The Temptation of Saint Anthony
with a general spectacle of mimicry to which the hermit succumbs: "plants are
now no longer distinguished from animals. . . . Insects identical with rose
petals adorn a bush . . . And then plants are confused with stones. Rocks look
like brains, stalactites like breasts, veins of iron like tapestries adorned with
figures." In thus seeing the three realms of nature merging into each other, An-
thony in his turn suffers the lure of material space: he wants to split himself
thoroughly, to be in everything, "to penetrate each atom, to descend to the bot-
tom of matter, to be matter." The emphasis is surely placed on the pantheistic
and even overwhelming aspect of this descent into hell, but this in no way lessens
its appearance here as a form of the process of the generalization of space at the ex-
pense of the individual, unless one were to employ a psychoanalytic vocabulary
and speak of reintegration with original insensibility and prenatal uncon-
sciousness: a contradiction in terms.
One does not need to look far to find supporting examples in art: henc
the extraordinary motifs of Slovak popular decoration, which are such that
does not know whether it is a question of flowers with wings or of birds w
petals; hence the pictures painted by Salvador Dali around 1930, in whi
whatever the artist may say,42 these invisible men, sleeping women, ho
and lions are less the expression of ambiguities or of paranoiac "plurivocitie
than of mimetic assimilations of the animate to the inanimate.
Beyond doubt some of the above developments are far from offering an
guarantee from the standpoint of certainty. It may even seem questionable t
compare such diverse realities as homomorphy and the external morphology
certain insects, sympathetic magic and the concrete behavior of people of a cer
tain type of civilization and perhaps a certain type of thought, and fina
psychasthenia and the psychological postulations of people belonging, fr
these points of view, to opposite types. Such comparisons, however, seem to
not only legitimate (just as it is impossible to condemn comparative biolog
but even indispensable as soon as we approach the obscure realm of un-

40. Works by Henneguy (1885), for the Phyllia.

41. Cf. Bouvier, p. 143.
42. Salvador Dali, Lafemme visible, Paris, 1930, p. 15.

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32 OCTOBER

conscious det
should give r
the instinct o
life, there is g
ward a mode
either conscio
*

It is on this
phenomena o
perience, sin
space, as elem
life seems to
organism and
cording to Pyt
the same.44

43. Thisparalle
or in its
absenc
dividual an equ
44. In this brie
of obliterating c
ed., 1932), and
renunciation, as
been able to give
and exciting pag
vol. VIII), pp. 31
with especial in
leaf hoppers (Pt
that if the mim
leads therefore
aesthetic end "f
discuss such ant
stinct to a tend
what Vignon w

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