The Lunar moth gets its name from its moon-like spots. It seems likely that Linnaeus recalled the Roman moon goddess Luna in 1758 because of the moth’s distinctive hindwing spots – translucent discs with a dark crescent edge, like the moon when it’s nearly full. Perhaps he also realized that the entire moth is a living avatar of the moon – at rest by day, on the move by night, exquisitely pale, subtle yet spectacular.
The luna moth embodies not only the full moon in its pale majesty, but also the new moon in its obscurity and unrevealed potential. Hidden among the green leaves, unseen on the forest floor, undetected even by close-range sonar calibrated through eons of evolution, the moth eludes the senses even as it fires the imagination. And just as the ancients saw divinity in the new moon advancing to fullness and waning again, so too can we marvel at the moth’s life history, from egg to caterpillar to pupa to adult and repeating in a never-ending cycle, miraculous in all its phases.
