There is a creature that spends years — sometimes seventeen of them — underground, in darkness, in silence. Then one day it splits open its own skin, climbs into the light, and sings so loudly that the whole summer reorganises itself around the sound.
Then it dies.
If you are drawn to gothic aesthetics, to dark art, to the beauty of things that exist at the edge of life and death — you already understand why the cicada matters.
The Cicada as a Symbol of Death and Rebirth
Across cultures and centuries, the cicada has carried the same weight of meaning: transformation, resurrection, the soul's journey between worlds.
In ancient China, jade cicadas were placed in the mouths of the dead — a talisman for the journey, a promise of return. In ancient Greece, the cicada was sacred to Apollo, associated with music, prophecy, and immortality. The philosopher Plato wrote of cicadas as souls of poets who had died and been reborn into song.
The Romans buried their dead with cicada amulets. The Japanese have long associated the cicada's cry with the fleeting nature of summer — and by extension, of life itself.
What makes the cicada so enduring as a symbol is the specificity of its life cycle. It does not simply die and disappear. It disappears underground, waits in darkness for years, and then emerges — transformed, winged, briefly magnificent. It is the most literal metaphor for resurrection that nature has produced.
The Ghost Cicada: Ethereal and Unforgettable
Among the hundreds of cicada species in the world, one stands apart for those drawn to the pale, the translucent, the quietly haunting: Ayuthia spectabile — the Ghost Cicada.
Its wings are near-transparent, veined in gold, pale as cathedral glass held up to winter light. It is named for what it looks like: a ghost. Something that has already passed through.
In Lacrimosa, a single preserved Ayuthia spectabile rests against deep navy velvet — the colour of the sky at the moment just before it decides to be night. It is crowned with a hand-made silver lace ornament in the shape of a cross, surrounded by dried white flowers like an offering left at a shrine. The baroque frame was built to hold something sacred. The Ghost Cicada earned it.
Cicadas in the Company of Serpents
In nature, cicadas and snakes share the same underground world. Both emerge from beneath the earth. Both shed their skins. Both carry the symbolism of transformation so heavily that ancient cultures could not help but notice.
In Requiem Aeternam, two species of preserved cicadas appear alongside a real articulated snake skeleton and a preserved tarantula — all held within deep forest-green velvet, surrounded by roses and dried botanicals. One cicada has yellow-green wings marked with small white spots; the other is dark brown-black, spotless, silent. Together they form a cabinet of transformation: the serpent that sheds its skin, the spider that waits, the cicada that emerges.
In Serpent Violet Chamber, Ghost Cicadas with translucent wings hover beside a coiling snake skeleton against deep violet velvet — their presence ethereal, as if frozen mid-flight in a fragile moment between worlds. The gold ornamental inner frame elevates the composition into something almost ritualistic.
The Lantern Bug: Cicada's Strange Cousin
Not all insects that carry the weight of transformation are cicadas — but some are close enough in spirit to belong in the same conversation.
The lantern bug — family Fulgoridae — is a distant relative of the cicada, belonging to the same order Hemiptera. Where the cicada is known for its voice, the lantern bug is known for its extraordinary elongated head projection: a rostrum that extends forward like a lantern, or a horn, or a key to something that has not yet been named.
Pyrops synavei and Pyrops pyrorhynchus are among the most striking insects in the world. In The Apothecary — part of the Witch's Library series — they preside over a cabinet of curiosities: pigeon skull in a wizard's hat, bat skull, mouse skull in a glass dome, crystal ball with a skeletal hand, bottles of snake skin, raw quartz, spell books, scrolls. Every detail the inventory of a witch who never stops collecting.
Why Cicadas Belong in Dark Art
Gothic aesthetics have always been drawn to the liminal — to thresholds, to things that exist between states. The cicada is the most liminal creature in nature. It lives underground and above ground. It is silent for years and then deafening. It is larva and then winged. It is alive and then, very briefly, everything.
Preserved in a shadowbox, the cicada does not become less itself. It becomes more. The glass holds the moment of emergence permanently. The velvet gives it the dignity of a relic. The frame says: this mattered.
I work with preserved specimens because I believe that death, handled with care and intention, becomes something else entirely. Not morbid. Not macabre. Sacred.
The cicada already knew this. It has been practicing resurrection for longer than we have been watching.
All pieces shown are one-of-a-kind handmade shadowboxes, available in the Morbid Oddities shop.