We’re all familiar with the creepy Death’s-head Hawkmoth from its appearance in the 1991 thriller The Silence of the Lambs, but there’s a lepidopteran out there even more foreboding. This goth moth’s appearance is downright Satanic.

The Clymene Moth (Haploa clymene), a member of the Tiger Moth family, can be found throughout eastern North America. It can be identified in the wild by its metal-as-fuck upside-down cross marking.

Of course there are Christians out there who would like to appropriate this moth, like they did with the dogwood tree, creating legends about God using natural markings as signs of his watchfulness and good works. For instance, this Christian website posted the following photo:
 

 

When God created the first Clymene moth, at least several thousand years ago did He think about the Cross? As you can clearly see the black marking on the wings looks like the silhouette of Jesus hanging on the Cross. I took this picture yesterday morning as the moth sat quietly on a tomato plant.

I think that when “God created the first Clymene moth at least several thousand years ago” he was probably aware that the head goes at the top—not the bottom. Sorry, Bible-guy. Posting upside-down photos is cheating. Here, let me fix that for you:
 

 
Make no mistake. This moth is PURE EVIL. Especially if you happen to be an Oak, Peach or Willow tree—as its larvae will be decimating you.

Feast ye now upon this demonic gallery of ungodly nature photos of Haploa clymene, the most METAL of moths. Each photo is accompanied by an appropriate quote from Matt Paradise’s Book of Satanic Quotations:
 

“God is a sound people make when they’re too tired to think anymore.”
—Edward Abbey
 

“As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.”
—William Blake
 

“I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved—the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!”
—Thomas Jefferson
 

“If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it.”
—Thomas Carlyle
 

“I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning.”
—Aleister Crowley
 

“I can find no room in my cosmos for a deity save as a waste product of human weakness, the excrement of the imagination.”
—George Norman Douglas
 

“An actually existent fly is more important than a possibly existent angel.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
 

“Religious ideas have sprung from the same need as all the other achievements of culture: from the necessity for defending itself against the crushing supremacy of nature.”
—Sigmund Freud
 

“O ye generations of Christ-deluded imbeciles! Ye swarms of moonstruck meeklings! Ye burnt out cinders of men! Ye blessing lambs! One day! One day! Ye shall be flung to the lions! Behold! I spit upon your Idols—your Opinions. Now would I pour molten hell through the ventricles of your soul.”
—Ragnar Redbeard
 

“The idea of God is the sole wrong for which I cannot forgive mankind”
—Marquis De Sade
 

“There is no god more divine than yourself.”
—Walt Whitman
 

“I deny Jesus Christ, the Deceiver and I abjure the Christian Faith, holding in contempt all of it’s Works.”
—King Diamond
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Goths and metalheads, is your heart black enough for the Indonesian Ayam Cemani Chicken?

 
Texas-based mother Yvonne Esquilin swears God was trying to send her message through the yellow and brown patterns on the wings of a large yellow and brown Imperial Moth that came to stay in her home for a few days.

“At first it looked like Jesus,” she said, “and I still think it looks like Jesus.”

Esquilin had been praying for a way to continue her daughter’s education, and believes that the timing of the moth’s appearance is significant. The family also discovered that the color yellow symbolises hope, and brown represents important news.

“I believe this was a sign,” she explained. “God is letting me know good news is coming and to keep the hope.”

Okay sure, whatever you say, lady. Keep the faith! Still other observers of the moth, which does appear to be emblazoned with an image of a man with long hair and a beard if you squint a bit, aren’t sure if it’s the Son o’ God or maybe it’s like an evil sorcerer or sumpthin’.

“People also saw an image of the Devil which is kind of creepy but after staring at it for so long it almost looks like it,” Ms. Esquilin said.

Hard to say what this mixed moth message means, isn’t it?

 
via Christian Nightmares and Christian Today

 
Like the gastropod that crawled into a victim’s brain in Shaun Hutson’s Slugs, or the carnivorous insects invading human orifices in Guy N. Smith’s Abomination, this is a tale worthy of a horror story: man has live moth removed from ear which had been buzzing inside his head for three fucking days!

This nightmare began for Rob Fielding, 43, of Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, England, when a moth perched on his ear while he was reading in bed one night at home. Instinctively he reached up to poke it away but ended up pushing the insect into his ear canal. 

After three restless days, his wife suggested he went to hospital for an examination. The insect was eventually removed during a 90-minute operation where his ear canal was prised open and the moth pulled out with a tiny pair of forceps. Mr Fielding told ITV News:

It was awful knowing the moth was flying around inside my head and every now and then when I felt it move, it made me jump out of my skin.

 

 
He now displays the dead insect on his mantlepiece as a souvenir of the ordeal.

Alas no video for this story, but here’s one that was removed earlier…(success around 2:50).
 

 
H/T Arbroath