The illustration above is by the artist Brianna LaVarta, who specializes in drawing animals and birds. She always seems to find a unique perspective in the way she brings them to life. The bat above and the prairie dog below are both her work.
Here, for example, she shows the bat entering the fall season with rose hips, so instead of the vampire kind of take, letting us see the bat as a creature of life, rather than death. After all, it does us favors like eating mosquitoes. And it is the only animal that can truly fly, not just glide.
What else do bats do? They also eat fruit and pollinate plants. Agave, which produces tequila, is pollinated by bats. Think about that when you are sipping a margarita. They use sound to navigate, and they live for decades.
They are generally shy and avoid humans. They are most active at night, dusk and dawn, the hours that many of our ancestors regarded as the prime time for doing rituals. The times of day when we change, the times of day when we welcome in the rising and setting of the sun.
The way they hang upside down call to mind the Hanged Man in tarot, who looks at the world upside down, thinking outside the box, seeing things from a different angle.
Only a few varieties of bats, a small portion of the whole, feed on blood, aand these live in a few places in Central and South America.
Writers like Bram Stoker conflated them with legends of undead creatures, and that promoted those concepts. Their connection to Halloween grew out of the bats attraction to the Celtic Samhain bonfires. The large bonfires were to scare away evil spirits, and they attracted insects, which in turn, attracted bats. As nocturnal creatures, their presence was associated with the spiritual nature of the holiday.
Do you think of bats differently now?
With this and the suggestion to try at home below, do you have a new insight about Halloween now?
To see more of Brianna's art, go to:
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