The lighter and darker Morpho menelaus butterflies

My students often have homework assignments where they have to record themselves speaking English and send me the recordings via a messaging app. This afternoon, I was checking this recording homework and, trying to tap the play button to listen to one of the recordings, I inadvertently tapped the student's name instead, which brought up her profile on the app:

The two butterflies immediately caught my eye:

They both look like Morpho menelaus to me, but one is much darker than the other. Compare them to these two M. menelaus I posted in "Synchronicity, symmetry, and Menelaus blue morpho (and blue Mormon) butterflies":

How impossibly perfect a sync is that?

Notice that, besides the two butterflies, the main feature of Amber's background is a large circle, and her name, Amber, is in the circle. In my last post, "Some people just can't live without joy," I reported a dream about a large circular symbol that was "a yellow-orange color much like that of Waite's Wheel of Fortune." One of the definitions of the word amber is "a pure chroma color, located on the color wheel midway between the colors of yellow and orange." In fact, Waite's Wheel of Fortune may be explicitly intended to be amber in color. Waite's basic design comes from a drawing by Éliphas Lévi depicting the Wheel of Ezekiel. Here is how Ezekiel's vision of the Wheels opens:

And I looked, and, behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire infolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber, out of the midst of the fire (Ezek. 1:4).

The word amber occurs only three times in the Bible. All are in the Book of Ezekiel, and two of them are in the Wheel vision. (Incidentally, the word Tetramorph is often used in connection with the vision in Ezekiel 1 and with the four Living Creatures depicted on Waite's Wheel of Fortune card. Since tetra- is a prefix meaning "four," this ties in with the sync involving four Morpho butterflies. The Tetramorph creatures in Ezekiel also have four wings each, like butterflies.)

After typing the line "How impossibly perfect a sync is that?" above, I took a break from writing this post so that I could meet with a student. I drink a lot of water while teaching, so before going to the classroom I went to the kitchen to fill up a pitcher. The decorative motif on the glass pitcher jumped out at me:

The pitcher is decorated with blue four-leaf clovers. Some are light blue, others are dark blue -- and still others, like the one in the foreground of the above photo, have both colors. It doesn't take much imagination to see this clover as two stylized pairs of butterfly wings, one light blue and the other dark.

A four-leaf clover is a symbol of luck, or fortune, and is thus a link to the Wheel of Fortune. The link is more specific than that, though. Almost exactly a year ago, I posted "Green and the Mushroom Planet," which ends with this paragraph:

It is not specified how many wedges each Mushroom Stone is divided into, but it must be an even number (since the lines cross at the center), and four to eight seems likeliest -- much more than that, and the wedges would be too narrow to contain pictures. Couldn't such a design easily be misinterpreted as a four-leaf clover, or vice versa?

A circle divided radially into either four or eight segments, I wrote, would resemble a four-leaf clover. Waite's Wheel of Fortune is divided into eight segments, while the variant on the motorcycle helmet is divided into four:

Finally, in his latest post, "The Red Bull, Part 1," Bill reveals that The Last Unicorn -- which includes a character called Mommy Fortuna and is thus a link to the unicorn Wheel of Fortune -- also features a blue-and-purple butterfly. Bill posted this clip, in which the butterfly quotes a modified version of a verse from Deuteronomy which I have quoted several times:

The butterfly speaks mostly in nonsense, a verbal collage of snippets from poetry and song. One thing he says made my ears perk up: "Clay lies still, but blood's a rover." I immediately recognized this as a line from A. E. Housman's poem "Reveille,"  which I read in 2022 and quoted in my post "You be trippin." Looking back at that post, I see that I mention misreading Housman's "silver dusk" as "silver disk" -- so another Wheel reference. The poem also mentions "the sky-pavilioned land"; the sky is blue, and pavilion is etymologically "butterfly" -- so there's another blue butterfly link.

When I heard the butterfly quote Housman, I remembered that I had very recently visited Housman's Wikipedia page, but I couldn't remember why. Combing through my browser history eventually jogged my memory. I visited his page on December 4 in connection with my research on Pamela Colman "Pixie" Smith. Pixie, you will recall, is the artist who drew Waite's Tarot cards, including the Wheel of Fortune, and the motorcyclist with the unicorn Wheel of Fortune on her helmet had had PXY -- Pixie -- on her license plate. Pixie, it turns out, had been a member of the Suffrage Atelier, an artist's collective founded by Laurence and Clemence Housman -- brother and sister of the poet -- and by Alfred Pearse. Laurence Housman's book The Anti-Suffrage Alphabet included artwork by Pamela Colman Smith. This same Laurence Housman, it turns out, did woodblock illustrations for the 1893 edition of Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market, a poem about which I have sync-posted before.

"Blood's a rover" is one of several "roving" references by the butterfly in The Last Unicorn. In fact, he introduces himself to the title character by saying, "I am a roving gambler. How do you do?" That word rove ties right back in with the Wheel of Fortune:

Entomological note added: For those skeptical that the light-blue and dark-blue butterflies are the same species, the blueness of Morpho melelaus is structural coloration (the wings contain no blue pigment), and its precise appearance depends on the angle of the light. Here is a specimen so photographed as to make both shades of blue appear on a single insect:

The brown seen around the edges (and on the backside) of the wings is their "true" color, just as the feathers of a blue jay are pigmented only with melanin and are thus "actually" dark brown.

I suppose this is a link between M. menelaus and the blue-skinned Hindu gods -- who, as it was explained to me by an Indian roommate decades ago, are actually "black" (i.e. pigmented with melanin) but are depicted as they are because "blue is the radiance of black." The "blue" skin on the face of a mandrill is structurally colored, so a primate with structurally-blue skin is certainly a biological possibility.