Water, Transformation, and the Devil's Darning Needle

The dragonfly's life-cycle, an aquatic nymph that climbs from the water and transforms into a creature of the air, made it, in several traditions, an emblem of change, of the summer and of the boundary between water and sky. Among peoples of the American Southwest the dragonfly is a water-symbol associated with pure water and painted on pottery, a motif belonging to those living cultures and described here from the outside. European folklore was warier: names such as the devil's darning needle and the horse-stinger cast it as sinister, with tales that it would sew up the lips of the wicked. Auspicious harvest-sign, warrior's emblem and water-spirit in one place, a devil's creature in another, the dragonfly is read very differently across the world.

European folklore's wariness of the dragonfly had a real practical use in one corner of the record: nineteenth-century English naturalists noted country people using its presence over water as an informal sign of a stream's health, since dragonfly nymphs are sensitive to pollution and vanish from fouled water long before other visible change appears, an observation modern ecologists have since formalised, dragonflies now serving as a recognised bioindicator species used to assess freshwater quality in surveys worldwide.