NOTE: Those of you thinking of leaving early to avoid the rush to the car park would do well to remember that cocktails will be served this afternoon following the final lectures of the Symposium. For more information, you’ll have to wait until the end of my little presentation.
Now, in recognition of your patience this week I have saved the most spellbinding butterfly until last. It is not for nothing that this last butterfly shares its name with Doctor Faust’s son by the beautiful Helena! Prepare to be bewitched by Euphorian Golden!

But before we go into detail about the darkly hypnotic motions of this magical moth, it seems in keeping with the rest of the week that I tell you a little about that other Euphorion of Greek ancestory. A native Athenian born around 275 B.C, wealthy Euphorion assisted in the formation of the Royal Library at Antioch (from whence I possess a handful of overdue books on Lepidoptery). A man after my own heart, he had a taste for archaic and obsolete expressions that has rendered his works almost unreadable, but the hardy among you might savour his mythological epics, amatory elegies, epigrams, and best of all, a highly esteemed early satirical poem later translated by emperor Tiberius himself.
In Goethe’s version of the timeless Faust legend, the famous doctor’s son is also named Euphorion. Goethe wrote that the character represented Poetry itself in the manner of the tale of Icarus. His yearning for love, freedom, and heroism brings him into disequilibrium with all that is Earthly, and he is therefore characterised by a tragic imperfection as of one not meant for this world.
So too we have Euphorion Golden, that rarely seen miasma of the night with her wings of vivid sulphur. It is said that to lay your eye upon her wing is to know madness. Others have attempted to distill the sorcery from her sails with pestle and mortar in order to know Faust’s life eternal. If not for my own pact with the Devil, whom I met at a crossroads in the guise of a certain fabled blues singer, I’d be tempted to dabble.
Before moving on to a much needed drink I leave you with the alarming tale of a North Queensland butterfly collector who happened upon a curious abberation of the Euphorion Golden in her garden. What this story does not tell you is what really happened to her. But that I shall leave to your imaginations, which surely shimmer with ghostly mirages of yellow. May your mind be the yoke of profound distraction!
I hope you’ve enjoyed this week of lepidoptery as much as I. We can now see how the butterfly world holds the key to great swathes of antiquity and the Art that lies therein. Sweet przepustnica, I thank you for being my muse this long week of soaring temperatures.
Now, as promised, we must retire to the cooling shade of naughty Papilio Antimachus, who in recompense for her damage to the University grounds must provide the much needed breeze for this afternoon’s cocktails. Those of you who had the patience to read to the end, or the cheek to simply scroll down to the bottom of the page, may place your order for cocktails in my pigeonhole, below. I hardly need tell you what the theme is, but if you have a cockroach tale to share, I’ll work this damn pun into my lecture if it kills me.
And then Mephistophles will have a thing or two to say.

Ecology as a whole is a…hobby of mine.

Much like the good Dr. Pockless, whose line in lepidoptery veers off the chart of scientific intrigue towards something which I shudder to think of as being near to, or at least in the same postal district as, sadism, my interest in biological spheres is not limited to the heaving bosoms of the keen female English students who line the front rows of my classes.

I digress.

The many crossovers between the field of poetical endeavour and that of our animal chums are more frequent than you might think. If the field of poetical endeavour is, for example, a large, spacious field, well grassed with the occasional clump of daisies or dandelions and bordered with well-kempt hedgerows, then the field of ecology is over the hedge right next door, and there are lots of gates.

The grass in the field of poetical endeavour is greener. This is because, despite the combined efforts of every member of the animal kingdom, more…(shall we be kitsch here? Shall we call it by what it is? Of course not! We are civilised people! Kitsch is what we do)…more useful fertiliser is produced in the world of English Academia.

This nitrate advantage comes about as a natural fringe benefit to the huge arena of debate and discussion which goes on in the field of poetical endeavour. Myself and Doctor Pockless are, of course leading advocates of what has come to be known as Pockology, which is currently the main source of this brown gold.

It is not new, however.

The legendary John Keats grew weary of extended hand-waving debates over the mustard pots and cruets in the refectory of his home university of Derby. He viewed the whole process of academics arguing with poets over what they themselves meant as somewhat useless, and hence unleashed his fearsome genius upon those who walk amongst the groves of Academe, in his poem of the October of 1789, on Thursday the 18th, just after teatime.

Dare thee to question mine heart and mine pen?
My poems are open to all who might ken
whose eye and whose hand can read or turn page
not talk about sh*te and engender mine rage
to all but you fooles it is patently clear
mine wordes are quite simple, not fuéll’d by beer
yet you debate on nothinge, you squabble on nit
push around you dung beetles, your big balls of -[Censored]

“Dung Beetle” was revered as a poetical term of both the highest praise and the lowest of the low-brow insults (depending on the season, the poet concerned, several meteorological conditions and the geographic context, of course – nothing in poetry is simple) for nearly three hundred years.
Until, one day, a young intrepid explorer, Yangston MacCavity, financed by the Imperial Society for the Furtherance of The Understanding OF Faeces (ISFOTUOFF) on his four year mission to go, Ecologically speaking, where no man had gone before, catalogued the most common type of dung beetle on the continent of Asia as Shiteaterus Maxipongingus or ‘Keats’ Dung Beetle’, rather taking the shine off the whole business.

Sadly, our gargantuan Papilio Antimachus broke free of her moorings during the night and did untold damage to the new ornamental gardens outside the science block, overturning a miniature decorative bridge, devouring saplings and causing the night watchman to scold himslef with the kettle. The butterfly and the watchman have both been subdued since, and naughty Antimachus is now flapping with less vigour where we have had her secured outside.
As ever, the Papilio Antimachus seems determined upstage the silver-medallist of African butterflies, Papilio Zalmoxis, the humble brown second best, the by-no-means-small runner-up in the contest to be Africa’s biggest butterfly.

Papilio Zalmoxis fit snugly in the back of my car, and I would have brought the specimen in to show you, but she escaped through the sunroof as I was approaching the gatehouse. She was last seen jeering at the giant specimen tethered outside this lecture hall from the upper boughs of a poplar.
But who was the somewhat awkwardly named Zalmoxis? The Thracian Dacians held that he was the only true God. In truth he was a former slave of the scientist and pastry chef Pythagoras who became very wealthy upon gaining his freedom, quite possibly by selling purloined theories about triangles on the local Geometry Market. He then went to Thrace and spun them some tall tales about the immortality of the soul, and (some say this was his master stroke) investing his wealth in the Stax record label (who would later give the ancient Thracian township of Memphis Otis Redding and Booker T. & The MGs).
But sound investments and a few clever theories are not enough to secure one the status of deity. Zalmoxis retired to a cave and made sure a rumour was spread that he had visited Hades. Three years later, when most were sure he was dead, he returned. As if this wasn’t enough, he’d spent his time in retreat studying medicine, so he could bolster the resurrection stories now being told with remarkable feats of healing.
As a consequence, when he really died he gave the world its second truly monotheistic religion, after Judaism.
Thus we might say that Papilio Antimachus is the butterfly of Zion, securing itself first place in mankind’s race for monotheism. Poor Papilio Zalmoxis could only ever come in second, and its moments of glory are brief, like the example given earlier in this lecture: mocking Antimachus from the safety of a nearby tree.