I came home to find a aqua-green scarab sitting on the threshold. About an inch long, not iridescent as they usually are [or at least he didn’t seem to be, other than on his six royal blue feet], more like the soft understated sheen of fine turquoise – not too shiny, not at all iridescent.
I mentioned it on Facebook and a friend linked to this picture asking if this was the kind I saw:
And it is.
Except that species, Chrysina woodi, is apparently only in Texas. Chrysina beyeri is similar, but only in Arizona. I haven’t been able to find any mention of a similar beetle here in the Vancouver area, but maybe I’m not asking for the right keywords.
Anyway, a scarab on the threshold cannot help but be a good omen.
The Egyptians fancied scarabs to be a manifestation of the sun god: Khepri, the rising morning sun. The hieroglyph Kheper [or Xeper, as the Setians prefer to write it] refers to scarabs but also to various ideas of existence and actualization. Rising sun, rising above one’s self. And their amulets were usually made of aqua-green turquoise.
A couple decades ago I somehow came to have a necklace of a Khepri amulet, though I didn’t know what it was at the time – a scarab carved out of wood, stained aqua-green like the scarab I saw tonight. Just another one of those strange amulet-type items that fell into my possession somehow.
So what does Khepri wish to say to me on this Midsummer’s Night? And it doesn’t go unnoticed that he comes on the Solstice…
