This Summer’s ‘Brood X’ Cicadas Are Inspiring Death-to-Life Meditations

The “Brood X” cicada in 2004. Creative Commons photo.

Here’s a job title you don’t often see — “bug philosopher.”

That is what David Rothenberg, also a professor of humanities at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, is known as. So when millions of cicadas oozed up from the ground a few weeks ago, he was ready to rhapsodize.

“Well, they tell us, first of all, how wonderfully strange nature is,” Rothenberg said after a visit to Princeton, N.J. — the closest appearance of this year’s eruption of the black and orange bugs to his upstate New York home. “It is no accident that when scientists named this group of cicada species they called them ‘magicicada.’ They did that on purpose because they are magical.”

Rothenberg, the author of “Bug Music: How Insects Gave Us Music and Noise,” is not the only one who sees beyond the cicada’s beady red eyes and crunchy, cast-off shells. The cicada has been sacred to cultures, faiths and peoples. And this year, many see in them a reflection of a specific symbol of our own rebirth as the country emerges from COVID-19 restrictions.

“The cicadas are emerging after 17 years underground,” Rothenberg said. “And we are emerging from this pandemic. We're moving from the sense of lockdown, confinement, fear, restriction — all of these things — to see the cicadas crawling out of the ground, climbing trees to sing, fly, mate and die. It's kind of inspiring to people.”

The tiny animal responsible for all this musing is the periodical cicada, an insect that emerges by the millions from the ground every 13 or 17 years, depending on their type and location. They are found only in North America and are different from the annual cicada, which emerges once a year.

Entomologists — scientists who study bugs — have identified 15 different “broods” of periodical cicada that appear in different parts of the country. The current crop is called Brood X — that’s the Roman numeral for ten, not the letter of the alphabet — and their frenzied singing is currently driving everyone crazy from New Jersey to Indiana and Pennsylvania to Virginia.

Cicadas “sing” by rubbing their wings together in giant choirs that can hit 90 decibels, or about the loudness of a power lawn mower. It is a sound that has been described as the caterwauling of a million cats, the mating cry of a race of aliens and like being inside a jet engine. 

The good news is their show lasts only a few weeks and won’t have an encore for a long time. Periodical cicadas emerge, sing, mate and die, and then the next generation burrows underground to feed for 17 years, in the case of Brood X, before performing the whole show over again in 2038.

That's the scientific side of periodical cicadas. But Jeremy Biles, an assistant professor of liberal arts at the School of The Art Institute of Chicago is more interested in the cultural side — what they represent as opposed to what they do. He has identified common themes in cicada myths, including the death of the self, passionate devotion and ecstasy.

The cicada, he says, was considered sacred to the gods Apollo and Dionysus by the ancient Greeks. Plato connected their origin to the Muses — beings of artistic inspiration. Cicadas, the story goes, were once ordinary people. But when they heard the singing of the Muses, they were “so ravished by its sweetness” that they forgot to eat or drink and wasted away before being reborn as cicadas.

“What I find so compelling in this myth is the mingling of artistic in the Muses and the evocation of death,” Biles said. “Cicadas, for the most part, tend to be symbols of rebirth.”

This symbolism spans far beyond ancient Greece. The Hopi people of the American Southwest crafted dolls of cicada kachinas — spirit beings — and the Navajo peoples believe cicadas assisted them from an underworld to this world in their creation story. In the Han dynasty — about 200 BC — small jade cicadas were placed on the tongues of the dead as a sign of immortal life and rebirth.

And every Easter in a cicada year, many Christian pastors hold up the cicada as a symbol of Jesus's resurrection or connect the cicada's invisible underground existence to an ever-present, but always unseen, creator God.

“They're underground in the dark world and then they emerge to this whole new realm,” said Josh Shoemaker, a Christian and the co-author of “God and the World of Insects,” an entire book linking bugs to the divine. “For me, that speaks of what we experience when we become a Christian and we learn about God. We were maybe in a place of darkness and now we've just come out into light.”

Then there's the number of years in a periodical cicada's life cycle. For those into biblical numerology, the number 17 signifies triumph over one's enemies or an ordeal — the Psalms list 17 enemies of Israel and Noah's ark came to land on the 17th day of the seventh month. In New Age circles, the number 17 represents compassion, confidence and spiritual awakening. Cicada fans can buy cicada spirit candles, cicada amulets and cicada yoga mats for performing the cicada yoga pose.

Biles says periodical cicadas are "objective ideograms" — a sort of uber symbol that people can project all sorts of meanings and import on. He even sees a link between the “X” used for the currently appearing brood and the kind of physical ecstasy experienced by some Christian saints and mystics who starved themselves while meditating on Jesus.

David Rothenberg sometimes plays saxophone with cicadas humming around him and calls the experience “humbling” and “sublime”. Photo courtesy of Rothenberg.

“The Roman numeral ten is an ‘X,’ it is a form of the cross,” Biles said. “So it draws our attention to something linked with the crucifixion, to a sense of devotion. At least as it appeals to my imagination, there's something here linked with asceticism, with discipline and devotion. I would say even to an obsessive devotion to the death of the self.”

That might be a lot of symbolism for one little bug to carry, but it is definitely true for Rothenberg, the bug philosopher, that pondering the cicada can be spiritual. Every couple of years, as different broods emerge in different parts of the Eastern U.S., Rothenberg travels to witness it, usually with his soprano saxophone in hand. 

More than once, he has played along with them, letting them crawl over his body as he joins his song to theirs. To Rothenberg, who is not traditionally religious, this is not a stunt, but a transcendent moment of connection and peace.

“It's incredibly humbling, but also a deepening, sublime kind of experience,” he said. “It’s the hugeness of it — literally millions of cicadas are out and you're just one more voice. One more sound together in it. You're just one little thing and that's tremendously empowering in a way to connect us to a nature that's so much bigger, louder, and more eternal than anything humanity is going to do.”

Rothenberg wrote a three-stanza poem in praise of the cicada. The last verse reads like a mantra:

“There will be low soft ‘whooms’ in the trees.
Fluttering wings struggling to lift us between the trees.

We will stare up again and wonder:
who else has had to wait so long to face the air? 

No reason to go on except the only reason that matters: 

there is nothing else to do
this is the plan
this is our place in the plan
this is the sound.”

“An audio version of this story aired on “Inspired” and can be found at www.interfaithradio.org.”

Kimberly Winston is a freelance religion reporter whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, USA Today and more. She is the recipient of the Religion News Association’s 2018 award for best religion reporting at large news outlets.