Seeing a grasshopper
A grasshopper startled from the path often flashes bright wings and then vanishes as it lands. Its colors show only in flight, and some of yours may too.
What it may mean
Walk along a dry path in late summer and a brown grasshopper bursts up in front of you, flashing yellow, red or blue wings and clicking as it flies. A few yards on it drops, folds its wings and is gone, the same color as the dirt. Your eyes keep hunting for the bright thing you saw, and that is the point: birds are fooled the same way. The color exists only in motion. People can be like this too. Some show their energy, humor or talent only while doing something, and look ordinary sitting still. A grasshopper sighting is a good time to consider what others see in you only when you are moving, and whether you give yourself enough chances to move. Some traditions welcome the grasshopper and others treat it as a nuisance or a warning, so the reading shifts with who is watching.
Depending on how you saw it
A grasshopper in the house
Grasshoppers hop indoors through open doors in late summer and soon look for a way out toward the light. In Germany one was said to herald strange guests. Who could you welcome this week who does not normally come to your door?
A crackling sound as it flies
Some band-winged grasshoppers snap their wings in flight, a dry crackle that announces them. The sound stops the moment they land. What do you announce loudly at the start and then go quiet about?
A big grasshopper on a garden leaf
Grasshoppers chew leaves, and a few can strip a favorite plant in late summer. Gardeners grumble, and birds feast. Which nuisance in your life is, for someone else, a meal or a living?
A golden grasshopper on a weathervane
London's Royal Exchange carries a gilded grasshopper, the emblem of its founder, Sir Thomas Gresham, and legend explains it with a foundling saved by a grasshopper's song. Small creatures sometimes end up on the highest roofs. Which modest influence on your life deserves a place up high?
Why it happens in nature
Grasshoppers make sound by rubbing a hind leg against a wing, and they hear through ears on the sides of the abdomen. Band-winged grasshoppers have brightly colored hind wings that show only in flight; once they land, the plain forewings cover them, which can confuse predators searching for the color. Some species also crackle their wings as they fly.
What folk beliefs say
Germany
In Germany, a grasshopper was said to give warning of strange guests.
Source: Cora Linn Daniels; C. M. Stevans (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences of the World, vol. 2 (1903), vol. 2, p. 640. View the page
Ancient Athens
The ancient Athenians, who boasted of springing directly from the soil they lived on, wore a golden grasshopper in their hair as an emblem of that belief.
Source: Cora Linn Daniels; C. M. Stevans (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences of the World, vol. 2 (1903), vol. 2, p. 640. View the page
London, England
Sir Thomas Gresham's crest was a grasshopper, and a widely believed tradition said he chose it because, as a foundling, he was discovered by an old woman drawn to the spot by a grasshopper's loud chirping.
Source: Cora Linn Daniels; C. M. Stevans (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences of the World, vol. 2 (1903), vol. 2, p. 640. View the page
To reflect on
What do people see in you only when you are in motion, and do you give yourself enough chances to move?