Seeing a praying mantis
A praying mantis on your door in September or October is often a female near the end of her life, looking for a place to leave her egg case. Her last task says something about what outlasts the season you are in.
What it may mean
A praying mantis seen on a wall or a porch railing in September is most often an adult with only weeks left; across much of the continent, frost ends its life. Before that, a female presses a frothy mass onto a twig, a fence or the side of a house, and it hardens into a tough, papery case holding dozens or hundreds of eggs. The case sits through snow and ice, and in late spring tiny mantises spill out, already shaped like their mother. What the mantis builds is designed to outlast it. That makes a sighting a fitting occasion to think about what you are making now that will matter after this season of your life: a skill you teach, a garden you plant, a habit your children pick up. The mantis has been a prophet and a soothsayer in different lands, and people take from it what they need.
Depending on how you saw it
A mantis on your door or wall in fall
Late in the year, mantises wander more, often heavy females in search of a sheltered place to lay their eggs. One on your door frame may simply be passing through on that errand. What are you looking for a safe place to set down before the season turns?
Finding an egg case on a shrub
A tan, foamy lump the size of a walnut on a branch is likely a mantis egg case. Left outside, it hatches in spring; brought indoors, it can hatch too early with no food for the young. Which of your plans needs to wait in the cold a while longer before it is ready?
A brown mantis instead of a green one
Mantises come in green, tan and brown, and the same species can vary, which helps them disappear on leaves or dry stems. Their color suits the place they live. How much of your style is simply what helps you get along where you are?
A mantis swaying from side to side
A mantis sometimes rocks gently back and forth, looking like a leaf in the breeze, and the movement may also help it judge distance. Odd behavior often has a practical reason. Whose odd habit might make sense if you knew what it does for them?
Why it happens in nature
In temperate North America most mantises live a single season. Adults mate in late summer, and females lay eggs in a foamy case called an ootheca, which hardens and protects the eggs through winter; the adults die with the frost. Depending on the species, a case releases from about ten to several hundred young in spring.
What folk beliefs say
Ancient Greece and India
The ancient Greeks watched the mantis in soothsaying, and Hindus also studied its movements in flight, believing it told them whether they would be fortunate.
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. 661. View the page
France
French girls took a mantis to a place where three roads met and asked which way their sweethearts would come; it was said to bow toward the right road.
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. 662. View the page
Southern Africa (Khoikhoi)
Travelers' accounts quoted in 1903 said that the Khoikhoi of southern Africa revered the mantis as a disguised soothsayer, and that anyone it alighted on was honored ever after.
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. 662. View the page
To reflect on
What are you making in this season of your life that you hope will still be there after it ends?