Cicada Meaning — Symbolism, Origins & Significance

Few creatures have inspired as much philosophical and spiritual reflection as the cicada — an insect whose life cycle seems almost designed to provoke wonder. Most cicada species spend the majority of their lives underground in a larval state, invisible and patient, before emerging in adulthood to shed their shells, take wing, and fill the air with their distinctive song. The periodical cicadas of North America take this to an extreme: seventeen years of subterranean silence followed by a mass emergence of extraordinary scale.

This life cycle has made the cicada a natural symbol for some of humanity's deepest concerns: the possibility of life after death, the value of patience and invisible preparation, the sudden transformation that follows a long period of dormancy, and the nature of the soul itself. From the jade burial cicadas of ancient China to Plato's philosophical dialogue on the soul, from the haiku of Japanese masters to the marvelling accounts of modern naturalists encountering a seventeen-year emergence, the cicada has spoken to the human imagination across cultures and millennia.

What the Cicada Represents

The cicada's power as a symbol derives almost entirely from its biology. A creature that spends most of its existence underground, unseen and apparently inactive, before emerging to transform completely and take to the air carries an inherent drama that cultures across the world have recognised and interpreted.

The most fundamental symbolic meaning the cicada carries is transformation. The emergence of the adult cicada from its larval shell — the exuvia, or shed skin, which the cicada leaves behind as it climbs upward — is one of the most visible transformations in the natural world. The empty shell remains clinging to a tree trunk or fence post, a perfect but hollow replica of the creature that has moved on to a new form of existence. This shed shell has itself become a symbol: the discarded husk of a former self, left behind while the living being ascends to a higher state.

The theme of ascent is central to cicada symbolism across cultures. From underground darkness to sunlit air, from larval immobility to winged flight, from silence to song — the cicada's trajectory moves consistently upward and outward. This ascent connects the cicada to spiritual ideas about the soul's movement from earthly existence to a higher realm, from the physical to the transcendent.

Patience is the second great symbolic theme the cicada embodies. The seventeen-year cicada's underground period — longer than a human childhood — represents a form of waiting and preparation so extended as to seem almost incomprehensible. The cicada does not emerge prematurely; it follows a biological clock of extraordinary precision, surfacing within days of the appropriate moment after years of invisible activity. For those who read symbolic meaning into the natural world, this patience is instructive: great transformations require long preparation; the time underground is not wasted but necessary.

The cicada's song — the loud, persistent call produced by male cicadas vibrating specialised structures called tymbals — adds another symbolic dimension. The song is penetrating, continuous, and fills entire landscapes during cicada season. It has been described as the sound of summer itself in many cultures, particularly in Mediterranean and East Asian traditions where cicadas are most prominent. The song connects the cicada to music, poetry, and the creative voice — the invisible creature whose persistent sound cannot be ignored.

The emptied cicada shell (exuvia) has found independent symbolic use in Chinese medicine and Chinese aesthetic traditions, where it appears as a motif in painting and calligraphy representing the casting off of the old self and the liberation of the spirit. Japanese poets similarly used the empty cicada shell (utsusemi) as a melancholy image of absence, impermanence, and the traces left behind by those who have moved on.

In modern ecological contexts, the mass emergence of periodical cicadas has become a symbol of nature's deep time and the persistence of evolutionary patterns across scales of time that dwarf individual human experience. A seventeen-year cicada that emerges today is following a biological programme established millions of years ago — a continuity that inspires its own form of wonder and symbolic reflection.

Historical Origins

The cicada's symbolic history in China extends back at least three thousand years and is among the most extensively documented animal symbolisms in Chinese material culture. Archaeological evidence of jade cicadas used as burial objects dates to the Shang dynasty (roughly 1600–1046 BCE) and continues through the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) and beyond. These jade cicadas, often carved with exceptional skill and placed in the mouths of the deceased, served a specific ritual function: ensuring the soul's immortality and facilitating its passage to the afterlife. The placement in the mouth — the organ of breath and speech — connected the cicada's transformative symbolism directly to the soul's departure from the body.

The connection between cicada and immortality in Chinese thought is reinforced by the creature's biology as understood through a Chinese interpretive lens. The cicada seemed to sustain itself on dew rather than ordinary food — a belief that appears in ancient texts — connecting it to the Daoist tradition of spiritual cultivation through purified, minimal consumption. Taoist immortals were imagined to subsist on dew and air rather than ordinary food, and the cicada's apparent dewdrop diet made it a natural emblem of this ascetic ideal.

In ancient Greece, the cicada held a prominent place in philosophical and poetic thought. Plato's dialogue Phaedrus, written in the fourth century BCE, includes a remarkable passage in which Socrates describes cicadas as souls who in a former existence were human beings so devoted to the Muses and to learning that they forgot to eat and drink and died, transforming into cicadas. These cicada-souls now observe which humans pursue philosophy and music, reporting back to the Muses — a myth that elevates the cicada to the status of a philosophical and divine being.

Homeric poetry describes the old men of Troy speaking with voices like cicadas — a comparison that, in context, means something between thinness and beauty rather than weakness. The cicada's song was associated in Greek culture with old age and wisdom, with the dry clearness of a voice that had passed beyond ordinary concerns.

Native American traditions in the American Southwest, where periodical cicadas are familiar, include the cicada in their symbolic systems as a figure of transformation and summer. Hopi and Zuni artwork incorporates cicada imagery, and the creature's mass emergence has been incorporated into tribal stories about the nature of time and cyclical renewal.

Cultural Variations