Supernatural creature of the week: Musca

Supernatural added a fly-man hybrid this week, called a Musca, to its list of monsters based on nothing less than a regular house fly.

Okay, this is a weird one. Whoever wrote this episode obviously wrote it after marathoning on The Fly movies. I doubt we’ll see this monster around on Supernatural again, it’s just too weird. And as Sam tried to imply, the fly-man was basically there to serve as a metaphor for other-world Charlie.

In the show, Charlie describes a Musca as a giant fly monster born from a bad egg. Which pretty much sums it up. It was a giant fly-man that sprayed goo and laid eggs.

Outside of Supernatural, there are two types of Musca. One is a constellation and one is an actual fly. Musca domestica, otherwise known as the house fly. The most common species of fly are usually found where there’s garbage or barnyard animals and tend to fly around your head with that “buzz” noise until you want to rip your head off. Not only are they a nuisance, but they can also transport disease-causing organisms and lay eggs in rotting meat.

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Named after the house fly is the six-starred constellation called Musca. It was originally called De Vlieghe, which is Dutch for “the fly.”

One of 88 constellations within the sky, the Musca takes up 138.355 sq. degrees, which makes up 0.34% of the night sky; Musca is the 77th largest constellation. It was one of 12 constellations created by Petrus Plancius from the observations of Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser and Frederick de Houtman.

But I don’t think Supernatural got their fly-man idea from a constellation of stars. Musca isn’t one of the Zodiac constellations and there’s no mythology on it.

Insects in mythology

The use of the fly-man in the show to further evolve other-Charlie’s character is most likely influenced by how flies and other insects were once used in early stories. Ancient people thought that bugs with wings, most notably bees and butterfly’s, had the ability to carry signs of life and spread them worldwide. In a way they weren’t wrong, bugs spread pollen, seeds and diseases.

All things that grow into something more once planted. One of the earliest stories involves the Kalahari Desert’s San people and the legend of a bee that carried a mantis across a river. The exhausted bee left the mantis on a floating flower but planted a seed in the mantis’s body before it died. The seed grew to become the first human.

A tribe in Sumatra claims to be descended from three brothers hatched from eggs laid by a butterfly, and in Madagascar, among the Naga tribes of Manipur, some trace their ancestry to a butterfly. Butterflies have one of the more interesting birthing processes and are one of the new insects’ people can see transform, easy to see why cultures might link the two.

Flies in mythology

Now flies tended to revolve around more morbid symbolization than their more colorful co-workers, but it’s their own fault for swarming around dead bodies. In some cultures, the fly symbolized the impossibility of immortality, and in others they plainly represented death.

Flies were on old Babylonian seals as the symbols of Nergal, the god of death. Because flies were always found where the dead laid, people came to recognize them as a sign of souls, pestilence and death. A dead body is bad enough, but seeing a dead body surrounded by a black cloud made from gathered flies is worse. They thought it was Nergal coming to collect.

Almost every story involving flies will include a corpse in there somewhere. The demon Beelzebub, “Lord to the Flies”, stemmed from the demonization of a Canaanite deity, a Lord of Souls and guide to the dead. In the Sumerian Inanna hymns, a fly leads a goddess to her dead consort. In Mesopotamia literature, dead bodies are compared to that of flies. Even early colonial texts suggested that the souls turns into a fly after death.

Seeing a fly around the living was not a good sign. It meant someone was going to die or death was coming to ruin a town. The theory ended up being right when whatever diseases these flies were carrying transferred onto people, strengthening the flies = death belief. They would die, the flies were remain, and more people would get sick.

Flies were also a symbol of poor behavior and poor judgement. When they’re not around rot, they’re around food. Their little fat bodies sitting on top your meal as they rub two of their little legs together as if saying, “yes, I’m going to pig out today.” Well, this habit also made them a warning for people who acted in equally fat-cat ways. In Native American myth, a justified fate for lazy people was to be turned into a fly.

The myth tells the fate of two tribes who lived side-by-side. One tribe looked for food and conserved it while the other tribe played, sang and danced all day. Eventually, the Spirits reacted by turning the productive tribe into bees and the lazy tribe into flies. The bee tribe got to fly from flower to flower, eating honey while the fly tribe had to eat garbage.

There’s a similar myth from Australia that’s only slightly different, but the end result is the same. The industrious tribe of people is turned into bees and the lazy tribe into flies.

Fly myth used in entertainment

The start of fly-hybrids in movies started with the 1958 film The Fly, based off the short story of the same name by George Langelaan. The tale is straight forward in its narrative, a scientist has a mishap with an experiment and turns into a fly-man. However, the warning message of “The Fly”, is the warning of playing God. This theme is something we’ve seen maybe a hundred times, only God should have the power to do–fill in the blank–but “The Fly” really messes you up.

Like the story of tribal people cursed with becoming flies for their poor behavior, the scientist in the story is creating a device that can transport solid matter.

This story was written in the late ’50s where idea of transportation was too shocking to take into consideration, Langelaan used this on purpose. It was something no one was meant to achieve, and for attempting to do so, the poor scientist was punished by being turned into a fly. And then he died.

Nothing bad happens to Charlie in this episode, but it’s not uncommon for the weekly monster on Supernatural to represent something that’s going on in the character’s lives. Sam warns Charlie that she won’t be able to mentally survive without other people, comparing her to the Musca. Like flies in ancient times, the Musca is nothing less of a warning message.

Supernatural is on their Thanksgiving break next week and won’t return until Thursday, November 29.