This article is based on this Dutch article of Martijn Benders
### The Medicinal Power of Moon Moth Droppings
What a splendid creature, wouldn’t you agree?
Veronique and I recently became Lepidomedicophagous. We’re raising moon moths, and we have two large containers full of moon moth caterpillars. They feed on leaves from our walnut tree in the garden. The caterpillars seem to recognize you when you open the container; they stand up straight. Here’s the catch: they produce an enormous amount of moon moth droppings. The entire bottom of the container was full of them.
Unthinking people might throw them away or use them as fertilizer. Veer had collected all the droppings in a jar and told me that ancient Chinese used to brew a medicinal tea from this. Really, I asked, what an outlandish idea, and I grabbed the jar and sniffed it, expecting a nasty poop smell.
To my surprise, I smelled a wonderfully pleasant medicinal aroma. An aroma that could not possibly be considered unpleasant. It somewhat resembled the scent of fresh mandrake, though almost none of you will know that smell.
So, we made tea from it. And it tasted heavenly! Not only that, Veronique clearly perceived psychotropic features within herself. Her mind sharpened, she said, and I also noticed a definite medicinal effect.
That it is medicinal is, to me, beyond any doubt. I just don’t know what it’s medicinal for. What I do know is that perhaps no one ever came up with this idea – very recently a Japanese person began exploring this idea, but the Chinese have ancient traditions about it, and they even have their own species of moon moth: The Chinese moon moth:
Actias dubernardi
Which raises an interesting philosophical question: does China have its own species of moon moth because, in the distant past, they were bred for their droppings there? When humans intervene seriously with a certain species, you often see it develop differently.
The practice is mentioned in an important work: the Bencao Gangmu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bencao_Gangmu
‘Insect tea, mentioned in the Compendium of Materia Medica by Li Shizhen, is not only a traditional drink for the ethnic minority in southwest China but also one of China’s traditional export products. Insect tea is made from the droppings of insects that feed on plants and is characterized by a minimal dosage, pleasant tea flavor, few tea residues, and excellent transparency. Insect tea is used to relieve summer heat, protect the spleen and stomach, and promote digestion. Modern research has shown that insect tea is safe and nutritious and has lipid-lowering, antihypertensive, and hypoglycemic effects. Currently, due to the domestic production of insect tea, there are various types of tea-producing insects and nurturing plants. In this review, we summarized the species, civil applications, nutritional value, pharmacological activity, and safety of insect tea, in an attempt to provide scientific knowledge for future research.’ Source ResearchGate
The cultural minorities mentioned here are the Yao and the Miao communities, and the Yao, a mountain people, are likely the source of the tradition. Their religion is a mix of animism, ancestor worship, and elements of Taoism and Buddhism.
It is also mentioned in the somewhat later and somewhat wilder book Bencao Gangmu:
‘The Bencao gangmu contains 52 chapters with descriptions, stories, poems, histories, and recipes for the use and understanding of everything from fire and mud to ginseng and artemisia, turtles and lions, and even human body parts as medicine. Li was a man obsessed: convinced that the only way to correctly use something as medicine was to understand as much about it as possible, he put everything he could find in his bencao, from as many different books as he could get his hands on. He experimented both on the creatures around him and on himself, noting his experiences such as “half drunk” moments in local bars and trying remedies on patients to test the hypotheses of other doctors, poets, and scholars. In the pages of his book, you’ll find prescriptions for dragon bone, stories of corpse-eating demons and fire-pooping dogs, instructions on using magical mirrors, advice on driving away locusts, and recipes for excellent fish meals.’
In short, there is a tea tradition involving insect-droppings tea, but that is quite general. A tradition focusing on the moon moth could only be inferred from the existence of a special variant: if the tradition ever existed, it was lost.
This calls for experiments – does the tea really have psychosomatic or psychedelic effects, what is its medicinal focus? Veer is busy planting the garden full of teacher plants and medicinal herbs. She even built a greenhouse for it. If you want to improve the energy of a place, this is one of the best methods. The thought that mandrake will soon be growing in the garden of my childhood fills me with a sweet sense of nostalgia, though the seeds have not yet sprouted – it’s a matter of waiting for the wonderful root man.
Martijn 03-07-2024