01/15/2026
The Caterpillar Knows Something We’ve Forgotten: This is why I keep coming back to caterpillars and butterflies. The life cycle of transformation aka butterfly-becoming. And the important tiny-big truth of the caterpillar in the chrysalis.
When a caterpillar enters the dark liminal space, its body dissolves into cellular soup. Complete dissolution. But hidden within the caterpillar are imaginal cells - cells carrying the blueprint for transformation and the becoming butterfly.
At first, the caterpillar’s immune system attacks imaginal cells as invaders. The old form tries to destroy the new form. Imaginal cells persist. They cluster together, communicating, activating, and building new structures. Eventually they reach critical mass. The caterpillar’s immune system stops fighting. Imaginal cells take over. The butterfly emerges.
Here’s what scientists discovered: if you remove imaginal cells, the caterpillar dissolves but cannot reorganize. It becomes formless mush without the capacity to transform. The imaginal cells are essential - they’re what allows transformation to complete, not just dissolution. An old story must fall - but without imaginal cells, nothing can rise.
Imagination too is essential to our becoming.
Imaginal cells need four things:
To persist even when attacked
To find each other and cluster
To reach critical mass
Time in the dark, formless soup
We are living in chrysalis times.
And imagination? Imagination IS the imaginal cell.
This is why psychopomp work - guiding souls through thresholds of death, transition and becoming - requires imagination. Without imagination, I cannot companion someone through dissolution. I can witness the old form dying, but if there are no imaginal cells, no imagination awakening new form, then I’m just watching someone disintegrate.
The psychopomp’s work is to hold faith in the imaginal cells even when everything looks like formless soup. To trust that imagination will cluster and build and reach critical mass.
To believe in the butterfly when all evidence suggests only death.
READ MORE
https://open.substack.com/pub/thewildremembering/p/imaginal-cells-and-the-fall-and-rise?r=9ogty&utm_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=overlay
