• It is regarded not as the creation of a benevolent being, but the device of evil spirits —spirits enemies to man—conceived and fabricated in the dark, and the very shining of its eyes is thought to represent the fiery element whence it is supposed to have proceeded. Flying into their apartments in the evening at times it extinguishes the light; foretelling war, pestilence, hunger, death to man and beast. +
• There are actually three species in the genus Acherontia, which takes its name from the Acheron, the River of Pain in the underworld: A. styx, found in Asia, is named after the boundary river of Hades; A. lachesis, found in India and other parts of Asia, is named for the fate who measures the thread of life; and the best known of the bunch, A. atropos, found from Great Britain (at least in the warmer months) to South Africa, takes its name from the Fate that cuts the thread of life. +

in literature:

• In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the titular vampire sends the moths to his thrall, Renfeld.
• Thomas Hardy wrote about them in The Return of the Native
• John Keats mentioned them in his poem “Ode to Melancholy.”
• In Thomas Harris’s book Silence of the Lambs, the killer places the pupae of the Acherontia styx in his victims throats. +

related: hell-moth