The Misunderstood Creature of the Night: The Bat
Originally published on my Substack — subscribe there for more like this.
The bats outside my garage are currently having the time of their lives, clicking and screaming away, flying all around the trees, generally acting unhinged. Meanwhile half the internet still treats “bat” as a synonym for “evil little omen creature,” which is wild to me, because bats have historically been more of a mixed review than a horror movie.
Here’s the thing about bats: depending on where you’re standing on Earth, they can mean almost the opposite thing.
China decided bats are good luck. And not your average “vibes based” good luck but literal, coded into the language good luck. The word for bat, fu (蝠), sounds identical to the word for fortune, fu (福). Five bats together is a blessing: health, wealth, longevity, virtue, a peaceful death. It’s all over antique Chinese art and you’ve probably looked right at it without clocking what it was.
Zulu tradition doesn't treat bats as a one off superstition it drops them into a much bigger cosmology. The amadlozi, the ancestors, are the actual daily spiritual authority in Zulu belief, arguably more present in day to day life than the creator god himself. They show up in dreams, they get consulted before big decisions, they're fed and thanked. And there's an existing category for animals that might be an ancestor moving through the world; house snakes, for instance, are traditionally never killed on the chance one's a visiting relative. Bats slot into that same logic. So that bat that flew into the attic could potentially your great-grandmother just checking in, not a vampire. Hurting one is bad luck for the obvious reason: you don't know who you'd be hurting.
The Maya were not as forgiving, and honestly, they didn't half ass it. Camazotz literally translates to "death bat" or sometimes "snatch bat," which is somehow worse. In the Popol Vuh, the Hero Twins have to survive a night in the House of Bats as one of several death traps in the underworld, and they only make it by hiding inside their own blowguns. Then Hunahpu, convinced the sun's finally coming up, pokes his head out to check. Camazotz decapitates him on the spot and carries his head off to be used as the actual ball in the gods' next ballgame. His brother has to carve a decoy head out of a squash just to stall long enough to get the real one back. I want you to understand that this is not a vague "bats = death" symbolism. That's a named god with a kill count and a documented use for the head afterward. That's not some outsider slapping "evil" onto an innocent animal. This is a culture looking directly at the bat and deciding, on their own terms, "yeah, this one's ours to fear." Different vibe entirely from a Victorian novelist doing it from across an ocean.
Greek myth says that King Minyas’s three daughters refused to join Dionysus’s rites, staying home to weave instead while everyone else went wild in the hills. Dionysus punished them by he drove them actually, genuinely insane. In that madness, one of the sisters tore apart her own son, convinced he was a fawn. Only after that does Hermes turn all three into bats, the final piece of the punishment. Ovid’s version of the transformation is genuinely upsetting to read: skin stretching thin into membrane between their fingers, their voices shrinking down into thin useless shrieks, daylight becoming something they can no longer stand. I know how this story sounds but this is a story about what happens when you refuse a communal, ecstatic ritual (not just “missing a party”) and the punishment is losing your mind first and your humanity after.
So no, it’s not universal. It’s regional, and it tracks with each culture’s own relationship to night and death.
Where the “evil” reputation actually comes from
This is the part that makes me insane. The vampire-bat thing is the reputation doing 90% of the heavy lifting in Western bat-dread, is fairly recent. Bram Stoker published Dracula in 1897. Europe had already been side-eyeing bats for a thousand years by then. He didn’t invent the fear, but he did play onto the newly popular fact that blood drinking bats existed somewhere in the Americas.
There are over 1,400 species of bat. Three of them drink blood. All three live exclusively in Latin America. Europe spent over a millennium terrified of an animal it had zero actual overlap with. Just think about that for a second.
Rabies gets the same treatment. real, but wildly oversold. Bat-to-human transmission is genuinely rare. And please, I’m not telling you to go cuddle a bat. Over the past 60 years, it’s estimated that roughly 1–3 cases of human rabies per year in the United States have been attributed to bats (Gale, Jenn 2026).
What they’re actually doing out there
Bats are the only mammal that actually flies and most species are running echolocation while they do it. How cool is that? Built-in sonar, navigating and hunting by reading sound bouncing back at them. In pitch dark or while eating dinner mid-air. Genuinely so impressive.
And to top it off they’re working the whole time. Bats pollinate agave (yes, the plant tequila comes from, you’re welcome) and disperse seeds for a huge range of tropical fruit. They also eat an absurd number of insects a night, functioning as free pest control for entire ecosystems. A healthy bat colony is doing a job that would otherwise cost a lot more in pesticide.
Why I think this one actually matters
Pattern I keep running into with this research: the animals that get cast as “evil” almost always got there from one specific, recent event aka a novel, a plague, a bad translation, that then gets treated like its ancient, universal truth. Crows got theirs from Western death omen folklore (Check out my article on crows and spiders). Bats got theirs from a Victorian horror novel meeting genuine unfamiliarity, and it stuck so hard we forgot to ask where it came from.
That’s the actual practice. I will never say “good animal, bad animal,” case closed. it’s all about finding out why the story got told, and by who.
Half the time the fear was never really about the animal in the first place.
Okay, so how do you actually work with this
Here’s where it stops being trivia and starts being useful.
Bats live at the threshold, no I mean literally, not just spiritually.They emerge at dusk, the exact moment between day and night, which is the actual liminal hour, the one witches have worked with for as long as witches have existed, and bats are the animal that owns it. If you're doing any kind of threshold work, like closing a chapter, moving, ending a relationship, banishing something, starting the version of yourself that comes after this one, then dusk is your window, and a bat sighting during it is more than a cute coincidence, think of it as confirmation you're standing exactly where the work happens. Correspondence wise: bat pairs with anything liminal space work, cave/underworld imagery, black candles, and, because of the echolocation, sound based divination specifically. Bells, chimes, even your own voice.
A simple echolocation working, if you want one to actually do:Go somewhere dark and quiet at dusk, try for an outside if you can, a dark room if you can’t. Ask your question out loud, once, clearly. Then stop talking and count to sixty in silence. Whatever crosses your mind, whatever sound reaches you, whatever thought lands first when the sixty seconds is up, that’s your answer coming back. The point is not meditating for clarity, you’re pinging the dark and reading what returns, the same way the animal does. This is a genuinely good working for anyone who freezes up doing tarot or scrying because they feel like they need to “see” something, this one doesn’t ask you to see, it asks you to listen.
For banishing inherited fear specifically:write down the fear on paper: something you’re scared of that you suspect isn’t actually yours to carry, an inherited superstition, a “everyone just knows this is bad” belief you never actually tested. Underneath it, write where you think it actually came from. Then burn it at dusk, and as it burns, say something like: “This story isn’t mine. I release what I didn’t choose to carry.” Bats work here specifically because they’re proof the method work, an entire continent feared them for a thousand years over a threat that didn’t exist yet. If that fear could get planted and outlive its own logic for centuries, so can the smaller ones you’re carrying. Naming the fear’s actual origin, out loud, is the first real crack in it.
Go make peace with something that scares you for no reason, I’ll see you down my next rabbit hole.
References
Popol Vuh (trans. Dennis Tedlock) — Camazotz and the House of Bats
Ovid, Metamorphoses (the Minyades’ transformation into bats)
Terese Tse Bartholomew, Hidden Meanings: Symbolism in Chinese Art (bat and fu symbolism)
Axel-Ivar Berglund, Zulu Thought-Patterns and Symbolism (amadlozi and ancestor cosmology)
Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)
National Geographic / Smithsonian resources on bat biology, echolocation, and ecology
Gale, Jenn, (2026) How many people have gotten rabies from bats? - The Institute for Environmental Research and Education
