What Does “Bugonia” Mean?
Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’s black comedy film Bugonia (2025), starring Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons, follows two young men who convince themselves that a powerful corporate CEO is an alien in disguise. They believe that kidnapping her is the only way to save the world. Their reasoning develops through a chain of pseudoscientific ideas and conspiracy theories. The title, which screenwriter Will Tracy has described as intentionally ambiguous, evokes at once an insect, a place, and an illness. Moreover, the term reaches back to one of the ancient world’s enduring beliefs about bees and dead cattle.
Etymology and meaning
Bugonia combines two ancient Greek roots: bous (ox or cattle) and gone (offspring). It refers to a belief held widely across the ancient Mediterranean world that bees spontaneously emerge from the putrefying remains of slaughtered cattle. The Greeks used the term bugenès (“ox-born”) to describe honeybees, and the Roman scholar Marcus Terentius Varro quoted the poet Archelaus describing bees as the children of a rotten ox.
Origins and spread of the belief
The oldest known literary reference to the term is attributed to the Greek poet Eumelus (about 8th century bce), who reportedly composed a poem called “Bugonia.” Over the following centuries the belief spread across the Mediterranean.
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The Egyptians under the Ptolemaic dynasty (305–30 bce) appear to have associated this belief with ritual practice. The historian Antigonus of Carystus, writing in the 3rd century bce, described an Egyptian practice: An ox was buried with its horns jutting out of the ground; after several weeks the horns were sawed off, and bees were said to fly out through them. The Egyptians probably assumed that the animal’s decaying body would transform into new life in the form of bees. The annual flooding of the Nile River regularly destroyed beehives, and the generation of fresh swarms of bees was an agricultural necessity.
The myth found its most enduring literary form in the Georgics (37–30 bce), a didactic poem on agriculture by the Roman poet Virgil. In Book IV of the work, Virgil recounts the story of Aristaeus, a keeper of bees and son of the Greek god Apollo and the nymph Cyrene, who loses his entire swarm to famine. His mother instructs him in the bugonia ritual, mediated by the sea prophet Proteus: Slaughter a steer, seal the carcass, and wait for bees to appear.
Cyrene’s instructions at the poem’s close tell a different story. Aristaeus’s bees were destroyed as punishment for the Greek mythical figure Eurydice’s death, after she was bitten by a snake while fleeing his advances. Cyrene then instructs her son to appease the nymphs, Eurydice’s companions, and to make funeral offerings to Eurydice’s husband Orpheus. As part of this act of atonement, four bulls and four heifers are slaughtered at the sanctuaries of the nymphs, and their bodies are left in a grove. Nine days later the sacrifices are offered to Orpheus. From the decaying carcasses, a new swarm of bees springs forth, marking the success of the sacrifice.
The belief was mentioned by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History (77 ce) and also appears in the Geoponica, a Byzantine collection compiled under Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus in the 10th century ce.
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During the Renaissance the belief passed for proverbial wisdom in William Shakespeare’s chronicle play Henry IV, Part 2 (written 1597–99):
’Tis seldom when the bee doth leave her comb
In the dead carrion.
The belief and the film
The film’s protagonist, Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons), is an amateur beekeeper whose hives are in serious decline, a crisis he attributes to the actions of Auxolith, the corporation at the center of the story. The parallel with Virgil’s Aristaeus, a beekeeper who is driven to extraordinary measures to restore his lost swarm, can hardly be coincidental.
Screenwriter Will Tracy has said that the title could be read as a metaphor to suggest that new life might arise from the ashes of a corrupt entity. In the ancient ritual, that corrupt substrate was a decomposing carcass, whereas in the film it is the corporation. The ancient believers in bugonia, as Russian entomologist C.R. Osten-Sacken demonstrated in 1894, were not entirely wrong in what they observed, only in what they concluded. The creatures emerging from the carcass were actually drone flies, close enough in appearance to honeybees to sustain a flawed belief across millennia. In a similar vein, Tracy has suggested that the character Teddy reflects a human tendency to fill gaps in knowledge with beliefs that seem convincing.