The moth occupies a distinctive and symbolically dense position in the depth-psychology corpus, most fully elaborated by Jung in his extended commentary on the Miller fantasies in Symbols of Transformation. There the moth emerges as a figure of the soul’s passionate, ultimately self-destructive longing for the luminous absolute — the light it cannot reach without annihilation. Jung reads Miss Miller’s hypnagogic poem ‘The Moth and the Sun’ as a condensed image of libido in its enantiodromic arc: the ascent encoded in the earlier ‘Hymn of Creation’ gives way, in the moth poem, to the descent — libido burning itself in the very source that animated it. This dual movement (creation and self-immolation) is for Jung the signature tension of the symbol. The moth also figures in analytical psychology’s canonical illustration of the archetype-as-instinct: the yucca moth, cited by Jung, Samuels, and Hogenson, demonstrates how an innate psychic image ‘triggers’ biological behaviour, collapsing the distinction between instinct and representation. A third valence, noted by Campbell, is ethological: the grayling moth’s preference for supernormal dark-stimulus mates becomes an analogy for how the psyche generates sign stimuli that exceed nature. Across these registers — romantic-mystical longing, enantiodromia, and archetype theory — the moth functions as a privileged index of the soul’s compulsive, luminotropic self-expenditure.