The Death's Head Hawk Moth

Associated with death due to skull like appearances on it's thorax and it's strange ability to let out a shrieking sound, while creating visual signals designed to inspire fear, it was held in terror by the superstitious.  The death's head hawk moth inspired a work of art by Salvador Dali, which would appear in a famous cinematic cover art.  It's bee-like colours are no accident.  The moth sometimes utilizes this characteristic to raid bee hives, or to covertly infiltrate them in order to steal honey.  John Keats included the Death's Head Hawk Moth in his Ode on Melancholy, as a sort of morbid inverse to the Psyche of the Ancient Greeks.  To the Ancient Greeks the Psyche 'soul or mind' was equated with a butterfly, which was released from a person's body when one died.  Suitably it sometimes lays it's eggs on Solanaceous plants.  Linnaean classifications for the different varieties of the species are based around the theme of Fate and Death in Greek Mythology, the names adopted referring to the Fates (e.g. Atropos who severed the mortal thread with shears at the time of death) or to elements surrounding the journey to underworld e.g the waterways Acheron and Styx.  In a sense these two act as an inverse to the journey of the psyche after death to the land below as opposed to the sky above.  The Death's Head Hawk Moth can be seen to represent the death of the psyche.

Photo of Acherontia Atropos from Wikipedia