Metamorphosis, page 4
Footnotes
i The larva gets its name from the Latin for “mask,” implying that a genuine nature lingers hidden within. Whether that’s true or not, the ancient etymology also links to “ghost,” or “hobgoblin,” hinting at ephemerality, intangibility, or perhaps simply mischief.
ii A pupa carried its Latin meaning into the German for “girl,” or “doll.” In English it became a “puppet,” waiting to be animated, indicating a liminal stage between immature and mature form.
4.
IMPOSTERS
Every summer you’ll see him, usually in July, fluttering about in an open field. From Spain to Armenia through Kazakhstan to Siberia, and all the way to Sichuan, the large blue butterfly (Phengaris arion) is aloft. Like symbols of nature’s beneficence, or living examples of art, they seem to flutter everywhere without a care in the world.
I didn’t know this as a child, watching them hatch in my dry aquarium, but the large blue butterfly was, and is, in serious trouble. First recorded in Britain in 1795, it has since gone extinct there, as well as in Belgium and Holland, and populations are dwindling in Denmark, Germany, and France. The UK Biodiversity Action Plan has succeeded in bringing back small numbers and so has a project in the Ordesa Valley in Aragon sponsored by UNESCO. While scientists remain unsure about why this is happening, across Europe the large blue is fighting for its life.
To stay alive the large blue uses, and has always used, a weapon, and that weapon is deception. You wouldn’t guess it to watch one flitting above a meadow of wild thyme like a flying jewel, two inches across. Look closely at one of those thyme bushes. You will see that a mother blue has laid twenty to thirty flat and semiglobular, pale blue eggs in the purple blossoms of the thyme. When the eggs hatch, tiny ocherous larva caterpillars emerge, with a lilac tinge on their sides. Until autumn they will nibble on the thyme, and like the cicada undergo several molts. At the fourth molt, they drop to the ground. Then the tiny caterpillar begins to secrete a pheromone. Before long, groups of little red ants of the species Myrmica sabuleti hesitantly come by to sniff it, picking it up and lugging it to their nest. There, in the nursery chambers, they will loyally tend to the tiny caterpillar, feeding it and cleaning it as it grows to more than one hundred times its original mass.
The large blue caterpillar has tricked the ants into believing it is one of them. Not only by the scent it makes, which perfectly mimics the scent of their own larvae, but also by means of acoustic chicanery, producing a scratch-like noise when begging for food. The noise sounds just like the one made by a larval queen, and the worker ants give it preferential treatment at the expense of their own kin. Even though it’s much larger than they are, and a different color, the growing larva of the butterfly continues to be nurtured by the ants as it builds its chrysalis, climbing out again in June with legs and wings, ready to take to the skies.
Parasitism is a fine-tuned affair. If the mimicry is not perfect, the ants become suspicious, leading to almost certain, and brutal, death. Sometimes the cover is blown when a caterpillar is found by the wrong (though closely related) species of ant. Even small deviations from protocol will end in disaster. Research in this vein has borne out something called the “queen effect”: Large blues are three times less likely to survive in a Myrmica nest if there is a queen present among them. The reason for this is that ant queens lay eggs the fate of which depends on the queen’s condition: If she dies, or otherwise leaves the nest, worker ants will groom the largest of the larvae as they transition into “virgin” queens. But if the queen is healthy, and present, she instructs the workers to neglect the growing eggs, starve and even bite them, disrupting their growth so that they emerge as workers rather than “virgin” queens that would challenge her. The large blue imposter has to be painfully attuned to its surroundings, maintaining a strict balance between mimicking the queen in the presence of workers and appearing to be a worker to avoid the wrath of the queen.
These court intrigues were far from my mind when the large blue first captured my imagination. And, before long, so too was the large blue itself. Why people lose interest in one obsession and move on to the other is often a mystery, but it just so happens that for me butterflies were replaced by Russia and Catherine the Great. For a time I read everything I could about her, dreamed about her, spoke to her, imagined myself walking, even sleeping, unnoticed by her side. Born Sophie von Anhalt-Zerbst in Prussia to an impoverished prince and a mother with a well-regarded bloodline, fate took a twist on her: Russia was desperate to continue its line of emperors and needed someone to produce an heir. When the daughter of Peter the Great assumed the throne in a coup in 1741, unmarried and childless, she chose her nephew Peter as the man for the job and went about searching for a bride. Peter needed an empress from the aristocracy, but not from a family of any power or political maneuvering. Sophie was the lucky choice, traveling north to Russia by horse and chariot to become his wife at fifteen. Converting to Orthodox Christianity shortly after, she became Ekaterina, or Catherine.
Catherine, it is said, had high expectations of love, all of which shattered the moment she met her liege. He was crass and devoid of gentleness, and nearly nine years passed before an heir was seeded. The courtiers gossiped that he was the son of a military officer, not Peter, and Catherine did little to deny it. Maybe this was a form of revenge served cold: She herself thought her husband, however much she hated him, was the father of her son.
When Peter the Great’s daughter died in 1762, her chosen nephew became Czar Peter III, and Catherine became his consort. By now so utterly disgusted with him, and proficient in Russian, she determined to transform her childish romanticism into an adult love for Mother Russia, doing whatever it took to gain her place. Just six months after her husband had become czar, Catherine hatched a plan to dethrone him. “All his actions bordered on insanity,” she wrote in her memoir, and she needed to save the country. Her conspiracy was uncovered, but she moved quickly and was smart. Within days she forced her husband to abdicate. They called it a “bloodless coup” despite the fact that on July 17 Peter was found dead. The official version was that he died of hemorrhoidal colic, which soon became a euphemism for assassination. Most probably his death came at the hands of a brother of Catherine’s current lover. Ever since, Catherine’s enemies would grow in number. She despised them, and they considered her an imposter.
Catherine had started out as a foreigner, but as the years passed, no one was more Russian. With a political genius and renowned lovemaker at her side, she and Prince Grigory Potemkin began consolidating the empire, squashing dozens of uprisings and sending dissidents to the other side of the Urals. Using soldiers like pawns, she attacked the Ottomans, the Lithuanians, and the Swedes. She pushed down to the Crimea. All the while she became known as Europe’s most enlightened leader, though many judged her a hypocrite. According to one report, court musicians were employed during concerts to tell her when to clap, but she nevertheless wrote opera libretti for enjoyment and almost succeeded in employing Mozart at her court. She drafted her own legal code and sponsored the first-ever national system of education. In the Winter Palace we now call the Hermitage, she wrote books on women’s education, children’s fairy tales, and amassed what many would claim was the world’s greatest collection of art.
None of this mattered to her detractors, for whom she was always no more than a pretender. To them she had tricked her way into her station, taking away what belonged to them. And, like many powerful women that came before her—from Cleopatra to Marie Antoinette, Catherine de Medici to Anne Boleyn—she was made to be a harlot. Her great rival Frederick the Great said of her with characteristic misogynist disgust, “A woman is always a woman… in feminine government the cunt has more influence than a firm policy guided by reason.” Others called her a nymphomaniac, pointing at her many lovers. Biographers report that she did enjoy lovemaking. But to her mind she had grown the wings to deserve her lust.
It seems random that Catherine would have followed the large blue as a youthful obsession, but in retrospect perhaps there was a deeper connection. After all, to Catherine’s contemporaries, as well as to the large blue’s duped servant ants, each was, and is, an imposter. It’s said that art is a lie that helps us see the truth, but sometimes the resemblance of art to life is just uncanny: The young and idealistic Sophie von Anhalt-Zerbst became Catherine the Great, Russia’s feared and celebrated ruler. Marking this dramatic transformation are two portraits: the first made of her in her youth, by the artist Georg Christoph Grooth, and a later one drawn by Vigilius Eriksen when she was reigning empress. In the first painting the sash is ocherous red and girly. But in the second it has morphed into a confident royal blue, mimicking the life cycle of the large blue butterfly.
If art can be a likeness to nature, this is hardly a coincidence. Just like Catherine, the large blue imposter has its own enemies, and they are no less devious. An ichneumon wasp will sometimes fly into the ant nest itself, stealthy and lethal, looking for a home for her own brood. As she scuttles through the opening, she is immediately attacked, but secretes a pheromone that makes the ants assail one another, forgetting about their new invader. Quickly advancing to the nursery chambers, the wasp will then proceed to identify the defenseless pink caterpillars among the other larvae, climbing atop them and injecting them with her own eggs. As the defenders continue to fight among themselves, the wasp makes a hasty exit.
And so, when summer comes around again, the unsuspecting ants may be doubly surprised. Having carefully cleaned, fed, and protected the caterpillars and then their chrysalises all winter, not only may a large blue butterfly emerge, but if the invader’s egg succeeded, then suddenly—a wasp. The shell of the chrysalis will register, unwittingly, the butterfly’s own betrayal: Having tricked its caregivers, it was tricked in turn.
And, for a time at least, so was Catherine. When he became czar, her son passed an edict forbidding a woman from ever assuming the Russian throne, a slap in her face. Though his own tyrannical rule would be cut short when he was strangled with a sash by assassins, he put a stop in Russia to Catherine’s flirtation with the Enlightenment. Most embarrassing of all was a final humiliation: The Empress’s death came about, her enemies spread the word, when the harness of a suspended stallion snapped, crushing her in flagrante delicto.
The story was just slander. The mundane truth is that she suffered a stroke, just like Maria Sibylla Merian, whose papers on the butterflies of Surinam had ended up in St. Petersburg, purchased by the physician of Peter the Great. Merian’s own granddaughter, in fact, would have met Catherine on more than one occasion, married as she was to Russia’s greatest mathematician, the one-eyed genius, Leonhard Euler.i
I had graduated from the large blue butterfly to the monarch—the human female kind—and often wondered whether I was the same person still. Perhaps the newly formed me was an imposter, a foreign creature masquerading as myself. Whether or not my musings had any merit, obsessions seem to be a part of our normal human development. Their appearance and succession are often mysterious to us, but they can become linked if we insist on it as we look back. That insistence is a narrative we tell ourselves, the one we call the story of our lives.
Footnote
i Leonhard Euler (1707–1783) was a Swiss mathematician who spent much of his adult life in Russia. He is famous for having made influential discoveries in infinitesimal calculus, graph theory, analytic number theory, and topology, and is considered to be one of the greatest mathematicians who ever lived.
5.
THE TRANSFIGURATION OF JESUS TO CHRIST
Some would say that she underwent her own metamorphosis, having hatched from an egg in Germany, pupated in the Labadist community of Wiuwert, then grown her wings in Amsterdam, before flying as an imago to Surinam. They would say that she learned to love the insects. But the truth is, the love was always within her.
Maria Sibylla Merian was born in 1647 to a family of Belgian Walloons in the city of book fairs and religious tolerance, and on her Calvinist father’s side, to one of Frankfurt’s leading publishers. Her father produced books for wealthy clients on alchemy and natural history, geography and adventure—like Theodor de Bry’s Historia Americae, illustrating the exploits of explorers to the New World, Sir Walter Raleigh’s searches for El Dorado included. But he died when she was three, leaving her his name and the emblem of the printing press, “Pious diligence wins.” Quickly, her mother married Jacob Marrel.
She would remember the smell of ink, musky with hints of honey, or lime. She would spy from behind the kitchen window the poor souls who’d come from the countryside in search of a walled city, dripping with grime. There had been a never-ending war between Protestants and Catholics, and a terrible plague. In some towns, every third person had died. Still, there was something to live for, festivals and book fairs and art and nature, which was God’s art. As she grew she began to see that the family press attracted free thinkers: Most others held that the only book above suspicion was the Holy Bible.
She attended school, but as a girl was never taught Latin. It was at home where she received her true education. There she would grind pigments and mix them with the sap of the acacia, to better bind them to the page. She’d engrave illustrations on copperplates; sort quills by bird—swan, eagle, goose, crow, lark—sometimes even tend to the account books. She learned how to draw and paint and etch, copying from her stepfather and half brothers. And, she would help her mother cook.
Marrel was a specialist in floral engravings, which, thanks to the tulip craze in the Netherlands, served them well. But it was the minuscule bugs in his drawings, on petals and leaves, that caught her attention. To him they were emblems: a dragonfly signifying the eternal life of the soul; bees, industry; locusts, retribution; a snail, the virtue of patience; death—a lowly fly. But she looked more closely, imagining herself one with them. Nothing made her happier than going out to find insects to be his models. Later, her mother would lament that this “odd and dirty obsession,” as she called it, had been due to her eyeing a collection of bugs while Maria was still in her womb.
Understand, what we would one day call biology had scarcely been invented, and science and magic walked hand in hand. In reports of the highest caliber, sightings of new planets lay side by side with sightings of unicorns and dogs who could bark in French. The origin of things was miraculous: raindrops bringing frogs to the world, cheese yielding worms. To believers, the transformation of caterpillar into summer-birdi was an earthly reminder of the transfiguration of Jesus to Christ. As for Maria, she searched out and found her first silkworm caterpillar at thirteen.
Aristotle remained the authority. But even he thought that caterpillars came from dew, as did Pliny the Elder, whose encyclopedias she knew. Above all, there was Ovid, a beautiful edition of whose Metamorphoses her Papa had published. Slipping into bed with a candle glowing on her bedside table, she would leaf through its pages to marvel at Apollo chasing after Daphne until she could do nothing to save her honor but become a laurel tree; at Zeus turning into a swan to win the love of Leda; at the nymph Io banished by Hera as a heifer across the Ionian sea. She read, too, of the crown given by Dionysus to Princess Ariadne at her wedding, tossed into the heavens and turned into a constellation. In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas / corpora, Ovid wrote there—“I intend to speak of forms changed into new entities.” Everything is always transforming, from the night sky to the gnat.
She adored Ovid but listened carefully to new voices. Most impressed was she by the man from Middelburg who described countless life cycles of summer-birds. Johannes Goedaert wrote for gardeners and embroiderers, natural historians and lovers of art. Carefully, in his book Metamorphosis Naturalis, he showed that each kind of caterpillar made a particular kind of pupa, which, when it cracked open, revealed a peculiar adult. But the caterpillars themselves, he wrote, were “bred by a moist winde,” and neither were they and their adult the same species. This, she gathered, he’d taken from the ancients. But following his own claim never to have rendered anything he hadn’t seen with his own eyes, she began to wonder whether spontaneous generation was nothing but a myth.
Marrel had left the family when Maria was twelve. Later she married his apprentice, Johann Andreas Graff, upon Graff’s return from an artistic journey to Venice and Rome. She was eighteen at the time, Graff twenty-nine, and soon enough she was pregnant. Shortly after her first daughter, Johanna, was born, they moved to his hometown, Nuremberg. The family home in the Milk Market neighborhood was once an inn, full of light and spacious. Down the road Johann Pachelbel would soon arrive to play the organ at the double-spired Lutheran church of St. Sebald’s; up the hill was where Albrecht Dürer once lived, painting rhinoceroses and stag beetles. All day she would cook and clean and embroider and launder; she would feed and tutor and when she was spent, sleep. She painted, too, and whispered to herself, trembling, that her talent might be greater than her husband’s. But neither the painter’s guilds nor the art academies would admit women in those days.
The Graff family home in Nuremberg, photo by the author, 2024.
Recently, a French judge had suggested that just as herbs and plants spawned worms and serpents, so might werewolves be transmuted forms of Satan. The Jesuit priest Athanasius Kircher claimed a dragon’s head had been sent to him by a Romanian hunter, though it was too decomposed to display. All across Germany, people were burned at the stake as witches; there were public trials nearby in Würzburg, Bamberg, and Mainz. The fairer sex was time and again the one on whom eyes cast suspicion. Even the imperial mathematician, Johannes Kepler, was made long ago to defend his mother against charges of sorcery in Leonberg, accused as she was of appearing through closed doors and paralyzing a school master with a glass of wine.
