The Caterpillar Lady

Happy Birthday, Maria Sibylla Merian. She was an amazing force to be reckoned with. One of my heroines!

I do think it is a fact that women were pretty much intellectually quashed by many men back in the seventeenth century. But Maria didn't spend any time resenting or obsessing over the fact that she might be oppressed by men. She just did her thing.

She was strong willed, had endless patience, had an observant nature, and artistic skills out of this world. She was born into a "lucky" situation: her family boasted publishers, scientists, and book dealers. She grew up drawing things for her father's experiments and reading many books at his encouragement! And from the age of 14 she was forever enamored of caterpillars. It seemed an odd attraction, as the people of her day might have worried.

In her time, caterpillars along with worms were considered disgusting and useless....and basicly from the devil. They ate trees and were ugly and grubbed along in mud. No one had yet made the connection between them and their future glory as butterflies. But Maria simply loved them. Loved them enough to watch them for hours on end. through a crude sort of magnifying glass of the time. And she watched day after day for 50 years. And she discovered what had not been discovered quite yet. That there is a link between certain trees, certain caterpillars and specific butterflies and moths. In short she discovered the life cycle of the butterfly and the relationships found in natural environments or ecosystems.

There was a penchant for explaining certain things back then as being spontaneously generated. Just popping out of thin air. Like maggots on meat. One day they are not there and then poof they are. No one of course could see the microscopic eggs that flies laid on the meat that hatched into maggots. Maria was to show that butterflies did NOT spontaneously generate. Maria was to show signs of the beginnings of the scientific method. Careful observations and carefully recorded data. She was to discover that the natural world was not so much a heirarchy as an interdependent web. It took her 50 years!

After reading about her, I fancy that SHE could have been said to be spontaneously generated. Her gifts seemed preternatural - beyond human. And all to show us the inner working of one small part of nature. The amount of time she spent looking at bushes and plants and caterpillars. Butterflies mating. Looking for their eggs. Watching them eat, crawl, chew day in and day out with nothing more powerful than a magnifying glass.

I spent one afternoon at a butterfly house and was driven almost mad by their constant moving about and hardly ever resting. It took 15 minutes just for me to get one of them on camera. She watched them HOW LONG before she could record what she saw. And then she DREW them. And not only that, she was an expert pigment mixer. Water colors! (because only male artists could use oils. who knows why? All her colors exactly matched the colors of her butterflies down to the very small hairs on the caterpillars' bodies. It is downright astounding!

She was strong willed (how could she NOT be), exacting, with a mind like a trap. It would wait and wait for answers and never stop thinking. Her butterflies were always alive. She never understood the obsession with dead butterfly collections. These could tell you nothing of the LIFE of these gorgeous creatures. And when she was given revelations by what she saw, she would go into lyrical ecstatic writing about being the most blessed person in the world to know that small thing she had been searching for.

And the best thing of all is that she was formally uneducated. She DID, however read books. But Not one degree after her name. She was a complete amateur driven by a God given talent to understand and know and express the mystery of the butterfly. She did this all between housework, cooking, cleaning, working for her husband and father. Her day was certainly filled with sixty seconds worth of distance run!! She spent much time alone and did not like a lot of socializing. She was too busy working things out in her mind.

I love this woman! She makes the world a magical place, almost infinite in scope. She wrote and painted her books that sold like hotcakes. The people of her time were as astounded by what they saw in her books as we would be with moon rocks. In her time, the simple natural world was a place of discovery and wonder and magical things. New butterflies were discovered every day! New plants were carefully packed and sent from the New World to Europe and had the force of bowling people over with their newfound beauty.

I would like to live in this world like that. To discover something new each day. To have so many questions that needed answers. To pursue a dogged path until they were found. I will have to live vicariously through Maria Merion. I don't think she minds that I have come along side. I can be an uppity woman with the best of them!!