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| 163 12 The Butterflies of the Soul Antonio M. Battro As the entomologist chasing butterflies of bright colors, my attention was seeking in the garden of gray matter, those cells of delicate and elegant forms, the mysterious butterflies of the soul, whose fluttering wings would someday—who knows?— enlighten the secret of mental life. Santiago Ramón y Cajal The Unfolding of a Metaphor Metaphors are the seed of many scientific models. At the Ross School we were willing to explore how a metaphor can serve as a trigger for interdisciplinary work in a school. Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1923/1981, 99), one of the founders of modern neuroanatomy, suggested that the neurons were those “mysterious butterflies of the soul” that “would someday enlighten the secret of mental life.” At the Ross School several mentors, teachers, and high school students organized a network of literature, visual art, music, sculpture, dance, history, computers, communication, and neuroscience. The results were amazing: a fifteen-year-old girl produced a video that is still presented to many academic audiences around the world. The process took several months of interaction at many levels. It reflected the remarkable potential and flexibility of the educational model in place at the Ross School. According to I. A. Richards (1936, ch. 5), metaphors cannot be reduced to their literal meaning and are central to the practice of science as well as other disciplines. They are a privileged path toward understanding; they are also a common field to share new meanings from different perspectives. When we decided at the Ross School that we wanted to explore this particular metaphor , many unexpected and interesting things occurred. First, we became engaged in the search of the roots of the word butterfly in several languages: borboleta, schmetterling, mariposa, papillon, farfalla . . . all were so different! It was difficult to decide in which way we should orient our quest. At this stage the help of the Latin teacher, Clement Kuehn, and the librarians, Elizabeth Angele and Dale Scott, was key. Finally we found that the French papillon is related to the Latin papilium, for butterfly. And papilium is related to 164 | Antonio M. Battro palpitare, to flutter. We started to associate words with actions such as “those fluttering wings.” We consulted the famous text of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (1980), and read their concept of a metaphor as a means to map structure from one domain of experience onto a different one. We discovered that the metaphor was a transfer of meaning (metapherein , translatio, transferentia). In our case it was a transfer over two bridges: from “neuron” to “butterfly” and from “butterfly” to “soul.” We left the neurons aside for a moment and searched to know more about the butterflies in Maria Mandel’s text The Butterfly (1991). Butterflies are Lepidoptera, from lepis (scale) and pteron (wing). Now we were a bit closer to the words of Cajal: those wings were pointing toward our mental life! We were reaching the realm of the mind, mens in Latin, psyché in Greek. We consulted Rowena and Rupert Shepherd’s book One Thousand Symbols: What Shapes Meaning in Art and Myth (2002). We found that the Greek silphe also means “butterfly” and that the Sylphes are those invisible female spirits of the air whose voices are heard in the wind. Wind, wings, air, spirit, soul, mind, immortality. It was clear that the semantic fields did interact to produce a transference of meaning from one domain to the other. Female spirit? Psyche, the goddess of love? All of us knew the myth of Cupid (Eros) and Psyche. We searched for a famous Latin text, the Metamorphoses of Apuleius. It was fun to read The Golden Ass, and it wasn’t too difficult to do it even in Latin with some help. It was the long, charming, and incredible story of the young girl Psyche, who became Cupid’s lover and finally was made a goddess. Therefore, Psyche became our target and our icon. We identified many representations of Psyche in the Western world, in particular the famous sculpture of Canova, The Kiss of Cupid and Psyche (a plaster model is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art). We found that in most works of art the girl Psyche had—butterfly wings! Normally angels and gods are represented with bird wings (Cupid, for example). Why this exception? There was no easy answer to that. But butterfly wings were inspiring. Some suggested that the transformation of...

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