If we apply Thelyphron’s experience to Lucius, we can say that here he receives another definite warning. Inwardly he is preoccupied only with Photis, and, being completely bored with the conventional dinner party, he is only waiting for the right moment to disappear and get back to her. Therefore he is like Thelyphron—he has Photis on the brain. The story shows that, without realizing it, he is falling into black magic.
The Thelyphron story is also interesting because the truth is uncovered by an Egyptian priest, with the name Zatchlas. This seems to be a secondary motif, which the reader could easily overlook, but it points already to the events at the end of the book, when this whole underworld—which now only appears in this dark, uncanny, and gruesome story—comes to Lucius as his initiation in the Egyptian religion. One can see that already some threads of fate are being spun. Thelyphron would have been in a bad position if Zatchlas, the Egyptian priest, had not at the last minute, as a deus ex machina, clarified the situation for him. Commentators have connected the name Zatchlas with Sôlalas, which in ancient Egypt was a common name, meaning “he who knows.” According to others, the name points to Saclas, a demon who was connected with the Egyptian word for “savior.”8 Necromancy was widely spread in the Egypt of antiquity. In the time of the Roman Empire, Egypt was famous for being the country of magic par excellence and at the same time the country of the greatest religiosity. One could say that the Greek and the Roman religion had already evolved partly into a philosophical system but had also degenerated into a kind of soulless institution that no longer included any primitive emotion. The cult became formal and sober as it is in our modern Christian Church. The essense of religion on the original level consists in being emotionally gripped, totally involved with the primitive, emotional part of the personality. One could not imagine ecstatic dancing dervishes in a Christian Church. Religion is a total experience which encompasses the primitive, affective, and instinctive aspects of man; it should not concern us only from the waist up. As at that time in these European religions, the emotional element which was lost became projected mostly onto Egypt, and further onto the Ethiopians. In the antique literature (since Herodotus) one reads about the Ethiopians who worshipped the sun, that they were the most pious and that they had the most powerful religion. Later this was projected onto the Brahmans of India, since the Greeks, through the conquests of Alexander the Great, had come in touch with the Indians and were impressed by the authenticity and completeness of their religion. This projection survived into the Renaissance. For instance, Giordano Bruno writes that the ancient Egyptians were the only really pious and religious people. The same projection is also at work here in our story, for it is the Egyptian priest who knows the truth and reveals it. He makes just a sporadic appearance and disappears again from the story. The story of Thelyphron would be therefore like a second dream. To make a comparison with Socrates, the unemotional superior philosopher who falls completely into the witch, here we have a young man who becomes a victim of witchcraft, but only partly: Socrates is killed, whereas Thelyphron is only mutilated. So one can notice a tiny improvement in the “dreams” of Lucius.
When Lucius wakes up from his drunkenness, the police come to fetch him and he remembers that he has killed three people the evening before. Therefore he fears that his end has come, and he remembers that he had been told that the people who strolled about in the night in the streets were rich and influential. So he thinks that he will have no chance. The case is tried in court, and Lucius is accused and makes his defense, but when it comes to the crucial moment and he is in tears and thinks he is lost, everybody bursts into Homeric laughter.
Then the widows of the murdered men come weeping and ask for vengeance and ask that the murderer uncover the corpses of the murdered men. When Lucius is forced to do this, he discovers that they are not men’s bodies but blown bladders, mangled in diverse places. They are the goatskin bladders made for carrying water which he stabbed. For the crowd this was a great joke, the whole thing having been staged in honor of the great god Risus, but Lucius has lost his sense of humor and cannot join in the laughter.
Later Photis comes to his room and explains exactly what has happened and how she had been the cause of all his troubles, but had been forced into it by her mistress, Pamphile. Pamphile, she says, was in love with a young man whom she wanted to seduce, and in order to charm him to her side she instructed Photis to go to the barber and obtain some of his hair. Before Photis could get out of the barber’s shop the barber saw her, and since she and Pamphile were accused of witchcraft, he ran after her and took away the hair she had managed to get hold of. Photis was frightened, knowing that she would be beaten. On the way home she saw a man shearing blown goatskins for water bags, and, as the hair was yellow and something of the same color, she took it to her mistress. With this hair and her other ingredients and confections, Pamphile concocted such a spell that “those bodies whose hair was burning in the fire received human shape, and felt and heard and walked, and smelling the scent of their own hair,”9 came and rapped at the doors in place of the Boeotian, burning with passion as the young man was meant to be. These were the skins which Lucius had slaughtered. Photis begs Lucius to pardon her.
An analogy which occurs to one is that of Don Quixote, who fought against the windmills with true heroism. Here, too, a man fought with exaggerated effort and emotion against a hallucination, without recognizing the real danger that was sneaking up behind his back. That has again to do with the perversion of the instinctive functioning due to the mother complex. Such a man will say that all old women are witches and will watch out not to fall into the trap of the devouring mother, but eventually he turns up having married a superwitch and has not noticed it. That was what was slowly creeping up behind him. That is the tragedy of the perverted instinct, for the destroyed feeling function makes him fall for the wrong object. If you ask such a man wherein lies the great attraction toward his beloved, he will generally say that she has such “tremendous warmth,” which usually means that she is good in bed. He has no capacity for differentiation and confuses physical passion with feeling. That is why the tragedy must take its course. It is of no purpose to preach against it, for the reason lies too deep. Men with such a negative mother complex are often engaged in fighting some intellectually represented danger, philosophical or ideological opponents, be it Communists or Jesuits. Such fights are shadow projections, for they do not see their own shadow, which is in the grip of the mother problem. The mock lawsuit against Lucius was displayed as an instance of this. Here it was in honor of the god of laughter. I have not been able to discover whether similar festivals were held in other towns. It is probably a spring festival, having to do with the fertility of the fields. In Athens, society ladies would meet and tell each other the most improper stories, which was supposed to further the fertility of human beings and the fields.
Among Jungians we consider that where there is no sense of humor such cases are serious. Especially in the case of a bad psychosis, it is helpful if one can get the patient to laugh about himself and not to take himself too seriously. If you can help a person who is possessed by an affect with a joke that allows him to see how ridiculous he is, this gives him a spark of objectivity, since for one second he can look at himself objectively, from the outside, so to speak. I would even say that it is the Self10 manifesting in such a moment. The ego tries always to do the “right” thing but sometimes it behaves like a clown who rolls himself up in the carpet he is trying to lay. If you can see your own ego-clown and how incredibly funny you are for somebody else, at that moment you are in the objective center of yourself, there is a feeling connection with the archetype of the Self. But generally we lose our sense of humor the moment a complex is touched, and we become dramatic and serious, unable to look at our problem realistically.
However, as with all psychological factors, it can also be the other way around. Then we are dealing with the negative god of laughter, when laughter—as is the case here wit
h Lucius—has a destructive effect. When someone has a damaged feeling function, he does not take himself quite seriously. He plays intellectually with his own life and does not see himself as really important. Some modern intellectuals are so poisoned by statistical thinking that they are convinced they do not matter, they are just casual existences, there are millions of people like themselves. Such people come into analysis and tell their tragic life history in the most casual manner. One man even said to me, “But you must hear such stories every day.” He believed his tragedy would not affect me and assumed that I would deal with it only intellectually. He did not want me to be shaken by his tragedy and did not appreciate it when I took his life seriously, because then he also would have to take it seriously. So people make a joke in such cases and laugh about themselves. That is what happens to Lucius here, if we take the laughing people as being parts of himself. He suffers from intellectual irony, with which he can keep away all feeling reactions. Thus the shadow can get at him from behind.
4
The Ass
We now must go further into the cult of the god of laughter, which is obviously a parallel form of what we still have today in the form of carnival. It is mainly a festival at which people are licensed to make fun of each other and to take all sorts of liberties. In the very bourgeois level of society in Basel, for instance, where everybody knows everything about everybody else, including how much tax everyone pays, the people are stiff and narrow, stuffed-shirt people, but there is a kind of gentleman’s agreement that whatever happens in the Basel Fastnacht never really happened. Even if you meet your neighbor naked in the street, dead drunk, you may never mention it later on. It is a day apart, when the other side may live and the most marvelous things may happen. Jung told a wonderful story of one of his uncles, one of those very honorable men, who got so drunk that he undressed and wanted to take a bath in one of the big fountains. His friends took away all his clothes and even his door key, so that the poor chap had to walk home through Basel completely naked, and when he arrived at his own door, he did not even have a key but had to ring. A very fashionable, elderly maid came to open the door, and he thought: Oh, my God, I can’t face Marie in this costume! So he made her open the door and then caught the handle, saying, “It’s all right, Marie, go to bed now.” But she asked what was the matter with him and wanted to open the door more, so he repeated, “It’s all right, Marie, go to bed now.” They discussed this for half an hour, both pulling the door until finally it opened and he fell into her arms! So, if you want to know what the Deus Risus is, and the festival of laughter, go to Basel, for things still happen there nowadays.
Originally such things (which have now taken on a lighter touch) had a much deeper and more religious meaning. In Christian civilization it was still understood that a carnival belonged to the cult of the dead in antiquity. Those masked people, clowns and columbines and whomever one meets in the streets, are really ghosts. The dead come along in that form and you meet them halfway, you wear their masks. It is really a festival in which the underworld, the ancestral spirits, come back and you unite with them. In the inner parts of Switzerland at certain of these carnival festivals, which are also held before Christmas, these masked people whip the fields and the fruit trees in the fields, which is supposed to make them fertile. The dead ancestral spirits guarantee the fertility of cattle, of the fields, and of women. There takes place therefore a mystical union of the Beyond and the here and now. Mundus infernus patet, the underworld is wide and open and the masked ghosts go around, and the laughter has therefore a strange double aspect of being close to the gruesomeness of the ghost world and death. Here one could quote the famous saying of Heraclitus about these feasts in honor of Dionysos: “If it were not Hades, the god of the dead and the underworld, for whom these obscene songs are sung and festivals are made, it would be a shocking thing, but Hades and Dionysos are one.”1
So we touch here the mystery of the shadow and of the abaissement du niveau mental: sex, in its purely impersonal, unrelated nature—fertility, shadow, dissolution, and the fertilization of everything. If we understand in this way the festival of the god Risus, we realize that here we touch on the whole process presented in this book, namely, the descent into the underworld, and that the god Risus, laughter, has a very dangerous, double-edged aspect. For instance, in the I Ching, hexagram 58, Tui (“the Gay,” or “the Joyous”), says that “the joyous is close to murder and death.” The joyous has to do with metal, death, and autumn.
One sees with Apuleius how much laughter, his sense of humor, which he obviously has, is an ambiguous thing. He sometimes uses it, like many people, in order to keep away from life. It is typical of neurotic personalities that when they get involved, when fate approaches them in the form of emotional involvement, they quickly make an elegant joke, tum it into something light and amusing, and hop out of it. I have had analysands who could not be serious. Whenever one touched something which could get pathetic or emotional, they made a joke to be out of it. That is a form of laughter which is used as a murder weapon, to kill life. It is an intellectual trick, a way of pretending to be old: it is the autumn of life and not youthful. Youth must be inwardly involved. This ironic attitude reveals that one is distancing oneself at the wrong moment, and it is utterly neurotic. The opposite is the freeing laughter. Schopenhauer even said that the sense of humor was the only divine quality in man. Jung always said that if a borderline case had a sense of humor, the chance of cure was ninety percent better.
Another problem for the normal personality is that when the deeper layers of the unconscious are touched, or if one tries to bring them up in active imagination, the unconscious tends to display an emotional and pathetic style which is difficult for modern man to stand. It is theatrical, childish, and pompous. For a long time I could not do active imagination, because a figure which turned up from the unconscious would say, “Harken!” or something like that, and I just switched off. Jung said that he had the same trouble, for it is very difficult to write down what seems to be a lot of theatrical, emotional stuff. But that is the style of the unconscious, although it shocks one’s aesthetic and literary feeling. To jump into it and take it seriously, saying, “Well, after all, I am not going to publish this stuff, and if my soul speaks that language I shall write it down and look at it objectively,” is a test of courage.
What is activated here is the psychic attitude of the primitive carnival festival, and the situation is bad, for it has a definitely negative effect on Lucius’s consciousness. The big hoax and the collective joke they play on him destroy him completely, and strand him in a state of feeling inferiority, tears, and utter despair, so that the abaissement du niveau mental and the disintegration of the former conscious attitude are even speeded up. He loses the last bit of snobbism, or self-esteem, and is reduced to an absolutely helpless condition. But, if looked at from the outside, we can see that he is beginning to touch a more human level of his personality.
When he returns to Photis, in despair she confesses how great a share she had in this hoax by exchanging the hair, thus affording people an opportunity to laugh at Lucius. To make up for this, she offers to let him witness the secret magic actions of her mistress, Pamphile. As the continuation of the story will show, she makes another mistake by which Lucius gets even deeper into the mire. As I have pointed out, she must have had unconscious resistances because of his inhuman attitude toward her, which she pays back in the same coin. She allows him to go to the attic in the night and to see how Pamphile rubs herself with a certain ointment and, with the help of incantations, turns into a bird to fly and visit her lover. Lucius promptly is gripped by the desire to try this out on himself and wants Photis to steal the ointment for him, so that he might also transform himself into a bird. But she fears that, if he succeeds, he will never return. He swears that he will not try to escape; rather, he wants to be “a winged Cupid standing opposite her, Venus.” This little sentence, which one hardly notices, refers to something t
hat later is of importance: the fairy tale of Amor and Psyche. It is the first allusion to this motif. Lucius also says here that he wants to use magic powers so that he can identify with a god.
He gets what he wants, for he becomes a god, but in the form of an animal, for Photis makes a mistake in choosing the ointment, so that when he expects to grow feathers he instead grows a long tail and finds that he has grown into an ass, and though inwardly he feels like a human being, outwardly he can only say, “Hee-haw!” He looks with watery eyes at Photis, who says that the countermagic is very simple, thank God, that he just has to eat a few roses, and that then he will be back in human shape, and that tomorrow morning she will get them for him.
The Golden Ass of Apuleius Page 6