The Golden Ass of Apuleius

by Marie-Louise von Franz

  One has here to remember that all the Egyptian gods—the greatest gods worshipped at that time, and whom in the end Apuleius himself worshipped—wore animal heads. The gods in all original primitive religions were doctor-animals, spiritual, divine animals. Thus Lucius’s grotesque transformation is an involuntary deification which he came to in the wrong way.

  The motif of transformation into an animal is ambiguous because the animal can mean something positive or negative. On the one side, there is the motif of the helpful animal, the horse, fox, and so on; usually interpreted as the animal instinct showing us the way. As warm-blooded animals, we certainly have many instinctive patterns—hunger, fear of death, and many others—which are parallel to ours, and therefore if the animal appears in mythology or dreams, it would mean acting as it does. On the other hand, in myths there is very often the motif of a helpful animal which in the end asks to be beheaded. In the Grimm’s fairy tale “The Golden Bird,” and in many other fairy tales, the animal asks to be beheaded, and when this is done it becomes a human being and says, “I was transformed into animal shape and am now redeemed, having been cursed as an animal.” What does that mean? Seen from the outside, I would say that probably shows the difference between animal instinctive behavior and human instinctive behavior. Emotionality is not reserved for the human being. Higher animals have perhaps the same feeling. But what animals probably do not have is an understanding of what is happening to them.

  I do not think that animals, after having gone through a life experience, guided by their pattern of behavior, reflect about it afterward. Objective reflection on one’s own behavior and experience seems to be confined to man, for it seems to be a specific aspect of our species. Where does that impulse originate? The ego did not invent it. It comes also from the depths of the instinct. You can say that our instinct has this deep, human superstructure of reflection, which induces us not only to live the instinct but to reflect upon it. Every species of animal has a pattern of behavior in different situations—building nests, and so on. Every species has the same pattern with a slight variation, a different nuance, yet it is similar. Man’s specific nuance would be the impulse to reflect and to build up a certain continuity of consciousness. Therefore, if a man lives as an animal, without reflection and without linking it up with his conscious views, he is not living the totality of his anthropos pattern, and for this reason animals in fairy tales beg to be transformed into human beings. For the animal instinct of a man does not want to be lived autonomously. That is not a disease of our civilization but belongs to the specific anthropos instinct, which is different from that of other animals.

  Then there is the question of the personal level. Let us take the Naskapi Labrador hunter who lives to a great extent in animal patterns. He has a philosophy about the interpretation of dreams, a theory of where dreams come from, and that is a thread of continuous interpretation and reflection. You have to think about dreams. But there is no urge within these people to develop to a more human level than that, except when they are hit and wounded by an outer difficulty. You can say that people always live on the lowest level of consciousness because consciousness is such a terrible effort. Unless we are caught by some trouble, why should we do more? But we get wounded by disturbing influences which force us to think, and sometimes the wound comes from within. There are always among a group of people some who are quarrelsome and restless, inwardly hit by something, and not satisfied. They have the Luciferian urge within them, which generally manifests as dissatisfaction, irritability, nervousness, and so on. And where this is followed up by attacks of depression, you find that there is a specific urge to disturb the pattern in order to bring up a higher level, and that I would call the urge to individuation. This seems to be a tendency in man to reach a further level of reflection and consciousness, and this comes from within and not always from outer disturbing factors only.

  You could speculate a lot and ask, why is there such a thing as evolution in nature? And why does life on our planet always invent further situations? But that leads to philosophical speculations about an urge in nature to reach higher levels. What is the problem of mutation, and why does nature make groups in which some survive and some do not? To some people there seems to be a directive urge; we tend to believe in the teleological aspect, and see such a tendency within the human being, which would be only one example of the more general fact, namely that biological processes have to be looked at also from a final standpoint. It seems that in the human species there is an urge toward ever-increasing consciousness, which would give us a completely different theory of neuroses. It would suggest that in the neurotic person there is an indication of an urge to reach a higher level. If this is followed up, the neurosis disappears. One often cures the conflict by reaching a higher level.

  I met two brothers, one a highly successful businessman who had been too much caught in the stuffed-shirt attitude and who had lost the meaning of life, his feeling and instinctive reactions. He had thus been forced to come to me, on all fours, because of awful compulsive symptoms which were so bad that he had no choice. Later, I met his brother, who presented exactly the same case, though not quite as bad. But, again, the stuffed shirt. He was eaten up by the persona and elegant and successful. He sniffed around for some time, but had not had a bad symptom. He was just generally dissatisfied, and he was not so caught in his profession. After a few hours, he got enough from analysis to realize that it would be painful if he went on. So he said he would come again if he felt bad, and later sent a message to say he was getting along all right. His brother had been forced by his symptoms to come, and he got somewhere, and got rid of his symptoms. He once asked me whether one absolutely had to take up all these shadow problems in order to get somewhere. Was it really necessary? And he mentioned his brother. I told him that he could thank God on his knees that he had had the symptoms, as otherwise he and his brother would have been just the same.

  That means that the urge for individuation is as strong as the symptom. In one brother the urge was stronger, while the other got away with remaining relatively unconscious and wriggling through the situation. He was healthier, in a way, and in another way, looked at from the deeper level, less so. The younger brother had been forced into a realization, as his urge was stronger. It is shocking for a medical man to look at it from that angle. Jung sometimes spoke of a neurosis as a blessing, for behind the illness is the urge to reach the new level, and perhaps that is simply because the species, man, is still very much in a state of mutation. We know that the brain does enlarge and that we are still evolving, relatively quickly, so that the change can be seen statistically in a few generations. If a man acts like an animal, without adding the specifically human ingredient, he is behaving not instinctively right, for he is not living his real human pattern of behavior, which is a strange mixture: an animal that has to reflect!

  In antiquity, transformation into an ass had a very specific meaning. The ass was interpreted not as a symbol but as a kind of allegory of lasciviousness. The transformation of Lucius is therefore characteristic, for the way he had behaved with Photis was the behavior of an ass. The ass is also an animal which belongs to the followers of Dionysos, and was therefore associated with the Dionysian ecstasy, sexuality, and drunkenness. More obviously (and, with Apuleius, certainly consciously) indicated is another connection, or symbolism, for the ass in the Egyptian religion is a symbol of the god Seth, who killed Osiris.2 In the myth of Osiris, Seth invited Osiris, when they were at a festival, to get into a coffin, and when he did so, as a kind of joke, or to find out the measurements, Seth quickly put the lid on and poured lead on it and threw it into the sea. Seth is represented in the hieroglyphic text as an animal with a strange kind of long-eared head. It is not known whether what is meant is really an ass, but certainly in Hellenistic times it was interpreted as being the picture of an ass. Seth personifies in Egypt the principle of murder, lying, brutality, evil par excellence, the counterpart of the god-man Osiris. T
hat Apuleius thought of this connection consciously is shown at the end, in the scene of his redemption, when Isis says to the ass, Lucius, “Get out of this shape of an ass, of the animal I always loathed.” By this she alludes to the ass as the animal of Seth whom Isis naturally loathed.

  In the Bible the ass has a still different meaning, if one thinks of the ass through whom God spoke to Balaam, giving him guidance, or the ass which carried Christ. In Christian symbolism, therefore, the ass acquired a slightly different meaning. At the time of Apuleius it was essentially associated with the God of the Old Testament, Yahweh. We have from that time a drawing by a student in a college who, to mock his comrades, drew the figure of the crucified Jesus as a man with a donkey’s head. Obviously the student, for anti-Semitic reasons, wanted to mock his Jewish colleagues with this implication. To worship an ass was an insult to Jews and early Christians, who were at that time in the same common society, the Christians being regarded as a Jewish sect. In this way the ass acquired a different meaning, which then was picked up in the Middle Ages, when it had quite a positive meaning and very often represented a form of the old God, of a patient animal, the carrier animal of Christianity, a symbol of all those spiritual processes described in the Old Testament, which, in a hidden way, led to Christianity. Even that the birth of Christ in Bethlehem was witnessed by an ox and an ass was interpreted to mean that the ass represented the God of the Old Testament and the ox the God of the New Testament. These are later developments, but even at that time the ass was essentially associated with the Jews and Christians, who were thought to be worshippers of the donkey. If we know, for instance, that Christ was identified with Dionysos by many people, we can see the mental connection. The ass is the animal of Dionysos, and so of Christ. The image of Christ was not very precise; many people included him with all the youthful saviors, such as Attis, Tammuz, and Adonis, who dominated the mystery cults at that time. In astrology, the ass was attributed to Saturn and was seen as having the qualities of that planet, in the astrological sense of the word, which meant drivenness, creative depression, despair, heaviness, suffering, imprisonment, helplessness, and dehumanization.

  These amplifications illustrate the psychological projections on the ass at these times, namely the strange, complex mixture with which we are now so familiar in the treatment of neurosis, of creative depression and drivenness. In some times of depression one finds that behind the constipation, the lameness, the headaches, and the continual low mood, there lies hidden a tremendous desire or drive which the person is intelligent enough to know cannot be lived. The person is convinced that a desire, or a power drive, or sexual drive, or any other strong instinctual drive, cannot be carried out, so that it is repressed through resignation and so constitutes the nucleus of a deep depression in the unconscious. That is why when you get people out of such a state they first turn into a hungry lion which wants to eat up everything, the depression having been only a compensation, or repression mechanism, because they could not cope with the tremendous drive. The same is true of real creativeness, which also has the aspect of violating the wishes of the ego. It attracts all the energies of the soul for its own purposes, so that in consciousness there remains only a deep melancholy, which then usually cures itself by an enormous creative élan. This mechanism was already known in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance. In Marsilio Ficino’s theory about melancholia one finds exactly the same problems described. Ficino suffered from very heavy depressions himself, and therefore he called himself a child of Saturn, and described exactly those states of depression, emptiness, abaissement du niveau mental, and listlessness, which in him always preceded great creative phases. This is also true of the painter Albrecht Dürer. The precreative depressions, if understood rightly, are actually helpful because they drive people into isolation, into their own depths, and into introversion, and therefore bring about favorable conditions from which creative ideas can arise from the unconscious.

  We can therefore interpret the turning of Lucius into an ass either superficially, as has been done, in that he, so to speak, has an abaissement du niveau mental, becoming completely identified with the sex drive, and by that completely unconscious, and through this being turned into an ass; or we can take it in a deeper way and ask what Lucius repressed. He certainly does not repress his sex drives, but he does repress, to a certain extent, his power drive. There is a lot of power drive and self-preservation in him, looked at from a behavioral aspect, and we shall see later what that and his aggression mean. But I do not think that he is turned into an ass because of this. What he actually represses most, and does not even have the foggiest notion about, is his religious emotionality. Of What one could call being moved by religious contents, he has no idea, and that naturally overshadows his life, and depresses him literally into an ass.

  Here we must remember that first Lucius rode on a white horse and then he came to Photis and Milo and had all the experiences we have described. Next came Thelyphron’s story, the story of the man devoted to women, who was mutilated by the witch. This, to follow the line of our sketch, gave a slight improvement below the line, and a slight deterioration on the upper level. The depression continues, for he gets into a lower and lower state of mind. Then he gets turned into an ass, and things go rapidly downward, but on the lower level there is a slight improvement.

  We have here what one always sees in treating a neurotic split in human personality: consciousness becomes weaker and weaker and the unconscious comes up. Slowly, but only at the very end of the book, there is the sudden breakthrough of the two parts of the personality and the unification into one. But in the meantime there are all sorts of smaller ups and downs, with the main line showing a worsening of the conscious state, and a slow improvement on the unconscious. The ass makes visible the terrible and helpless imprisonment of the ego in depression, which now begins to take possession of Lucius, with all the drivenness, helplessness and lack of orientation. As an ass Lucius is not articulate, is incapable of expressing himself to Photis in any way, incapable of sleeping in his own bed or of having fun with Photis.

  The ass Lucius goes down to the stable, parks himself where he thinks he belongs now, with his own horse and the other ass, and, to his absolute horror, where he expects to get a friendly greeting, he is confronted by the two animals turning against him in fury. This is his first great shock. This is actually a very subtle basic idea in the book. One feels that Apuleius cannot have thought that out consciously. Looked at from the modern psychological standpoint, if a human being behaves like an animal, he is not in harmony with his instincts. An animal which behaves like an animal is in harmony with itself. If a tiger behaves like a tiger, it is, so to speak, individuated. It is what it is, in the truest sense of the word. This is why Jung often said that the animal is the only really pious being on this planet, because it lives its own pattern and self-fulfillment. Only man is a split animal who fights against his own inner pattern. If we sink to an animal’s pattern, we deviate from our own just as much as if we go off too much on the intellectual or conscious end. To live like a swine or an ass is neurotic for a human being. So the real animals reject Lucius, for he is not in harmony with animal nature. The tragedy of Lucius-Apuleius is that within his donkey’s skin he still feels like a human being. He is treated like an animal, but inside, in his subjective inner world, he is not one. If taken symbolically, it shows that he lives below his own level, outwardly lower than his inner personality would allow him.

  Then begins the whole series of “near-redemptions,” which he always misses. In the stable he sees the statue of the goddess Epona. This Celtic goddess, protector of horses, had been imported by the slaves into the whole Roman Empire, and as the horses were generally looked after by slaves, this little statue was found in most stables. There is a wreath of roses around Epona’s statue, and Lucius stretches to get it, but the slave sees him and beats him back from getting his quick redemption here. This is a little incident which carries a much deeper meani
ng, for in the late antique syncretistic religion, Epona was identified with Isis. So Lucius nearly reaches the goddess who could redeem him. The Romans and Greeks had quite a different attitude toward religions other than the Judeo-Christian one. It was based on the instinctual realization that there were the same archetypal patterns in most religions. As described before, they simply, for instance, established a temple in the conquered country in which a mother goddess was prayed to, saying: “O Hera, Juno, Epona, Isis, or whoever else you are.” Historically we call this a syncretistic religion. By this means, naturally, the Romans got out of a lot of political trouble, for at least the conquered countries never revolted against the Roman Empire for religious reasons. Naturally, as the early apologists pointed out, it was a sloppy way of thinking, taking things not too seriously by skipping all the different nuances which a specific divine figure had. The historian Arnold Toynbee, who was rather attracted to Jungian psychology and read a lot of Jung, thought that some of our political and racial problems could be solved if we would establish a kind of syncretistic religion between East and West. He even published a kind of prayer beginning, “O Christ who is also Buddha; O Buddha, thou art . . .” and so on. His idea was to establish again the belief that there is a great spiritual savior god, whatever his name may be. Naturally, this is too intellectual. For Buddha, having grown out of Eastern civilization, implies certain emotional attitudes and other associations which one cannot simply skip over by saying, “Oh, that’s more or less the same thing as our Christ. Let’s just make a nice potpourri of it.” But for a while the Romans did that quite successfully, as you can see here with the goddess Epona.