On later gems Psyche is usually identical with Kore; she would be therefore the mother of Eros. But it is typical of mythological relationships that the woman is always the mother, sister, wife, daughter of her husband, father, and so on. It is also the typical relationship all gods had to each other, for instance, Isis and Osiris.
On his part, Eros was also a central figure in the Orphic mysteries, but this leads to difficult, controversial ground, for in antiquity there was an early Orphism and a later Orphism. The early Orphism was influenced by Egyptian religion. According to their cosmogony the world came into being from an egg whose upper half was gold and lower part silver. The egg burst apart and out of it came a god called Phanes-Eros. Phanes was a divine youth and a creator god of the world. Similarly, in Egypt, Osiris was characterized as “the seed of the noble and magnificent egg.”10 There is a question as to whether and how far the old Boeotian god, who was worshipped in rural countries as a stone phallus, played a role in the early Orphic mysteries, or whether there was only a later connection between the two principles. Certainly in the time of Apuleius, Eros was worshipped as a world-creating principle par excellence; he also played a role in the Mithraic mysteries, where he appears as partner and redeemer of the goddess Psyche.
Commentary on the Story
The fairy tale of Eros-Amor and Psyche begins with the story of a king and a queen who have three daughters. The youngest is so beautiful that she attracts all the collective admiration, and a rumor spreads that she is an incarnation of the goddess Venus. The people begin to prefer this concrete incarnation to the rather abstract Olympian goddess and begin to worship her, which raises her to the status of a goddess, thus making her lonely and making it impossible for her to find a husband. She also attracts the jealousy and hatred of her less beautiful sisters and of Venus, who discovers that her temples and cult are deserted. The people’s idea that this beautiful girl, Psyche, could be a human incarnation of Venus is not just a naive opinion. We will see that this corresponds to some extent to the reality, which is why Venus gets so angry with her.
Psychologically, Venus would represent the archetype of the mother-anima figure. From Jung’s point of view11 the anima figure in man is a derivative of the mother figure, which is the first feminine figure to impress the young male child. She means his first encounter with the feminine, which, so to speak, shapes his disposition for reactions toward women and gives his anima certain characteristics. Thus, in an undeveloped state, the mother and the anima figure are more or less one in the man’s unconscious. Hence, one could say that Venus embodies the mother-anima archetype per se. Every man has by nature a predisposition to live such an experience, since its structure exists latent in the collective unconscious, somewhere “in Olympus,” to use the language of Apuleius. There is no primary connection with that structure until it becomes visible by a human drama: the anima experience of a man begins, for instance, when he is interested for the first time in a woman. The feeling which he experiences thereby does not involve his personal conscious memories only; rather the whole mother-anima archetype comes into play and leads him to the love experience, with all the richness of the relationship to the other sex, as well as its difficulties and complications. Later still, it can lead to the realization of an inner psychic factor, independent of the outer woman: to one’s own anima. For a human being, the experience of this realm of the psyche brings a fertile widening of the personality, which is why it has a healing effect. Here lies also the reason why Eros and Methē in Epidaurus were worshipped as healer gods. Psychological healing always entails a widening of the personality. It brings more life and more aspects of the personality into activity. One can say that the greater part of neurotic disturbances is due to the fact that the ego has its shutters too closed against those realities of life which want to enter. Therefore, healing coincides with a widening of consciousness. To the human being this means an access to religious experience, a discovery of the deeper meaning of life and of healing emotions. But in the mirror process it also means pulling down a brilliant omnipotent god into the miserable narrowness of human existence. A concept of the Christian theology illustrates this: the process of kenosis (from the Greek, “to empty oneself,” “to dispose”).12 It means that Christ (when he was still with the Father, before his incarnation, as the Logos, the Johannine Logos) had the plenitude of the Father, the all-pervading oneness with the divine world, without definiteness. After that he emptied himself—“ekénose heautón,”—as Saint Paul writes—which means he emptied himself of his all-embracing plenitude and oneness in order to become a mortal. Man is heightened through the realization of the inner Christ (for instance, by getting Christian teaching), and Christ is lowered by his descent into the human world. This is also expressed by his birth in the stable.
What Christian theology says about Christ’s kenosis is really a specific representation of a general archetypal event. Whenever a god incarnates, there takes place for him this process of kenosis, of narrowing, while at the same time human consciousness widens.
The problem of the incarnation of Venus is still pendent: a modern English writer, John Erskine, wrote a book about it entitled The Lonely Venus. Erskine is very amusing and must know a bit about feminine psychology, or must have become a bit conscious of his anima. He wrote another most amusing book called The Private Life of Helen of Troy. It is the story of Troy after conquest. Menelaus is furious and is forced by convention to kill his unfaithful wife, who by running away had started the whole war. Blazing with fury and conformist indignation, he storms after Helen, but the latter meets him with her natural charm and first makes a gesture of devotion, showing her beautiful breasts, and saying that she completely deserves it and he should please kill her. In a bitchy way, she slowly reconquers the whole situation. She comes home, where the old servants are indignant and treat her as a prostitute. But Helen, humble, friendly, and typically feminine, modestly and slowly takes the reins in her hands, and at the end of the book she rules Menelaus and the household, and people begin even to think that it must all have been Menelaus’s fault.
Erskine had certainly got a whiff of certain problems, and is very well orientated in antiquity. The Lonely Venus, Erskine’s other work, is the story of the love affair of Venus, who is unfaithful to her crippled husband, Hephaestus, and falls in love with the war god, Ares. In this way she gets mixed up with human affairs. In the Trojan war, in contrast to what Apuleius writes about the Olympic gods, the gods were very much involved. Zeus and the other gods tried to keep out of human dirt, but Ares went to fight on the side of the Trojans, and through that Venus got pulled into it. In the end there is a regressive restitution of the persona of the Olympic gods. After the burning of Troy on earth, the gods retire and become aloof again. The end scene has Zeus and the other Olympic gods looking down from a kind of balcony in the Beyond onto the burning city with all its dead and the destruction of war. Only Venus, by having fallen in love with Ares and having therefore been more deeply involved with human affairs, is unhappy and restless and cannot make peace with the aloof attitude of the Olympic gods. In the last sentence of the novel she suggests that the gods should really become man—an allusion to later Christian development.
Looked at broadly, what happened then was that at the end of antiquity the Olympic gods had worn themselves out in their aloofness and inhumanity and had become obsolete, and then came the great new myth of god becoming man. Historically, the masculine godhead has become a man, Christ. Incarnation has taken place on the masculine, not the feminine, side of development. But actually there was a germ or beginning of the development in late antiquity by which the feminine goddess should become a woman, and incarnation should not be only on the masculine side, but on the feminine side as well. Erskine, interestingly enough, has projected that into the love stories of Venus. In Virgil’s story of Dido, Venus, more than the other Olympic gods, again gets involved in human affairs and, so to speak, elects a woman to act out her plans. Venus
is the mother of Aeneas the Trojan, and in order to have him well received in Carthage she arranges that Dido, the queen of Carthage, should fall in love with him. Later, because politics advise otherwise, the love affair is ended, Dido is deserted, and she commits suicide. So one could say that Venus always has a tendency to get involved in human affairs, but generally the women she uses for her purposes get destroyed or are deeply unhappy. These tendencies toward an incarnation, or a linking of the feminine goddess with a human woman, therefore remained scattered attempts and did not lead to a great new religious, mythological event, as in the birth of Christ.
One can say that the incarnation of the feminine principle in a woman is still on the program for the coming centuries, and is beginning to become urgent today. Seen in this context, the fact that the people wanted to worship a human Venus in the form of this girl Psyche, a king’s daughter, is most meaningful. For it expresses the wish of the people that Venus should also become human and change in that way. If we look at the process of the incarnation of a godhead in psychological terms, then it is the mirror effect of a realization by man, or the archetypal background of a psychological realization. We think generally of modern man having an ego, then a threshold of consciousness, with the unconscious below. In dreams we distinguish the personal unconscious from a structure underneath (that which we call the collective unconscious), the energetic nuclei of which would be the archetypes. Normal man has no idea of this reality and experiences it therefore in projection. Through modern Freudian and Jungian analysis one has begun to discover this substructure of the human psyche and to see that the motivations behind our fate stem from there, and, coming through the filter of the personal unconscious, modify and influence consciousness. In the analytical process we use the word integration for what happens, meaning that the ego relates to these contents, has an Auseinandersetzung, a confrontation, with them, recognizing them as the deeper part of its own psychic substructure. Now, what happens, actually, if you take a mirrored, symmetrical standpoint and look at the thing from the side of the archetypes? The archetypes are the gods of polytheistic paganism. The Greek gods are the archetypes in the collective Greek psyche. What happens to the gods if this process of integration takes place? A relationship is never only a one-way thing, so the gods get pulled into the human realm and, in the countermovement, the ego expands its conscious awareness. That is the process of the incarnation of a god. Actually, the beginning of this process is not here. We very often see in the impulse toward individuation and integration it is the god who wants to incarnate. Only secondarily is the ego touched and pulled into the process. This explains why initial dreams in analysis frequently are not that the ego meets divine figures, but that the god has decided to incarnate. The ego has no idea of this but is looking somewhere else, has had money or marital troubles, and does not know yet what is being played out on the other side. Very often the creative initiative of the process of individuation comes from the other side.
In our fairy tale, then, we can understand that Venus does not like to incarnate in a human being and resents being robbed of her all-encompassing divinity. She feels a typically feminine and rightful jealousy toward the girl Psyche.
Reinhold Merkelbach has taken great trouble to find out, step by step, the analogy between Isis and Psyche.13 He is convincing to a certain extent, but he stumbles over the fact that Psyche as well as Venus can be looked at as identical with Isis. That Venus is a parallel to Isis is clear, but that would mean that Isis fights Isis! We are dealing here with a split within the symbolic figure. A fight arises between one part of the archetype which wants to remain in its original form, in its inertia, and the other part which wants to incarnate into human form. The conflict is represented in a projected form as jealousy, when Venus says indignantly, “And now a mortal girl, who will die, walks about in my shape,” which very clearly expresses her feeling. She protests against the narrowing of her immortal omnipotence.
Venus then orders her son, Eros, to make the girl fall in love with the lowest of all human beings, but Eros, on seeing his victim, elects to be that lowest human being himself. Then it is arranged that the king, because his daughter has not married yet, is told by the Delphic oracle that she will never marry but is destined for a terrible dragon, or monstrous thing, and that, therefore, she should be exposed on the top of a mountain. This is a typical Greek version of the fairy tale.
In all the more modern folklore stories14 it is the girl who brings this fate upon herself. Some versions run: A father or a king has three daughters. He goes for a journey and asks them what he should bring back. One wants clothes, the other money or jewels, but the youngest girl asks for something nonexistent, something fantastic. For instance, she wishes “ein singendes, springendes Löweneckerchen” (“a singing, springing lion’s lark”), or a squirrel called Sorrow, or a white bear named Valemon, or a white dog from the mountains, or some such apparently whimsical thing. And when the father finds it—the lion’s lark or white bear or wolf or a squirrel called Sorrow—it says, “All right, you can have me, but in return your daughter must marry me.” So, by a kind of wishful fantasy, the girl brings this fate upon herself. Here it is replaced by the Delphic oracle, which is not much different if one realizes that the oracle was simply the place where people asked, with the help of a medium, for an explanation of the present constellation of the collective unconscious. Even before the greatest military and political enterprises, the Greeks never omitted first consulting the collective unconscious constellation to find out whether it was favorable for a war or not. That was very wise and corresponds to the fact that until the First World War the Japanese parliament still officially consulted the I Ching before great actions, and I think if they had consulted it before the Second World War they would perhaps have been better off. There they were already “enlightened” by our not doing so.
One could therefore say that something from the collective unconscious voices the wish for a union of Eros and Psyche and for an incarnation of Venus. It is the wish for a divine marriage between the masculine and the feminine principles. Because Venus is the mother of Eros, and Psyche is Venus, we are dealing here with the famous mythological hieros gamos (“sacred marriage”) between the mother-daughter-sister and her own son, but this time in a partly incarnate form, since it is not only that an archetypal image of Venus is approaching the human realm, but also that the whole image of the sacred marriage is coming down onto earth.
The girl is exposed on the mountain and left there for a death marriage. The hieros gamos is often mythologically identical with the death experience, so this is not only a play on the words of Apuleius, for Psyche goes through a kind of anticipation of a death experience. This has also been pointed out by Merkelbach, who says that this first part of the love affair of Eros and Psyche is really something which happens in the Beyond, in the underworld of death, though in its blissful aspect. It is so, because Psyche is carried away by the wind into a kind of unreal, beyondish, magical situation, far away from all human experience and existence, where she is served by invisible servants and united with an invisible partner.
The underworld, which is identical with the unconscious, here shows its paradisiacal, fairylike, alluring, and soporific beauty, and Psyche is caught into its magic realm. Whenever a deeper love experience between a man and a woman takes place, there has opened up another dimension of reality; a divine dimension breaks into the psyche and washes away its egocentric pettiness. There is an element of romantic unreality about it which every passionate love experience also generally contains, at least in its beginning stages, a kind of Olympic spring blossoming where everything is divine and somehow uncannily real. That is why people in love are laughed at by those around them. If they are wise they disappear out of human society, they fall out of it, because they are now in the realm of the gods. In spite of its divine beauty, there is also an uncanny feeling of having lost something which essentially belongs to the human realm—the pettiness, the jeal
ousy, the narrow-minded cynicism, and all the other not-so-nice qualities of the higher mammals. This condition brings up the jealousy of Psyche’s sisters.
The classical philologist C. S. Lewis has written a famous novel, Till We Have Faces, in which he created very aptly a kind of modern paraphrase of this story of the jealous sisters. He interprets them as the shadow figure of Psyche. It is a little dangerous to use the word shadow in this respect, because if Psyche is a daimon, she is not a human being. Does a daimon also have a shadow? We can say yes, but then it is a slightly different use of the word. Cum grano salis, these sisters are the shadow of Psyche, the other aspect of the humanization of the goddess, namely, of being pulled into the human, the all-too-human, realm. Young people generally do not see this realistic and cynical side of love. Only in later life, when one has experienced the true and divine aspect, can one become immune to the cynical, inferior side of human relationships. If the ideal side of love prevails too much, the dark side is blotted out or repressed, and then it naturally develops into a dangerous outside factor. No grown-up person can be only romantic; one has had too much experience of life not to know that there is an all-too-human aspect of love. This aspect is embodied in the sisters. Here they instill distrust into Psyche’s ear and heart, and make her disregard what Eros has demanded of her. The main figure in C. S. Lewis’s novel is, characteristically, one of the jealous sisters, and he tries to show that it was she who destroyed the first relationship of Eros and Psyche. She personifies the woman who refuses the love of the god.
The Golden Ass of Apuleius Page 10