The Golden Ass of Apuleius

by Marie-Louise von Franz

  Were we to compare the incarnation of the Father God in Christ with the incarnation that occurs in the story of Amor and Psyche, we would have different images. God comes down from the heavenly sphere, carefully purified from any macula peccati, and takes on human form. In the parallel of our story, the incarnation of the goddess is not the same. Venus does not come down and incarnate in a feminine being, but instead an ordinary feminine being is elevated and regarded as a personification of Venus and rises slowly up to Olympus. In the development of the Catholic teaching, too, the Virgin Mary is first an ordinary feminine being who slowly, through the historical processes, is elevated to nearly divine rank. Thus, in the incarnation of the male god there is a descent into humanity and into matter, and in the incarnation of the female goddess, an ascent of an ordinary human being to a nearly divine realm. We are dealing, on the one hand, with the materialization of the abstract logos, and, on the other hand, with the spiritualization of matter. The latter process is still today in its beginnings. Psyche, who is looked on as an incarnation of Venus, incurs her wrath and is condemned in the Beyond to marry the lowest of men. But Eros, falling in love with her, decides to be her mysterious bridegroom. Psyche is placed on the summit of a rock for her funeral marriage and left there. But a soft wind lands her in a paradisiacal country where she lives very happily with her husband, who remains invisible, only visits her at night, and forbids her ever to look at him. In contrast to what happens later, the first descent of Psyche into the unconscious has a misleading aspect, which takes her into an ideal place, a fool’s paradise of happy love. And, as with all fairy tales which run parallel, this cannot last. In this form, her process of becoming conscious is delayed, since for Psyche the event indeed seems to be lucky and a great blessing, but from the human realm it means a loss. In the human realm a feminine being, who has already carried the first characteristics of Venus in an incarnated form, has disappeared into the unconscious, and in this the human world has suffered a “loss of soul.” At the beginning of the coming up of a new content from the unconscious, energy is being used, and hence there arises often on the other side a loss of libido, a depression or emptiness, until one discovers what comes up from below and what has happened there. Therefore we cannot be too angry with the two sisters, who, with jealousy, learn of the secret of Psyche’s happiness and who weave their poisonous intrigues by telling her that Eros is a dragon.

  The slander that Eros is a monster is in itself meaningful because in antiquity Eros was very often represented as a dragon or a snake. In alchemy the snake or the dragon is a symbol of the prima materia of the “stone of the philosophers” or a symbol of the “divine child.”4 So the two sisters are not too much off the mark. In a way they are even right: if the whole love problem has again regressed into such deep layers of the unconscious, one could say that it was completely inhuman and cold. The dragon and the snake always refer to something in the unconscious which is inhuman, either in the positive sense of being divine or in the negative sense of being demonic. In either case they are not human and lack the possibility of human contact. Jung always pointed out that wardens in zoos say that from the snake on downward even the specialist in animal contact cannot make any feeling connection. One can tame and handle a snake for years, but one day it will bite, and even a very experienced warden cannot foresee such a reaction. With warm-blooded animals, on the other hand, someone with enough experience and knowledge can foresee or guess their reactions. If we live close to warm-blooded animals, we can have an empathy with them that we cannot have with snakes. As soon as a content in the unconscious appears in snake form it is therefore often difficult to make the meaning understandable to the dreamer. He does not feel any empathy toward this content of the unconscious, which sometimes shows itself only in physical symptoms, especially in those which involve the sympathetic nervous system. It is therefore almost impossible to come in contact with something which is stirred in this form in the deepest layers of the unconscious. We feel, quite innocently, that this has nothing to do with us, and generally it takes, in my experience, months before such a content becomes visible enough for one to be able to say, “Now, that is the snake.” Therefore, if the sisters slander Eros, calling him a snake, they describe it in the way Eros appears when seen from outside. It is too far away from the human and therefore the unreal, divine paradise in which Psyche lives has to be destroyed.

  Naturally, one can also connect the sisters with the power drive, which works in them, although this drive has a positive value, as power and self-preservation are very closely connected. If an animal expands its territory by fighting a neighboring animal, is that self-preservation fighting to have enough food, or is it power? In a certain measure it is simply self-preservation, but if it goes beyond that it begins to become what we would call power drive. There is only a thin borderline between the two. This instinct of self-preservation, contaminated with evil power, breaks into the paradise of Psyche. She is induced to take a lamp and a knife and to throw light on her bridegroom in the night. If she should find that he is a dragon, she intends to kill him. So, with no less intention than murdering Eros, Psyche lights the lamp. But then she discovers that her husband is a beautiful winged youth, and she is so shaken by this overwhelming sight that she drops the knife, and a drop of hot oil from the lamp falls onto Eros. He wakes up and gives her the greatest punishment this god can give: he leaves her. To be left by the god of love is really worse than anything else he could have done to her. Psyche now is completely in the dark, and now her real deeds begin with the long and agonizing search to find Eros again.

  The symbolism of the lamp, whose oil burns Eros, is double. In a modern German parallel, recorded by the brothers Grimm,5 it is the light (not the oil) that drives away the hidden lover. In mythological context light symbolizes consciousness. The light of a lamp represents in particular that which consciously is at the disposal of a human being and can be controlled by him, in contrast to the light of the sun, which is of a divine and cosmic nature. Jung has pointed out frequently that it is not possible to describe the unconscious life of the soul with the help of conscious and logical categories. Too much “light” damages the soul. Symbolic analogies are much more adequate, because all psychic reality is never “nothing but” this or that; rather, it is a living entity with innumerable facets. Moreover, the hot oil of the lamp makes Eros suffer greatly. In every devaluating interpretation of the personification and of psychic events of this kind there lies hidden a secret motivation: the wish to escape the “divine” aspect, which is manifested in all archetypal manifestations of the deeper layers of the collective unconscious. The true motivation of this rationalistic devaluation is fear. We see this depreciation at work in the common modern psychological theories, in which the great divine symbols of the unconscious are looked upon as “only” sexual or involving the power drive.

  Beyond the fear there is contained in the oil of the lamp still one more element, namely, “burning” passion, but a passion which has more to do with demand for power and possession than with true love. Psyche personifies here some personal traits of the anima of Apuleius-Lucius: his passionate longing for knowledge (curiositas) and his inclination toward magic, whose purpose is to manipulate the divine forces instead of serving them. These intellectual qualities of his anima have prevented Lucius until now from getting to know the goddess Isis through personal experience and subordinating himself to the unexplorable mysteries of the soul. Love can endure neither an intellectual standpoint (these are “nothing-but” interpretations) nor the passion which strives for possession. That is why Eros runs away, deeply wounded, and Psyche must suffer long trials before she can find him again.

  As Erich Neumann6 has pointed out, in that moment when Psyche begins to love truly she is no longer lost in the unconscious of a distant paradise of joy and death; rather, she awakens and behaves toward Eros like a loving partner. The personal love has taken the place of a purely collective pleasure principle, but ex
actly in this moment love becomes tragic.

  Generally in fairy tales the woman achieves individuation by suffering, while the male hero is more active. There are exceptions, but the hero slays dragons, fights with giants, or climbs mountains, while the heroine more frequently completes her quest by enduring suffering without giving up her love. Psyche is a typical example of the latter. There are innumerable fairy tales in which the girl goes to find the water of life, and so on. There are also the texts of late antiquity, as I have mentioned, which described endlessly the sufferings of the goddess Sophia and her descent into hell.

  There is a certain amount of the same motif in the Jewish teaching that the divine aspect of the feminine in God, the Shekhinah, has to be redeemed from matter and return to God again. These Jewish Shekhinah tales were probably influenced by Gnostic traditions, or they may come from the same source. Jung mentions this in his book Alchemical Studies. He says that wherever motifs come up in which the feminine side of God has gotten separated from the male, this is the separation from the anima through the Logos, who wants absoluteness and the victory of the spirit over the sensual world. The more a man wants to establish order in consciousness, the more he will cut himself off from the anima, and she therefore falls into the lower level, into matter. This means that he is dissociated from his anima, who sinks down into suffering and endless emotions. Where the man does not consider his anima and keep in contact with her, she becomes more and more involved in sensual impulses and primitive affects. That’s why the academic man often has a worse character than the man in other professions, for he is the type who tends to reject the anima and who therefore regresses onto a lower level. If you take away the academic persona from the professor, you may find just a baby. He is often the man who marries his cook, for he is too lazy to find a proper wife and has no time to develop his feeling and woo a decent woman to whom he might have to give in to a certain extent. The man who is absorbed in his books all day needs someone simple, so he marries his cook because she is there, and after a few years she rules him! He has devoted himself to the Logos, and the anima has regressed into primitive sensuality, affect, and emotion. Naturally, this is only a caricature of what happens when the man rejects Eros too much. And that is mirrored in the motif of the anima falling down from heaven and having to go on a long quest. As stated earlier, mythologically, the woman usually reaches the goal more by suffering than through action. It is a quest of endurance, and of more and more suffering, while the hero often has to be active, though this is not always the case. Like the suffering, fallen Sophia in Gnosis, she accepts her suffering and goes a long way to find Eros. In the tale of Eros and Psyche, one fact, however, is definitely altered by the interference of the wicked sisters, a little fact which Neumann skips in his book, but which is an important point for me: in leaving her, Eros says to Psyche that the child which she has in her womb will now become a girl instead of a boy. “If you had not broken the secret,” he says, “it would have been a boy, but because of what you have done you will not lose the child, but will give birth to a girl.” We know that at the end of the story, when she is on Olympus, she gives birth to a girl called Voluptas, sensuous love. She would have given birth to a boy, whose name we do not know, if she had not broken the spell.

  If we interpret this turn of events from the human aspect and connect it back to Apuleius, then it becomes clear that Charite and Psyche are a personal aspect of the same figure in his unconscious, which is tied up with the positive aspect of the mother complex and with a great puer aeternus naivité. When a man has a positive mother complex he identifies direcdy with the divine child. He behaves like a winged god, refusing all the essential tasks of life, such as taking a firm standpoint of reality of his own, earning his own money, finding his appropriate line of work, and similar hardships. Lucius has a negative mother complex, as we saw in the beginning. One could say that he, the ass, is completely imprisoned by the negative aspect of the mother archetype. The Psyche-Eros mythos now shows an enantiodromia, a beginning turn into the opposite. But since this positive aspect is still completely unadapted and unrealistic, the sisters can break into it.

  This leads us to the question of what the “masculine child” who is not born could have been. The answer is: the child of the anima, that is, the Self. The result of the hieros gamos, of the sacred marriage of Eros and Psyche, would have been the birth of a symbol of the Self. A divine child would have been born, which we could have called the emergence of his Self in relation to Lucius. In a man’s psychology, the girl who will now be born is a renewal of the anima. It comes up as Voluptas, as sensuous lust, of which one would think Lucius had already enjoyed enough. Although born on Olympus, this girl Voluptas is closer to the human, so there arises with her a humanization of the pleasure principle, which is, however, almost immediately swallowed back into the collective unconscious.

  A similar, and to a certain extent parallel, process is represented in the Apocalypse of Saint John, on which Jung commented in Answer to job.7 A woman appears with a crown of twelve stars on her head and is pursued by a red dragon. She should give birth to a new savior figure, but she is removed to heaven again, and thus the divine child is not incarnated on earth. Here we also have a description of the possible birth of a new symbol of the Self, which, however, again sinks back into the unconscious. This means that the time has not yet come when this aspect could have come into the collective consciousness. Also this is a parallel to the Leta-Apollo myth and the not-yet-dead paganism of late antiquity. Here, too, is a description of the possibility of birth of a new symbol of the Self, which is again removed into the unconscious. There are only germs of such realizations here and there, which then get lost again. We must see the abortive birth of a boy in our story as a parallel to the Apocalyptic story; “only” a girl is born instead, and she is taken away into the Beyond. The question why it is specifically Voluptas, sensuous lust, I would like to leave until the end of the story when we have to comment on the beauty box Psyche finds in the underworld, for it is connected with that.

  The bringing together of the divine, elevating, transpersonal, and freeing aspect of the hieros gamos, the sacred marriage motif, with the incompleteness and disappointing narrowness and dirt of human life, is still one of the greatest of unsolved problems. People either let themselves be intoxicated by the “divine” and romantic aspect of love or cynically remain in its banal aspect. There is a beautiful representation of this problem in the novel Aurélia by the French author Gérard de Nerval. He was a deep-feeling and romantic poet, which is a very unfortunate predisposition for a Frenchman, and he liked therefore to live in Germany, where he felt much better. This he occasionally was able to do, visiting a German uncle in the Schwarzwald. As a young man and a gifted writer, he fell very much in love with a little midinette. Completely overwhelmed by his feelings and emotions, he wrote poems about her. He felt that Dante’s relationship to Beatrice could not be greater than this experience. But then suddenly the French rationalism and Gallic cynicism came up, and he decided that, after all, she was just une femme ordinaire de notre siècle, an ordinary woman of our time. So he threw her over. The girl really loved him, and she fell into despair. Later a woman friend tried to bring them together again, but somehow, probably because of the cynical way in which he had thrown her over, really destroying his and her own feelings, the break could not be mended. When this woman brought them together again, the girl looked at him rather reproachfully and with tears in her eyes. That hit him very badly; in the night he dreamt that he went into the garden and saw that the statue of a beautiful woman had fallen onto the grass and broken apart in the middle. This dream shows what really happened in Nerval. His anima had split, because now the woman was for him either the unobtainable goddess or une femme ordinaire de notre siécle, with whom you can just have a little pleasure. He could never bring those two aspects together again. He then slowly slithered into a psychotic crisis, which at the end overwhelmed him, and finally he ha
nged himself in a fit of mental confusion. He was a sick man, but he could have probably overcome his split if he had only understood that the hieros gamos and the ordinary aspect of every deep human relationship is a paradox. Love is a moving, divine, unique mystery, and at the same time just an ordinary human event. This split is constellated in the same way here: at first the pendulum goes too much toward the divine Beyond aspect, where Eros and Psyche live in a kind of paradise, and then follows the countermovement initiated by the interference of the sisters, who, through bringing in all the most wicked and cynical aspects of life, destroy the connection. I believe that a sense of humor is the only divine quality with which one can hold together these irreconcilable aspects of every deeper love experience. But people like Gérard de Nerval lack that; and so he became psychotic. He had no sense of humor at all, and thus he could not accept the paradox and say, “Yes, it is both, she is Beatrice, the experience of the divine woman, and also une femme ordinaire de notre siècle.” When a woman goes through such a process, generally the animus is the cynical commentator who tries to destroy every deeper movement of feeling.

  C. S. Lewis, in his novel, retells the story from the standpoint of one of the wicked sisters, who in our fairy tale are described as weak, jealous, intriguing, and witchlike women. Lewis, however, projected onto this motif a rational woman who serves the idea of power and duty. She takes over the throne from her father and rules the country. She is in opposition to her romantic sister, who falls into Eros’s clutches and seems to be lost in a romantic dream. But at the end of the novel, in a moment of truth, this jealous sister realizes that she has missed the point and has betrayed the principle of love. Lewis has therefore confronted the domination of Eros with opposing drives: sex and self-preservation. That conflict exists already in nature. The female sacrifices herself for the young, and the male often ignores his own self-preservation in the moment of sexual drive. These drives are the basis for many human conflicts, for here two genuine human urges do not coincide, and the still deeper drive to be oneself has to be constellated in order to overcome the difficulty.