The Golden Ass of Apuleius

by Marie-Louise von Franz

  This cream in our story is specifically called Beauty, a beauty cream. We are reminded that the girl to which Psyche later will give birth is called Voluptas, sensuous lust. Here we see clearly that in our context the tale of Eros and Psyche is an anima story. Man’s anima today is still very much the same as in late antiquity. To identify the highest values with beauty leads to a kind of aestheticism which is an inadequacy toward life, because life in every respect is a pair of opposites. It is beautiful, but also ugly, and both poles belong to reality, and chasing only beauty and aestheticism, even in their highest form, is a kind of hubris, an inflation, an unreal attitude, but one with which the anima in men especially tries to seduce. Eternal beauty does not exist in nature; it is always varied by gruesomeness and horror, and the same is true for our life. For instance, in the I Ching,9 Hexagram 22 speaks of Grace and Beauty, and there one can read that the great sage Confucius once threw this hexagram and got very depressed, for he realized that aestheticism was not an adequate answer to many of life’s questions.

  Today we have an overaesthetic attitude about religion. Our churches, our images, and the music played, all must be as beautiful as possible, for only that pleases God. Everything which is dirty, ugly, and out of tune does not belong. This shows how much we are also possessed by that prejudice—then we wonder that some of our youths dance their real religious dances in cellars, sweating in dirt, and have more inner experience there then with sober church beauty!

  The Chinese, who, being a people of high culture and great taste, were always threatened by aestheticism, did something compensatory, which was really just a trick, but still seems to me characteristic. In the best time of the Han, Sung, and Ming periods, when the greatest pieces of art were created, if a craftsman made a vase or a bronze vessel, he would make a tiny little mistake on purpose, chip it a bit, or put a little spot of wrong color, so that his work would not be perfect. Something perfect is, in a deeper sense of the word, imperfect. It must contain the opposites, and in order to be complete it must be slightly asymmetrical. But we still identify our highest values with aesthetic values. Only in modern art do the artists try to get away from aestheticism. Their art wants to destroy the false kind of aestheticism and show the “naked truth.” One could interpret the cream of beauty, which makes Psyche sink into the unconscious, also as the danger of being fascinated by the divine otherworldliness of beauty. It creates an ecstatic condition in which one loses interest in the concrete everyday life. Psyche therefore withdraws into the realm of the gods, into the realm of Venus, and makes no more progress toward the Venus incarnation on earth.

  When Jung began to be interested in psychiatry and worked in the Burghölzli psychiatric clinic, he often talked to an ugly old schizophrenic woman. The patient produced interesting material, which he studied and later published. Once Freud visited the ward and exclaimed, “How could you work for such a long time with such an ugly woman!” Jung said that he had not even noticed that she was ugly.

  The aestheticism of the anima is always a problem. Even if a woman is beautiful, she may yet get some disease or have to undergo an operation. Women sometimes fear that they may lose their husband’s affection after an operation, which shows that the feeling relationship is not quite right. Or they are not rightly married if she fears losing her husband’s love for beauty reasons.

  In antiquity, aestheticism was a much stronger bond between the sexes. Here, too, Christianity has brought about some change, but the problem has not been developed and needs more understanding. This problem of beautiful form and its connection and disconnection with inner truth is something we are still up against and here is represented for Psyche as the greatest danger. In this ultimate, tragic moment, Eros comes down from Olympus and wakes Psyche, and, with the help of Zeus, a happy ending occurs in the Beyond. On Olympus, Eros may marry Psyche and have her child, and Venus is reconciled. The story ends suddenly with a beautiful festival, a nice party of the gods on Olympus. From the human standpoint, Olympus means the unconscious. Thus the whole play of fate disappears. There is a solution, but it disappears; it is in the unconscious and not integrated in the human realm. It remains suspended as an open problem.

  Despite the uncertain ending of our story, it is clear that Psyche had to open the box, otherwise Eros would not have come to free her. This is basically the same problem as in the story of the Garden of Eden. For if Adam and Eve had not eaten the apple we would still be sitting with long tails, scratching ourselves on trees. Therefore the Catholic Church calls the guilt of Adam and Eve a felix culpa, meaning a sin which brought forth the most positive consequences. All such nonallowed deeds in fairy tales and myths are felices culpae, for in the end they lead to a higher consciousness. As far as the problem of the beauty ointment in feminine psychology is concerned, I am convinced that this motif does not apply to woman’s psychology. Women have other problems. The hairdresser, cosmetics, and all these things indeed play an enormous role in a woman’s life, but these have to do with parts of her persona10 and her conscious social personality and not that which comes at the crucial turning point of a deep process of individuation. I am confirmed in this opinion by the fact that the beauty-box problem does not occur in other folktale parallels, whether old or new. So we are justified in assuming that it is an addition from Apuleius and illustrates specifically an anima problem. However, it is also a problem for women, since the anima attitude of a man influences them. It is instinctual in a woman to wish to appear as the man who loves her would want to see her. There is no conscious calculation here. It belongs in a certain way to the essence of feminine nature to carry, to a certain extent, the projection of the surroundings, and to act it out quite unconsciously. Certain women are very gifted in this way, and we talk about them in our psychological practice as anima types. It is practiced even by very small girls. A girl wants chocolate, which she does not get from her mother, because it is not good for her teeth. When Papa comes home, she gives him an absolutely melting, beautiful smile and says, “Papa, just this once?” Naturally, he melts, being tired after the office and seeing his little girl only in the evening. So she gets from him all that Mama has forbidden. Little girls of three and four already play perfectly the role of the father’s anima. This is an instinctive reaction; but if it becomes a habit, then it produces the classical type of the anima woman. Although a seductive attitude is quite legitimate up to a certain point, sometimes such a woman gives up her personality entirely and only plays the anima. When alone in analysis with another woman, she will collapse into a heap of nothingness, for she is nothing in herself. She does not know who or what she is or what she would be if she did not represent the anima of her partner. She borrows, so to speak, her right to existence through carrying a man’s anima projection and is annihilated in her own feminine personality. But then the man misuses this situation, and there comes the occasion when the woman knows that as a human being she has to take a stand and must differentiate herself from the projection of the man who loves her, even with the risk of disappointing him or of a severe disturbance of the relationship. Many women do not have enough love, courage, or honesty for this. It is a marriage problem par excellence and very difficult for women who deeply love their husbands. They do not want to risk the relationship but prefer to continue playing the role, and so deny some instinctual truthfulness they feel within themselves. In that way they keep the man in the unconscious too; for he can never become conscious of his anima, since his wife always represents it. But if she one day does not do that, then the man must say, “She is different from what I thought!”

  Jung told us once how he discovered the existence of the anima. A woman in whom he was very interested suddenly behaved differently from what he had expected, and he was deeply disappointed. But instead of running away, as most men do in such a case, he went home and asked himself why in hell he had expected her to be different! Then he suddenly realized that he had carried within him an image of the ideal woman, or “how a woman
should be.” And now this woman in whom he was interested had not behaved in that way. That was for him a step toward becoming conscious of his anima. So if a woman always plays the role of the anima, the image expected of her, she prevents her man from realizing the inner image, his anima. But since women know that as soon as they behave differently from men’s feeling expectations, many men will just throw them over, they naturally do not want to take the risk. Such women get into a conflict between their own inner honesty and the risk of the loss of the relationship; then begins the plotting.

  The opening of the box was a felix culpa: Psyche has to become unconscious and Eros has to rescue her. If you think of Psyche as the archetype of the anima and of Eros as the archetype of the animus, it is a subtle ultimate reversal of role. In the human realm the man normally makes the effort of wooing the woman, otherwise there is a slight shift of normal values. Many mother’s boys are too lazy to go after a woman, but are caught themselves by some active woman, which is not usually very successful. Normally it is the man who in the visible world, as an ego, has to actively press his interest in a woman. In the deepest sense, however, in the Beyond realm of animus and anima, it is very often Eros, the highest animus quality of a woman, which is the logos spermatikos—the seed spirit of love. The French, who know more about the subtleties of love, have a beautiful way of putting it. They say, “Elle choisit celui qui devra la choisir” (“She chooses the man who shall later choose her”). It can easily happen that on meeting a man for the first time, the woman knows somehow that this is her fate; then she has chosen him. Her active Eros, her inner flame, has touched his sleeping soul, which he perhaps discovers five years later, though something in her has known it all along. So Eros is that active, invisible principle in woman. Jung has said that if a woman really loves, right to the bottom of her heart, that is, if her Eros really loves—and that is something she cannot bring about with her will or ego, or by plotting—she can get any man. It is something which happens to him as an inner fate.

  Psyche falls into a deathlike sleep, and it is then that Eros comes to save her. Eros, as Merkelbach has remarked, is a prefiguration of Osiris, who appears in Lucius-Apuleius’s final initiation at the end of the book. The Greeks identified Eros with Osiris; indeed, for the Egyptians, Osiris taught men and women genuine mutual love.11 Eros and Osiris are both, psychologically, symbols of the Self.

  This divine psychic core of the soul, the Self, is activated generally in cases of extreme danger. Eros appears again only when Psyche is at the end of her capacities. But then he takes her away to Olympus, to the world of the gods. This has to do with the fact that Eros appears in this story as an immature youth. It seems as if Lucius had not yet suffered enough to experience the Self inwardly, and as if he were not yet mature enough for the deep religious experience which occurs at the end of the book.

  8

  Charite, Tlepolemus, and the Chthonic Shadow

  We have come to the end of the Psyche-Eros story, to a happy end in the Beyond. Everything has returned into the collective unconscious from which it came, just as the boy savior in the Apocalypse returned to the Beyond, which implies that a realization in consciousness was not yet possible.

  One sees similar things on a minor scale in psychological practice. Very often people have numinous dreams, but they are so far from understanding them that even with an analyst who explains the meaning of the symbolism, it does not reach consciousness. Everything happens in the Beyond without being understood. Yet it exists somewhere; in fact, it even has an invisible positive effect.

  In our story the positive effect shows as follows: only after Charite and the ass (Lucius) have heard the old woman tell the tale of Psyche and Eros does Lucius decide to run away, and not before. The story must have therefore vivified him somewhere, given him a hope of life, a will to live, even if only unconsciously. Charite has been equally influenced, for she quickly jumps on the back of the ass, when it runs away, in order to escape with it. When the old hag tries to hold both back Lucius gives her a strong kick, which makes her unconscious and they run away.

  All that is an unconscious positive effect of the story, though its essential content has passed unnoticed. Only Voluptas and Beauty affect Lucius’s consciousness, because he listens to the story and says, “What a beautiful story! If only I had a pencil and could write it all down!” There one can see how aestheticism works. Had Lucius wondered what the story meant, he would have got more out of it. But there is this soporific element. However, the vivifying element is also there so he gives a kick to the old woman and runs away, but Charite ruins it all by wanting to go to the right where her parents live, though Lucius knows they will meet the robbers there and will be caught again. He wants to go to the left. But Charite is a mama’s girl; she has been, as the text says, stolen “from her mother’s lap.” It is this sentimental feeling bond with the mother which ruins their common flight, and makes them fall back into the hands of the robbers.

  Afterward, an unknown new robber, Haemus (from haima, “blood”; he is the bloody one), appears, and by boasting and shooting his mouth off, he gets accepted by the band as a superrobber. Later we discover that he really is Tlepolemus in disguise, Charite’s bridegroom, who has sneaked in among the robbers to free his bride. After catching Lucius and Charite, the robbers decide to punish the couple by killing the ass and taking out his entrails, then sewing the girl into his belly with only her head out. Then they are both to be exposed to the broiling heat of the sun so that she may slowly perish, sewn up in the stinking carcass of the ass. Even this sadistic plan has a strange symbolic meaning if we remember that Lucius should integrate his anima. His problem is that he does not do so, but sees it all from the outside, as beautiful and aesthetically satisfying. He never tries to interiorize the experience. If Charite were sewn up in his belly, that would represent, pictorially, the integration (internalization) of the anima.

  It would be interesting to make a study of all the punishments in mythology, for, at least in all that I know, every punishment represents symbolically a form of attainment of individuation, but with a negative turn. For instance, Ixion desired Hera, he wanted to become the bridegroom of a goddess, and as a punishment was bound on a wheel (mandala) in the Greek underworld; or Tantalus, who, hung tied to a tree full of fruits and hanging over a lake, had to die of hunger and thirst; or, finally, Sisyphus, condemned to roll a stone endlessly to the top of a mountain. The wheel, the tree, and the stone are all symbols of the Self. Therefore, all the criminals were tied to the principle of individuation. It is as if the unconscious would say: “If you want to be a god, all right, be a god!” Most punishments and sadistic torture-fantasies are of such mythological character, and the symbols of individuation appear here in a negative, destructive form. It seems as if the process of individuation is an inexorable and inescapable law of nature in man’s psyche. If one resists it, then it reaches its goal negatively.1 These mythological sufferings reveal the deep reasons and meaning of “eternal” torture as it is experienced in neuroses and psychoses.

  Since Lucius is not yet able to recognize his anima as something psychologically real inside himself, the sadistic robbers plan to teach him this in their own way. This does not come off, however, because Haemus interrupts their undertaking by proposing instead that they should get money by selling the ass and by selling the girl to a brothel. In that way he saves their two lives. He then makes the robbers fall asleep by giving them a lot of wine with a soporific drug in it, and while they are asleep he ties them up and frees his bride. The robbers are killed later and their den is destroyed. Tlepolemus here achieves what Lucius should have done: he acts. And therefore, seen from the perspective of Lucius the ass, it is still the autonomous, chthonic male shadow who by acting takes over the parts which are not yet integrated by the ego. It all happens in the unconscious, or in a half-unconscious state, and Lucius has therefore no direct profit from it.

  Later we hear that the story of Charite and Tlepo
lemus goes wrong. Another man, Thrasyllus (“the bold,” “the daring one,” here in the negative sense of the word), falls in love with Charite and wickedly murders Tlepolemus. Merkelbach has rightly pointed out that this episode in which Tlepolemus is killed while hunting a boar is a parallel to the Isis-Osiris story, where in certain versions Osiris is killed by Seth in the form of a wild boar. We meet the same moti fin the Attis myth.2 So here we encounter the mythologem of the death of the puer aeternus, of the mother’s son-god, who is destroyed by dark, brutal, chthonic, masculine powers. Elsewhere, I have commented at length upon the problem of the identification with the puer aeternus,3 the problem of a man who, because of his mother complex, is cut off from his chthonic masculinity and believes himselfto be the divine youth. In our story the shadow of repressed masculinity appears first in the form of the robbers who are overcome by Tlepolemus, and then in the form of Thrasyllus. The chthonic masculinity or the capacity for male action, which Lucius should have, remains in the unconscious, and there it exercises helpful and also destructive effects at random. It goes forward and backward without result. Why on earth did Lucius give in to the beautiful Charite, even though he knew that her wish to go to the right was wrong? He lacked the Tlepolemus-Thrasyllus quality; he just flirted with her and tried to kiss her foot, which was a waste of time. Thereby the chthonic shadow takes over and does not function in conscious connection with his ego, so the whole effort is again in vain. The further fate of both couples becomes tragic. Charite and Tlepolemus are separated, then reunited, and finally die violently. Eros and Psyche are reunited, but only in the Beyond. There is also an interesting fact: in antique gems and pictures Charite is often shown as Eros’s bride. She replaces Psyche, so at that time it must have been clear to everyone how much the one couple, Charite-Tlepolemus, represented a replica of the other, Psyche-Eros. Together they would have constituted a marriage quaternio, an image of psychic totality. In his work The Psychology of Transference, Jung relies upon the engravings of a sixteenth-century alchemical treatise.4 Depicted in these engravings are four persons: the Alchemist and his Soror (his companion, his mystical “sister”) on one side, and the archetypal figures of the King and the Queen on the other. Here, Charite and Tlepolemus are likened to Amor and Psyche; Lucius is excluded from the quaternity and the male child is not born: in such a case, neither the ego nor the Self are present in the totality. The ego, Lucius, has not understood what actually took place. The drama reaches an acute climax and then everything fades out again. The last step is missing. In our story, the conscious ego is so far away from understanding what happens inwardly that it remains outside the quaternity. If Lucius and Charite had married, there would have arisen a human couple vis-à-vis the archetypal divine couple and the totality would have become real. But the fact that Lucius has not integrated Tlepolemus, the man of action, makes the continuance of the process impossible.