The Golden Ass of Apuleius

by Marie-Louise von Franz

  The tragic end of Tlepolemus and Charite, who disappear into the underworld, is told to us in a side story and is not reported as an episode of the main narrative. This is a decisive point, at which all events, which till now occurred on the level of consciousness, fall down into the unconscious, where they take their course in the form of inserted stories. They disappear into Hades, the land of death.

  Both Olympus and Hades are ruled by Zeus. One couple of the novel disappears in the former, the other into the latter, but both sink into realms of the unconscious which have no connection with human life. In a way, the marriage quaternity is united again, but in the Beyond, in a place we know nothing about. Only at the end comes a positive development, which runs in the opposite direction: Isis comes up from the realm of the underworld gods. In this way, the death of Charite and Tlepolemus connects with Lucius’s process of rebirth through Isis at the end of the story.

  During the period when he is running away, Lucius, at an inn, hears the story of a slave who loves a free woman and whose wife is so unhappy that she kills herself and her child. The master of the house hears about this and has the slave tied to a tree and his body smeared with honey so that the ants will eat him. Honey, as I mentioned earlier, is a substance which plays an important role in the mysteries and mother cults, so the slave is covered with “mother substance,” which serves to bring the ants. One could compare ants to the dissolving effect of the mother complex. What could be a most unifying experience becomes here dissociating, a being lost in mass ecstasy, for the individual element, the anima, has gone into Hades. The personal feeling would be the filter to humanize the religious experience, but it is gone. Swarms of ants often represent a process of disintegration. For instance, before the Emperor Nero went mad, and after he had killed his mother, he had a dream in which his horse was attacked by a swarm of flying ants. There his latent psychosis became manifest.

  The slave who loves the free woman personifies again an aspect of Lucius himself. As people nowadays still project their shadow onto the maid or servants, so in the Rome of antiquity, the upper classes projected their common and lower reactions onto the slaves. Robert Graves, in his introduction to the novel, considers this to be one of the most important aspects of the book.5

  We know that if a man has a mother complex he is to a certain extent cut off from chthonic masculinity, in other words, from his low and “common” reactions. The pedagogic animus of his mother has endeavored to cut him off from such reactions because they contain that virile power which could separate the adolescent boy from the mother. Therefore the castrating effect of the mother’s animus6 cuts off not only his sexuality, but also all other low, primitive reactions. Nowadays one might think that such cases are the result of a Christian education, which is true, for that also reinforces the rejection of the animal element, but the problem already existed before Christianity. There has always been a tendency in the West to cut off this part in order to reach a more highly differentiated level of consciousness. If this is achieved in a wrong way, a split results and the person has no basis of fertile, primitive earthiness anymore.

  I would like to mention an example. A man who had very noble and particularly Christian ideas and a gentlemanly attitude got married. Everything seemed to be quite all right until his wife had an affair with another man. When I saw the husband the first time, I expected to hear a song all about his jealousy, and so on. But he was not jealous! He said that they had agreed to allow each other complete freedom, as he thought it mean to be conventionally minded. I said that that was quite all right, but that somewhere one has a primitive reaction. But he was so idealistic that he did not feel any other reaction. In his dream, however, the whole cellar was on fire and an apelike man raved about, beside himself with rage. Naturally, the patient had the normal reaction! But it was completely repressed and therefore much more destructive than if he had noticed it. Those are the slave reactions in us, where one is neither noble nor reasonable.

  We are the victims of our passions and greed. We are “slaves,” the passive victims of events in life of which one has to take notice. But if there is a schizophrenic split, these emotions are not only not let out, they are not even noticed. There are pros and cons for that, whether one lets them out, but in either case it is necessary to be aware of, and feel, and experience one’s primitive reactions. Some people are so identified with their ideals that they succeed in completely cutting off their emotional reactions and can honestly say that they do not feel anything of the kind. But “the cellar is on fire” and there, naturally, are the vulgar, or basic, or primitive, or animal reactions, in which one is not free but bound by one’s passions, which are usually projected onto the lower classes or political opponents.

  I knew a well-bred man of good family, a true type of fin de siècle nobility, who, probably even when he goes to the toilet or blows his nose, thinks that he does this differently from ordinary people. Every night he dreamed that the Communists were breaking into his beautiful villa. Ordinary men broke in and smashed all the beautiful things he inherited from his ancestors. Not being in analysis, he saw it as a mediumistic prediction of what was to come in outer reality. He thought the Communists would devastate Europe and did not see that the dream had a very personal meaning. He had repressed “the man in the street” within himself and had projected him onto the Communists. Anyone split in that way is secretly fascinated by the Communists, and behind his own back he will help the spread of Communism, because part of himself is behind the Iron Curtain and even hopes that the Communists will invade Europe. People who have the most to fear from the Communists support them in this way and sympathize with their ideas, though they would be the first to fall into despair under their regime. Thus, the Communists often carry the projection of the common, collective man who has not been integrated.

  We all have a common man, or a common woman, within us with the reactions of the man in the street, and the strangest thing about it is that this can even be an aspect of the Self—the Self being the highest and lowest at the same time. Christ, too, is called in the Bible both the king of kings and a slave. He was crucified as a slave. It is a paradox. People who do not know much of Jungian psychology think it is something esoteric and aristocratic. They do not realize that the process of individuation always moves in two opposite directions: on the one hand, one becomes more individual and less identical with the mass emotions; but, on the other hand, one also goes “down” in order to integrate “the man in the street.” The process encompasses an expansion of the personality in both directions. The most common and the most humble qualities have to be integrated, for otherwise a kind of elitist individualism creeps in which must not be confused with real individuation. The higher a tree grows, the deeper its roots must reach, and the more one develops consciously, the greater becomes the need to accept the general human reactions with humility and simplicity. So the slave symbolizes another of Lucius’s shadow figures, which longs for freedom. But this slave seeks freedom in an egoistic way: he acts out of himself, without waiting for a sign from the gods; and furthermore he neglects his wife and child. That is why he cannot reach the goal. The forces of the unconscious destroy him. Only when Isis, the redeemer, and Osiris appear on the threshold of Lucius’s consciousness can a true liberation of his slave side be possible.

  In this and some other stories which follow there is nothing magical or numinous. To remind oneself: the first and the second stories deal with witchcraft and the third is a magic story. But after the marriage quaternity breaks up and Charite—the personification of Lucius’s feeling life—disappears into the underworld and becomes completely split off, the inserted stories degenerate. What remains is just human dirt. It is feeling which decides whether something is valuable or not; therefore, if their feeling function is suppressed, people no longer know what is important and what is just banal. Everything becomes flattened into undifferentiated human dirt. Sometimes in an analysis, for weeks or months, there is nothing
but gossip and the “washing of dirty linen.” Nothing archetypal or numinous is constellated, and nothing much happens. One just has to plod on in human dirt.

  9

  The Ass in the Service of Many Masters

  The ass is now brought to market and bought by an old homosexual man, the chief priest of a band that goes around carrying an image of the Syrian goddess Kybele. The old man, Philebus, is a lover of youths. The members of this band behave like certain dancing dervishes in the Orient; at the end of their dances they fall down, wound themselves in masochistic ecstasy, and afterward collect money from the onlookers. Furthermore, in the case of this band they indulge in homosexuality and sodomistic pleasures. These people buy the ass, and Lucius has to carry the image of the goddess and some of their goods. Apuleius describes how they dance and how one of them suddenly begins to sigh deeply, pretending to be filled with the heavenly breath of the goddess, and prophesies in a state of ecstasy. Then there comes a sentence which shows why Apuleius wrote about this episode. He says the dancer pretends to be in a manic state, “as though human beings would become weak and ill through the presence of the gods, and not better than they were before.” Here he points out that this kind of connection with the divine does not have a curative effect, but represents a morbid religiosity.

  If one believes that Apuleius inserted this description consciously, that could explain the description of the great goddess Kybele as a wonderful counterimage to the Isis mysteries at the end of the book: first we have in front of us ecstasy and religious experience in their destructive aspect, and then Lucius becomes possessed by the goddess, because he does not serve her. Then follows, at the end of the novel, the positive counterimage of a genuine religious attitude toward the mother goddess. Whenever an archetype is pressing for realization, this realization can take place positively or negatively. If one accepts and turns toward it, it becomes a healing experience; but if one runs away from the archetype, it becomes negative and possessive, and one falls into the grip of it. Here the homosexual old man is possessed by the mother archetype, and through that has only a pseudoreligious experience. Many homosexuals seem to have a rich inner psychological life, an artistic and religious side, but if one looks closer, something has a wrong twist. The religious attitude of the homosexual is difficult to define. It is a question of feeling. But though it is admirable and gives a certain depth and dimension to life, one feels, as a woman at least, as if something were lacking. It lacks substance. It is not quite convincing, not quite real somewhere. Naturally this is not true of all homosexuals.

  In the description there is another aspect which in our time, too, is a great problem: the wild dances which today take the place of conventional dance. Our situation is parallel to that of the Roman Empire in so many ways! What children are offered today in the way of religion is often insufficient and does not reach the emotional depths any longer. So, naturally, they have a longing to be ecstatically gripped and to experience moments in life where one is lifted out of one’s miserable existence. Because they do not get the wine of the Holy Ghost, they drink the dirty water of the street instead. They turn to wild music and dances, and become drug addicts and even criminals. Even the political demonstrations en masse are not political activities for many youngsters; rather they spring from a longing for ecstatic experience. Because they do not experience the ecstasy in religion, they turn to political mass movements, which afford a morbid, pseudoreligious ecstasy. This shows a degeneration of the religious function; the more the religious problem is neglected, the more we have such compensatory substitutes. Therefore, too, the great attraction of homosexuality in this kind of movement. It all belongs together.

  The ass now gets into further danger. The company stays that night near a rich household from whose kitchen a dog has stolen and eaten “the side of a fat bucke,” which was to have been roasted for the evening meal. The cook is in despair and about to hang himself, when his wife prevents him, advising him to secretly kill the ass of the strangers in order to use one of its sides as a substitute. Nobody would notice the difference when it was roasted and served with a good sauce. The poor ass in his deadly terror breaks his halter and runs into the parlor, where he upsets all the company by throwing all the food and drink off the table onto the floor. The master of the house says he should be locked up. At this moment a boy arrives with the news that there is a mad dog in the town which has bitten a lot of animals and people, and everyone is frightened that the ass has rabies and they all want to kill him immediately, but he saves himself by running into the master’s bedroom. There he is locked in, so he lays himself on the bed, sleeps the whole night like a human being, and awakes much refreshed. The people peep through the door and, seeing him standing there, quiet and peaceful, debate what they should do. One suggests offering him water, so as to prove whether he has rabies or not, and the ass proves his sanity by drinking greedily. He is therefore laden again with the statue of the goddess of Syria and other trumpery, and driven away. Having escaped being eaten, he continues with the dancing Kybele priests.

  In this last story the ass begins for the first time to become more human again. For a short time in the bedroom he behaves like a human being. It is interesting that the people around interpret his humanness as madness. This has a parallel in the analytical process, for if a patient begins to be more healthy, sometimes the people in his vicinity think him more crazy than ever and do all they can to force him back in his illness. The return to normality is shocking to those around. It is always crippling to an ordinary group to have to take back to themselves the projection of the illness, which before was thrown onto the “other.” If the other person becomes normal, the equilibrium of the group is disturbed. Therefore there is an unconscious tendency in the group to prevent the healing process in the sick person.

  I had once a sad experience when visiting a big hospital in the States. An analyst of our group had selected a few patients and taken them into personal analysis. Among others, he had selected a fifteen-year-old girl who had been raped by her father, a drunkard, and brought to the hospital and diagnosed as schizophrenic. She was catatonic. The analyst had treated her and got her onto a better level. In a moment when the girl felt much better, she went into the kitchen and stole a big chocolate cake. She did not eat it herself, but took it to the children’s ward and distributed it, and they had a wonderful feast and everything was covered with chocolate. The head nurse appeared in a flaming rage, saying that the girl must be shut up again, that she was completely mad, that the psychotherapy was doing her a lot of harm, and that she must be isolated and given shock treatment, and so on. It was an impressive example of a dreadnought animus. But the doctor said, “Don’t you see that this is an improvement, that she had feeling for the other children and had established contact with them?” But the household was disturbed, so the nurse thought she must be mad and must have shock treatment again. When people who begin to become normal again have a transitional stage in which they are socially a nuisance, for they are neither mad nor normally adapted, people in the vicinity get excited, for they do not like things to be changed. Here the ass is becoming a little human, and it is interpreted as “rabies.”

  Then follows the inserted story of a carpenter who returns home unexpectedly one morning when his wife’s lover is there. The wife hides the man under a tub and scolds her husband for wandering about doing nothing while she has to work so hard. But he says that, on the contrary, he has been busy and has succeeded in selling for some money the tub, which simply clutters up their place. The woman thereupon says that she has done better than that and has sold it for more money. “The man willing to buy it is just now inspecting it.” The lover then shows himself and says the tub is dirty so that he cannot tell whether it is cracked or not, and the husband should bring a light. The unsuspecting husband fetches a lamp and says he will clean the tub himself, which he does while the other two, hidden by the tub, continue to make love, and are not found out.

&nbs
p; The story has neither magical nor supernatural elements in it, but is a plain story of adultery. Whereas earlier the stories above the horizontal line of consciousness of our diagram were realistic, and those below the line were numinous, now the latter are banal, and in Lucius’s conscious life there is the wrong kind of ecstasy. This is typical where there is a wrong relationship with the divine: the ego intoxicates itself in a false ecstasy, while the unconscious becomes more and more banal. The anima, who should be the mediator to the deeper layers of the soul, no longer fulfills her function. The marriage does not work, and this adultery is nothing more than a purely sexual distraction without feeling or love. The anima has fallen into an undifferentiated, immoral state.

  Later the priests of the Syrian goddess are caught and accused of theft. The ass is sold once again, this time to a baker, whose mill it has to turn. The description of the mill which follows throws a light on the social situation of the time. Lucius sees the poor slaves, carrying sacks, in miserable condition, and others marked by the irons which had burnt their heads. The faces of some are blackened by smoke and others full of wounds. The horses, too, are old and weak and covered with scars. They cough continually, their sides worn bare with the harness and their ribs broken with beating. It is a dreadful sight, and Lucius reflects sorrowfully on his own past behavior. His only consolation in his present evil situation is that he can hear and understand what goes on around him, for nobody fears or suspects him of being human. He remembers how Homer describes “him to be a wise man who travelled divers countries and nations,” and gives thanks to his ass shape for these unusual experiences.

  If one admires the monuments in Greece and Rome and the tourist guide relates how superior the civilization of that time was, it is time to remember that these cultures were flowers of the swamps. There is an uncanny analogy to our civilization, where a small group strives for intellectual and moral differentiation, while the mass remains undifferentiated. After a time, what has not been differentiated washes away what has been built up. Basically this is the problem of the inferior function:1 If single individuals, instead of overdifferentiating their main function, would work on other parts of themselves and bring them at least to a certain level, then such a split would not happen—individually or collectively. In our times we are confronted with the same split within and without. It is shown in the horrible display of social egoism which threatens our culture.