The Golden Ass of Apuleius

by Marie-Louise von Franz

  Naturally there were in antiquity a few exceptions who had compassion for the slaves, such as Seneca, the Stoic philosopher, but the majority of the other philosophers shut their eyes to the fact that many people had to live as slaves under dreadful conditions. Seneca taught that slaves should be treated as humanly as possible, for one’s own sake, for you could not enjoy your food if you were served by an unhappy, hungry slave! However, such ideas did not touch most of the Romans, and therefore the late Roman Empire—as Jung pointed out—was filled with a strange kind of melancholy, which actually was the longing of the slaves for redemption. The upper classes (as exemplified by Horace and his friend Maecenas) were deeply depressed, but they did not know why. Then came the Christian message, which gave a “new” symbolic meaning to life. Once more we are in the same situation as the Roman Empire; we too have to give up some of our intellectual and technical achievements in order to heal our outer and inner psychic dissociation, which threatens to destroy us, because otherwise the dark swamp of mob psychology will sweep away the cultural flower which has grown out of it.

  In the mill the ass hears a few other stories of adultery, which we know that Apuleius borrowed from an earlier novel. Apuleius-Lucius relates that the baker was an honest and sober man, but his wife “the most pestilent woman in all the world” who “abandones her body with continual whoredom.” An old woman, “a messenger of mischiefe,” who haunts her house daily, tells the wife the following story:

  Barbarus, a senator of the town (whom the people also called Scorpion, for the severity of his manners), being jealous and wanting to keep watch over the chastity of his wife, leaves her in the charge of the slave Myrmex (“the ant”). He threatens him with death if any man does but touch her with his finger as he passes by. Myrmex, therefore, does not allow her to go out and even sits beside her when she spins, and accompanies her to the baths. But a certain Philesiterus, whom the old woman who tells the story recommends as a lover for the baker’s wife, is enamored of her and tempts Myrmex with money, a part of which is to be for him and a part for the wife. At first Myrmex refuses, but then he asks the wife, who, greedy for money, consents. Myrmex brings Philesiterus, disguised, to his mistress. But about midnight the husband returns unexpectedly. Myrmex delays in opening the door, and Philesiterus makes his escape, but he forgets his slippers, which the husband discovers the next morning. He suspects Myrmex and has him bound, and on their way to court for trial, when passing through the marketplace, they meet Philesiterus. Terrified that the whole story may come out, Philesiterus beats Myrmex about the head, accusing him of having stolen his slippers at the baths. So both are saved.

  The story does not need much comment. It has sunk to the level of people who have insects’ names and sheer, cruel, instinctive animal reactions. With insects we are dealing with reactions of the sympathetic nervous system with all its coldness, brutality, and lust. There is nothing human left. Remember also that in Greek myth the ant is a symbol of the aboriginal man. It overcomes the scorpion, which could be interpreted as the personification of evil.2 Thus we do have here a slight progress: the autochthonous real man is saved and the true evil is outwitted.

  Hearing this story, the baker’s wife then decides to make Philesiterus her lover and prepares an especially good supper with lots of wine. He is scarcely seated when the husband comes home, and the wife just manages to hide him under a tub. The husband, who does not suspect anything, tells his wife of a neighbor who hid her lover under a wicker basket which served for bleaching the clothes hung across it. It stank of sulphur vapor and, when all of the occupants of the house were at the table, the hidden man had to sneeze. First the husband thought that it was his wife who sneezed, but when it happened again, he became suspicious, found the lover and would have killed him if he, the baker, had not prevented him from doing so.

  The baker’s wife cannot insult the other woman enough, but, remembering her own lover, she tries to convince her husband to go to bed. However, he wants to eat first, and she is forced to offer him the food which was prepared for the other. The ass, disgusted by her conduct, treads on the fingers of the young man which are sticking out beyond the tub and takes all the skin off. The young man screams, and the husband discovers him and punishes him by locking his wife in the bedroom and raping him homosexually in his own room. Next morning he has him thrashed and driven from the house. He then divorces his wife, who goes to an enchantress for help. But, as none of her spells will reconcile the baker, the latter sends the spectre of an old woman to his house. Pretending to have a secret, she takes him into a room with her. As the baker does not reappear, the servants break open the door and find he has hanged himself. But the dead baker returns as a ghost to his daughter, with the cord round his neck, and tells her what happened to him; he explains the circumstances of his death and how “by enchantment he was descended into hell.”

  Bake shops, like mills, were often types of brothels in antiquity. Moreover, bakers were looked on as being servants of the goddess of grain, Demeter.3 Here, our baker is destroyed by the Great Mother in her witch aspect. And here, for the first time, these stories of adultery become less banal, and the dark, divine element comes in again, though in an uncanny form which shows that the problem has fallen to such a low level that, in practical terms, it cannot be integrated. The old woman who lures the man to suicide represents the killed feeling function, that part of the anima which is in the underworld of ghosts. Charite has committed suicide and is in the ghost world. When the man is lured to suicide by the anima, it becomes more and more dangerous, for it has become a drive toward death: a power which lures the man to self-destruction. But there is still a positive aspect as well, for at least the supernatural appears again. Therefore one can say that the dark mother powers have come back, though in an uncanny, ghostlike form.

  The ass is now sold to a poor gardener. This gardener gives a night’s shelter to an honest and rich man of the next village, who, to reward him, takes him later to his house, where the gardener is served a wonderful meal. While he is eating, a hen produces a chicken instead of laying an egg, the earth under the table opens and spews out blood, and in the wine cellar the wine is boiling in the casks. Then a weasel is seen pulling a dead serpent into the house, and a live frog jumps out of the mouth of a sheepdog, and immediately afterward a ram kills the dog. While everyone is terrified at these happenings, a message arrives to say that the rich man’s three sons are all dead. The good man is so upset by these terrible tidings that he cuts his own throat. So the gardener returns with the ass to his house. On his way he is attacked by a soldier who demands his ass. The gardener tries to dissuade him, but when the soldier will not listen, the gardener knocks him down, leaves him seemingly dead, and runs away. He asks a friend in the next village to hide him from the police, who are pursuing him for murder. The friend hides him in an upper story of the house, but inadvertently the ass puts his head out of the window and one of the soldiers sees his shadow. Both ass and gardener are discovered, and the latter is imprisoned.

  The important thing in this story is that Lucius cooperates unconsciously with evil and helps to destroy his master, who is a good person. This he does by “showing his shadow.” This is meaningful if one recollects the fact that the book was written by a Neoplatonist philosopher. The Neoplatonists believed in the supremacy of good, and that evil was only a kind of ignorance and misunderstanding. Upheld by this sort of illegitimate optimism, Plato tried to meddle with politics in Sicily and, as is known, suffered shipwreck; he was even sold as a slave. Toward the end of his life Plato had therefore to correct his too-optimistic views and work over his theories, for his bitter experiences had shown him that evil did exist and that the real world did not match his ideal picture. This theme, too, is represented in our novel, and it shows how reality appears to a Neoplatonic philosopher. Hitherto the stories have been concerned with the problem of relationship, but from now on come forth the problem of good and evil and a clear tendency to pessimis
m. The evil forces predominate, and the ass is even cooperating with them involuntarily. In our culture, too, there still exists this problem. Many Christians have too optimistic an idea of evil. The more we are one-sidedly idealistic and wish to do good and the right thing, the more we involuntarily cooperate on the side of evil. On the contrary, if one takes trouble to take into account the dark side as well, one can better avoid evil suddenly forcing itself into the foreground in too strong a way. To do good may still be one’s aim, but one becomes more modest, for one knows that if one is too good, one constellates the compensatory destructive side. It is more realistic not to do good in an unreal way, thereby with one’s left hand increasing the weight of evil without noticing it, and afterward justifying it by saying that one did not know.

  This problem is especially acute for those who want to become analysts. Again and again analysts with the best intentions are too good to the analysands, and have bad effects without noticing them. They do not realize that they can harm an analysand, who is telephoning in despair, through too much sympathy. If one gives too much, either in feeling or in cooperation, one makes the analysand childishly dependent, even if it may not be the intention. That is only one example of how the best intentions can lead to wrongdoing if one is not skeptical enough about oneself and is not conscious of one’s own shadow. If one stresses the right, the left appears. Christian morality is derived to a great extent from Neoplatonism and the Stoics, and has the false idealistic tendency or coloring which is unhealthy and which builds up involuntary destructiveness.

  “Good intentions” can therefore be very dubious and can even become extremely dangerous. But what to do? What can guide one? Only dreams can show us what is happening and what our motivation really looks like. The balance and healthiness of the analyst are therefore of much greater importance than his dubious good intentions. After the problem of evil there arises at the end of our novel also the problem of psychic healthiness. From the tenth chapter on, the problem of our book becomes a medical one, having to do with illness and medicine.

  The next story is that of a stepmother who wrongly accuses her stepson of incest. (Here we may remember that Apuleius was a lawyer.) Briefly, the story runs as follows. The ass is taken over by the soldier whom the gardener had beaten up. They come to a little town where the ass hears the story of a young man and his stepmother. She is in love with her stepson and so tormented by her feelings that she sends for him to come to her room. The young man acts warily, saying that they should wait for a convenient time when his father is away. The woman persuades her husband to go on a journey and then bothers the young man, who always makes excuses, until she realizes that he does not care about her, whereupon her love turns into hate, and she and a servant plan to kill him. The servant buys poison, but by mischance her son, and not her stepson, drinks it and falls down dead. The woman sends for her husband and tells him that her son has been poisoned by his stepbrother, and the father sees he is going to lose both sons. As soon as her son’s funeral is over, the father denounces his son, saying that he killed his stepbrother and threatened his stepmother, which is what the woman had said. The senators and counselors are called together; the accuser and “offender” are produced and commanded to have their advocates plead their causes. The servant is also called and falsely accuses the woman’s stepson. So the young man is sentenced to be sewn in a skin with a dog, a cock, a snake, and an ape, according to the law.

  In this moment a physician comes forward and states that the servant had offered him a hundred crowns for some poison. He shows the hundred crowns and at the same time he states that he became suspicious and had not given poison but a drink of mandragora, which puts one to sleep only temporarily. Therefore the woman’s son would be found not to be dead. The stone of the sepulcher is removed and the son is found alive. Sentence is then pronounced: the woman is exiled and the slave hanged.

  Everybody at the trial was first in favor of condemning the stepson. If the old physician had not appeared, the whole thing would have gone wrong. Today, too, the problem of good and evil has become so subtle and difficult that it goes far beyond the categories of good and evil in jurisprudence. In many cases it has become a question of psychic health or disease. This is experienced again and again, for the person with the best intentions, if neurotic, will have a destructive effect. So the problem of good and evil is linked with psychic health, which is often more important than following the letter of the law.

  Again, we have a similarity with Roman civilization, inasmuch as at that time people began to think that civilization was a question of paragraphs of the law. But the psychological health of the individual matters much more. Therefore, with Apuleius, it is a medical doctor who settles the problem and not the lawyers, who would have given the wrong verdict. We, too, suffer from the fact that many of our leading politicians are neurotic; here we see how burning the problem still is. In primitive tribes, if there is a case of theft, they do not call in a lawyer, but the medicine man, who has to right the situation and must be the judge of good and evil. In our culture the field of law and health is split too much. I believe that only decentralization to a certain extent can help, for in a smaller group everyone knows if the village mayor is “neurotic.” His wife will talk about him, and so on. In village communities everyone still knows everyone and has a better feeling about whether the other is psychologically healthy or neurotic.

  Merkelbach has convincingly interpreted this story by relating it to the mysteries of Osiris.4 In his view, the two brothers represent Osiris and Seth: the truth and the lie. The resurrection of the innocent stepson recalls the resurrection of Osiris. The wise doctor is an image alluding to Thoth-Hermes. According to Plutarch, Thoth is the cosmic Logos and the wise doctor.5 In these inconspicuous images, there is already being prepared the revelation of great symbols of the initiation mystery at the end of the book. For nearly the first time, the positive element, truth, carries the victory over the forces of evil. Imperceptibly, something shifts in the psychic process, leading to a return of positive elements.

  Then Lucius is again sold on the marketplace. This time he is lucky, for his new masters are a cook and a baker. The two are in the service of a rich man, and bring home with them all kinds of meats, sweets, and pastries. The ass, Lucius, discovers this food and steals from it, and the two wonder how things disappear. They finally suspect Lucius and, watching what he does, catch him in the act. They call their master to see this strange ass who eats human food. He is thereafter made to sit at table with a napkin around his neck. As an ass he has to be careful not to betray that he is really human, and so pretends to learn slowly how to eat like a human being. The people are delighted with his intelligence and teach him also how to dance and answer questions.

  The owner of the two slaves has the interesting name of Thiasus, which is the name of the orgiastic reunions in the Dionysian mysteries. Dionysos was at this time completely identified with Osiris. So the work of rehumanizing the ass relates to the Dionysian mysteries. This is meaningful. If one looks upon orgiastic cults from a superficial angle, then their intention seems to be to bestialize man through ecstasy. But, looked at in another way, they served to humanize the animal in man. Apuleius here alludes to their secret meaning. The mysteries did not serve to release the beast, but to bring that side of man into an acceptable form in which it could be integrated. Thiasus therefore personifies something divine, which helps the ass to come back toward a human level.

  Finally, a rich matron falls in love with the intelligent ass and wants to sleep with him. And the rather shocking story of how she sleeps with the ass is told. If one understands this symbolically, it shows that the anima attempts to rehumanize Lucius, who has fallen down to a level below the human. Though it is an anima figure which tries to heal him, this effort at redemption is not wholly successful because it is on the level of sexual pleasure. But there are signs that the situation is improving: the masters of the ass are less cruel, and a human being even
“loves” him. So the process of a rehumanization starts from all sides. The enantiodromia, the turning over to the opposite, has set in.6

  In a personal analysis this is a dangerous moment. When the first symptoms of a positive change appear, there is the greatest danger that the analysand will commit suicide. This is rarely the case when the analysand is undergoing his worst times, but when he is at the point where there is the first indication of an enantiodromia, then generally one must reckon with a last outburst of destructiveness. At the moment when the devil and the destructive forces are beginning to lose the game, one must expect them to make a last attack. The same thing happens in exorcism: the devils do something awful at the last moment. They explode the lamps in the church, or go off leaving a dreadful stench of sulphur behind. The devils never go quietly, but give a last display of their destructive power. This is a psychological truth. Therefore, one must be very aware of that dangerous moment when an improvement first begins to set in.

  10

  Lucius Returns to Himself

  After a slow deterioration, the last story leads to a negative climax: in a circus Lucius is supposed to have a union in public with an inferior, criminal woman. She has poisoned a number of people and is the worst creature in the whole novel. Lucius is utterly repulsed by the idea of having intercourse in public with such a woman. Here, for the first time, he definitely refuses to be caught by the entanglements of the negative feminine. He stands up for himself and insists upon his own feeling attitude. In a moment of general confusion he escapes from the circus through the streets of the town. He goes along to the seashore to Cenchris, a famous harbor town, and then, to avoid the crowds of people, he goes to “a secret place of the seacoast,” where, exhausted, he lays down and falls into a sound sleep.