Osiris is the divine son, husband, and brother of Isis, hence this new initiation means that Lucius has now become the divine husband and son of the great mother goddess. Previously he was negatively possessed by the puer aeternus god, but now the development has reached its goal so that he realizes consciously that he is the god himself, the eternal son of the Great Mother. The divine aspect of the individual is realized here in its symbolic form. Lucius becomes conscious of his greater divine inner being.30 This is what Jung calls the realization of the Self The symbolism in the cult of Isis means a realization of the anima, but now follows the realization of the Self, of his own divine inner nature. The value of the experience, through which he has a positive relation to the goddess, can now be seen in his life. After this last initiation, Lucius realizes himself as being a god and also a servant of the divine principle; he is both, master and servant at once.
It has been mentioned already that there is an analogy in Christianity to the myth of Osiris in the cycle of the legends of the Holy Grail.31 After his death on the cross, Christ was buried in a tomb covered with a stone. When the women came to anoint the corpse with unguents, an angel told them that Christ was no longer there but had resurrected. According to a legend of the second or third century, Joseph of Arimathea had a vision of the resurrected Christ, who gave him a jar filled with his blood, and said that he had chosen him, Joseph, to carry on the secret tradition and the cult of his grave. Here again, as in the Osiris cult, the symbol of the dead god is a vessel, in which his blood, that is to say, his life substance, is contained. Later the legend was altered, and one assumed that the jar was lost, crossed the sea, and landed in a fig tree in Marseilles, where it was discovered and was brought to the cloister of Fécamp. That was how the Holy Grail came to France.
Here again we have an analogy to the Osiris myth, in the vessel containing the god-essence. It is the archetypal motif of the incarnated god, who, after a short human life, is killed and then continues to live in the form of his essential soul substance preserved as a relic in a jar, out of which his spirit emanates invisibly. According to the legend, sometimes a voice is heard from the holy vessel and helps the knights in their task. Why, one might ask, was there need for such a relic in order to fulfill the exigencies of the Christian faith? If we consider the history of religions more generally, we see that in many religions there are phases in which the religious symbols, originally experienced individually, have passed over onto institutions and collectively recognized rituals and litanies. Christ himself was first experienced as the divine God-man by the small circle of his apostles. Saint Paul experienced him in his vision.32 The fact that Christianity spread so quickly was due to a great extent to the dreams and visions of the individuals. The description of the lives of monks, martyrs, and saints report, for example, a figure clothed in light, wearing a crown of roses on his head, or of an oversized shepherd. Such dreams often do not specify that they concern Christ, but every masculine divine figure was immediately interpreted as such, which then for men became the carrier of all visions of the Self, or, for the women, the positive animus.33
In this way Christ was still a living archetype, with whom many individuals were connected through a personal inner experience. Christ for them was a divine being that could be experienced, someone who lived amongst them, circulated at the heart of the community, and had influence on their lives. Later, the living symbol faded, it lost its emotional quality and numinosity, which means more and more people knew only from what their grandmothers taught them that there was such a god, but they themselves had no longer a feeling of relationship to him. They still prayed in the old form, because they had been taught to do so, but they could not speak of a personal religious experience. That is why Nietzsche, in a crucial moment of his life, said that “God is dead.” However, he is not dead, only his life has become invisible, returned to the womb from which he was born, in his unconscious archetypal original form; in this state he is the god contained in the jar.
One can thus say that the round vessel symbolizes the secret of the human psyche, containing the living god substance, in other words, an imperishable divine reality which is eternal. Although man sometimes worships God and sometimes does not believe in him, yet there subsists always in the psyche an eternal essence of God which cannot die. The figure of Christ is today in danger of becoming a dead god, but as far as he personifies an archetype his figure is eternal. He embodies the experience of an archetypal reality and in this sense he is immortal. He survives his own death through a return into the womb of the unconscious human psyche, from which he came. The vessel and the god substance therein are the symbol of a psychological attitude and experience, in which everything religious is experienced within the individual, and nothing is seen any more in outer forms. Nothing is projected any longer in pictures and rituals, or in an institution. It has again become the personal, numinous experience of the individual human being. That is the moment when the dead god is returned to the vessel, out of which he comes again as that which he has always been: an eternal psychic reality. That is why the Egyptian symbol of the jar with the essence of the god has survived even in late Christianity. When certain doubts arose about the figure of Christ, suddenly all those legends came to life which circled around the idea of the Holy Grail, from which a new orientation could take place. The Church saw in the Grail material a certain danger, because of the individual element in it. Therefore, for a time it fought these ideas and called them heretical. But the ideas continued to live in alchemy and in the secret societies of the fedeli d’amore, a group to which Petrarch and probably also Dante belonged. But how far, in that time, was it understood that the Grail vessel symbolized the unconscious psyche of the individual or the individual as a vessel of the divinity? How far did one understand that every individual is really the vessel that contains the god? We cannot judge this. But at least the poets had some notion about this, as one can see from some of their writings.
The secret paths of the world of the courtly love, which carried further the psychic experience of the antique mysteries, disappeared almost completely in the seventeenth century. They were superseded by the Enlightenment, the rationalism and scientific and technical development with which we live today. But since archetypal values cannot die, in our day they reappear everywhere in the proliferation of sects, in drugs, in an infatuation for the esoteric in all its thinkable forms.
At the same time these irrational values, which nowadays have disappeared from collective consciousness, live again in an unexpected form in Jungian psychology. By being willing to descend into himself and to confront himself with the unconscious forces (“to worship the lower and upper gods”), Jung has shown us a way of dealing with these forces. It takes a strong consciousness, which is flexible and modest enough, to be able to accept what the unconscious—the gods—has to say to us, and to realize the will of the gods, of the god who manifests himself in us, and to put us into his service, without forgetting the individual limits of our human nature.
It is not for nothing that Jung inscribed over the door of his home in Küsnacht the words of the ancient oracle: Vocatus atque non vocatus deus aderit—ȍCalled or not called, the God will be there.” Even if we are unconscious of it, the god survives his death in the vessel of our soul, as in the jar of Osiris, or of the Grail.34 It is up to us to pay attention and to allow the development of that which within us seeks to fulfill itself.
For the people of antiquity it was easier to find this way than it is for us today, because—as we see in the example of our novel—mankind still had the mystery cults, which imparted to him the experience of the unconscious and of the Self. We no longer have these images and are therefore less protected in our confrontation with the forces of the unconscious.
I hope that these attempts at a psychological interpretation, which are often only tentative suggestions, have conveyed to the reader the following: that this novel of Apuleius is a highly important document humain which one c
an even put next to Goethe’s Faust. It leads into the deepest problems of Western man and points symbolically to developments which today we still have not realized in consciousness.
NOTES
Introduction
1. Apuleius, The Golden Ass, translated by W. Adlington, revised by S. Gaselee. A bibliography of Apuleius has been compiled by C. C. Shlam in world, no. 64, pp. 285-309.
2. For bibliography and further details, see Rudolf Helm, “Das Märchen von Amor und Psyche,” pp. 188ff. See also R. Reitzenstein, “Das Märchen von Amor und Psyche bei Apuleius,” pp. 88ff.
3. For the literary form, see Bruno Lacagnini, II significato ed il valore del Romanzo di Apuleio, p. 19.
4. We owe this term to Pierre Janet, who referred to a diminished state of conscious attention which allows unconscious contents to manifest themselves.
5. John Gwyn Griffiths offers the same theory and has compiled as complete a bibliography as this author knows, in Apuleius of Madaura: The Isis Book.
6. Karl Kerényi, Die griechisch-orientalische Romanliteratur in religionsgeschichtlicher Beleuchtung.
7. Reinhold Merkelbach, Roman und Mysterium in der Antike.
8. See chapter 9 of the present work.
9. Cf. Griffiths, Apuleius of Madaura, pp. 13f.
10. Cf. Georg Henrici, “Zur Geschichte der Psyche” (On the History of the Psyche), pp. 390–417.
11. Cf. the Acts of the Apostles, 9:1–19, and Saint Augustine, Confessions.
12. The first relationship between the child and its mother influences its psychic structure and its relationship with the world. On the subject of the positive and the negative mother complex, see C. G. Jung, “Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype,” pp. 75–110.
13. Cf. C. G. Jung, “Answer to Job.”
Chapter 1. The Life and Times of Apuleius
1. Cf. Griffiths, Apuleius of Madaura, p. 10.
2. See Serge Lancel, “Curiosités et préoccupations spirituelles chez Apulée,” pp. 25ff. For further details cf. Griffiths, Apuleius of Madaura, pp. 5, 408ff.; his attitude was probably rather anti-Christian.
3. Apuleius, L’Apologie. Cf. the detailed adaptation by A. Abt, Die Apologie des Apuleius von Madaura und die antike Zauberei (The Apology of Apuleius of Madaura and Antique Witchcraft).
4. Cf. Griffiths, Apuleius of Madaura, p. 10.
5. Cf. Griffiths, Apuleius of Madaura, p. 61.
6. Plinius Minor, Epistulae, p. 316f.
7. We also have fragments of other works by Apuleius and excerpts from his most famous lectures, which, however, are not very relevant for the present study. Cf. Florides and Opuscules et Fragments Philosophiques.
8. Cf. Frank Regen, Apuleius Philosophicus Platonicus. The author considers all the material without, however, taking Apuleius seriously enough.
9. Jane C. Nitzsche, The Genius Figure in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, chapter 1.
Chapter 2. The Two Companions and the Tale of Aristomenes
1. The question of whether or not Apuleius called himself Lucius, as tradition has it, is discussed by modem critics.
2. By the term shadow, Jung means the unconscious, repressed, and less differentiated aspects of the personality. See his Aion, para. 13ff.
3. The “Self,” in Jungian terminology, is the center of the psychic totality of the personality; its realization is the goal of the individuation process. It is superordinate to the ego and different from it. Cf. Jung, “The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious,” paras. 404ff.; and Psychology and Alchemy, paras. 126ff.
4. Marie-Louise von Franz, Puer Aeternus.
5. Karl Wyss, “Die Milch im Kultus der Griechen und Römer,” chap.7 and 8.
6. Griffiths, Apuleius of Madaura, p. 154.
7. Apuleius, The Golden Ass, book I, p. 15.
8. Cf. Georg Luck, Hexen und Zauberei in der römischen Dichtung.
9. The anima is the “personification of the feminine nature of a man’s unconscious” (C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 279). See also Jung, Psychological Types, under “soul image”; and Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, paras. 111ff. The anima personifies a man’s Eros, his unconscious moods, and his irrational feelings and fantasies.
10. Cf. Charles Seltmann, The Olympians and Their Guests.
Chapter 3. Lucius Meets Byrrhena, Photis, and Goatskins
1. Apuleius, The Golden Ass, book II, p. 49.
2. See Griffiths, Apuleius of Madaura, pp. 29f. Riefsthal and Scobie have pointed out the relationship between the scene in this bas-relief and the Isis theme without, however, grasping its most profound implications.
3. Apuleius, The Golden Ass, book II, xxv-xxvi, p. 87.
4. Cf. 1 Samuel 28:7–10.
5. Cf. Theodor Hopfner, Griechisch-ägyptischer Offenbarungszauber.
6. K. Preisendanz, Papyri Graecae Magicae.
7. Cf. Matti Hako, “Das Wiesel in der europäischen Volksüberlieferung,” in particular pp. 33ff.
8. These meanings are more than uncertain. Cf. Griffiths, Apuleius of Madaura, p. 351.
9. Cf. Apuleius, The Golden Ass, book III, xviii, p. 127.
10. The transpersonal nucleus of the personality.
Chapter 4. The Ass
1. See Hermann Diels, Doxographi Graeci, fragment 15.
2. Cf. Hopfner, Griechisch-ägyptischer Offenbarungszauber, vol. 1, pp. 235ff.
3. As mentioned before, by shadow Jung means the inferior aspect of the ego, which is mostly unconscious.
4. Pp. 63ff.
5. Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation.
6. Cf. Merkelbach, Roman und Mysterium, passim. Whereas certain commentators have not discerned the profound relationship between this tale and the story of Lucius taken together, others, though less numerous, have recognized its link with the intitiation mysteries that occur at the end of the novel. The attempt has always been made to interpret the book not only as an entertaining novel, but in part as mirroring a mystery, but Merkelbach only alludes to the story of Amor and Psyche, and to the shrewd doctor who gave evidence in the case of the young wife, who due to her unrequited love for her son-in-law accused the latter of poisoning his brother. He gives an interpretation by linking it with the mystery cult, and mystery tradition of antiquity, but does not analyze the whole novel throughout. He disregards the rest of the story as being profane, or as not belonging. I agree with practically everything he says along those lines, but, as far as I know the literature, I think that what has not ever been understood is that one cannot pick out a few stories and ascribe a deeper meaning only to them. The whole story is consistent. Naturally, not knowing the psychology of the unconscious, Merkelbach tends to describe the novel as if Apuleius had consciously woven in all those meanings, something which I definitely doubt. I think Apuleius thought a lot about it, and wove quite a lot into it consciously, but that quite a lot more has also flowed out of his pen without his quite realizing how well it fitted, which means that, probably, like every genuine piece of art, it arose out of a collaboration of both aspects of his personality. Merkelbach’s book, however, I can warmly recommend.
7. C. G. Jung, “The Psychology of the Transference,” paras. 437f.
8. Jean-Valentin Andreae, Les Noces chymiques de Christian Rosencreutz.
9. Para. 134.
Chapter 5. Amor and Psyche I
1. Erich Neumann, Amor and Psyche. Jung was of the opinion that the tale deals to a large extent with anima psychology, but that Neumann’s attempt to interpret it from the feminine aspect could be accepted just as well since femininity in a man is not completely different from the femininity of a woman.
2. Two years after the first edition of this present work, James Hillman published an essay in The Myth of Analysis in which, basing his interpretation on Neumann’s study, he develops some interesting ideas about the myth of Eros and Psyche and its importance for our epoch. His point of view differs, however, from mine, in that he interprets the tale apart from the
rest of the novel. We also have a psychoanalytic interpretation, which ignores the religious element but otherwise is thorough, in F. E. Hoevels, Märchen und Magie in den Metamorphosen des Apuleius von Madaura (Fairy Tales and Magic in the Metamorphoses of Apuleius of Madura).
3. Cf. G. Binder and R. Merkelbach, “Amor und Psyche,” which contains a complete collection of works concerning this type of story.
4. R. Reitzenstein, “Das Marchen von Amor und Psyche bei Apuleius.”
5. Reitzenstein, ibid.
6. Plato, Symposium, 202c and d.
7. Translated by K. Preisendanz, Papyri Grecae Magicae, “Le glaive de Dardanos” and “Prière à Eros,” p. 129.
8. Cf. Pierre Solié, Médicines initiatiques. See also C. A. Meier, Ancient Incubation and Modern Psychotherapy.
9. Concerning the psychological aspect of the Kore figure, see Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, paras. 306ff.
10. For details, see Jan Bergmann, “Ich bin Isis,” p. 33.
11. Cf. Jung, Aion, paras. 20ff.
12. Epistle to the Philippians 11:7.
13. Cf. also Ludwig Friedländer, “Das Märchen von Amor und Psyche,” pp. 16ff.
14. A collection of almost all of the popular versions of this story has been assembled by J. Svahn in The Tale of Cupid and Psyche.
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