The Golden Ass of Apuleius

by Marie-Louise von Franz

  The late Judea-Christian idea that we have the only true religion, and that all other religions are dark superstitious nonsense, did not exist in antiquity. The Romans conquering another country would ask the name of the main father god and mother goddess, and would say that these corresponded to their Jupiter, or Diana, or Ceres. It was discovered that everywhere there were the same types of gods, the father power and the fertility mother power, so they gave them mixed names or the name of their own god. Thus there grew up a kind of tolerant attitude, with the result that in every country there was a wonderful mixture of gods, and prayers started: “O thou mother goddess whom the Egyptians call Isis and whom the Greeks call Demeter. . . .”In other words, the same divine power was worshipped under different names in different countries. In this sense Artemis indeed represents the whole mother world.

  The mother goddess in our artistic bas-relief takes a bath, and a mortal man, Actaeon, who with his sexual curiosity wants to see her bathe naked, is torn to pieces by his own dogs—the dark powers of the underworld. The multitude of dogs would stand for the dissociating aspect of animal passion. This motif is really a very deep one, for if a man transcends his human level—either goes above it into the realm of the gods or goes below it into the realm of the animals—it is the same thing. By becoming a stag he becomes what he wanted to be; he becomes divine and the object of interest to Artemis, for the stag is what she hunts. He becomes a divinity, and then he suffers the fate of the youthful lover-god of the great mother goddess, that is, he is dismembered. So we can say that the picture which Lucius meets at the entrance of the house of Byrrhena anticipates his whole problem: it says to him, “You are entering the realm of the great goddess and the realm of animal life; you will have to pay in the classical form.”

  Again something is lacking, for Lucius only enjoys this beautiful piece of art aesthetically and does not read the message. Also, it is only a sculpture, a bas-relief, not a living representation. If, in a modern dream, someone dreams of a picture or of a sculpture, this means that what is represented by it is not alive for them. They see it intellectually or aesthetically, but are not touched by it. So we can say that Lucius here sees what is going to happen and what a tremendous problem he is breaking into, but it is not yet alive for him. He just thinks it is a very elegant representation. That is typical for the man who has a mother complex, which above all things cuts a man off from immediate touch with reality. One could also describe the circumstances with an ugly analogy: such men walk about in a transparent plastic sack and only look out of it. There is no immediate friction with reality, no real touch with life, and that is the secret witchcraft power with which the mother complex affects a man. He is always somewhere cut off. Aestheticism and intellectualism are two well-known ways of having this plastic insulating layer between oneself and reality, preventing immediate experience and, through that, immediate suffering and becoming conscious. If, as an analyst, you have to cut this bag open and take him out of that artificial uterus, he generally wails in despair, because then begins his meeting with hot and cold reality, and all sorts of other sufferings from which he has hitherto been nicely protected.

  Lucius is still only looking at things without getting the immediate impact of what is happening. He also does not, for instance, ask himself why he stumbles in his mother’s sister’s house on such a representation of a man whose interest in the great mother goddess gets him torn to pieces. He thinks of it as a beautiful piece of art which he describes in a literary manner. Aunt Byrrhena is obviously a counterpole to Pamphile and Milo, a real lady. She warns him immediately that he should not live in Milo’s rather dubious house, but should stay with her. But she, too, is a mother figure. She, too, wishes to grab and imprison him in her house; so it is one aspect of the mother complex against the other. Byrrhena is respectable, educated, correct, so she is seemingly a positive mother, but with the negative implication that she would prevent Lucius from getting into mischief, and through that also into life. If Lucius had left Pamphile and had stayed with Byrrhena, the whole novel would not have happened! Hence the advice of Byrrhena is not right, though she looks like the wise woman who warns him not to fall into the trap. Thank God, she did not win out. It is also typical that she had only a stone bas-relief in her house, which means that though she has the right wisdom, it is not alive. So Lucius is really between the devil and the deep blue sea: bourgeois wisdom recommends him not to step into all sorts of dubious dirty affairs, but then he would never come out of the plastic sack, would be respectable but not alive. Fortunately Lucius does not follow this advice and steps into Milo’s house, where he meets Photis in the kitchen preparing polenta. A relationship develops between the two. Photis conquers Lucius or Lucius, Photis. The fact that there is no warm feeling in it becomes obvious only later.

  The next inserted tale is told by Milo about Diophanes, a fortune-teller who is advising a merchant about a journey the merchant intends to take, when suddenly Diophanes’ brother appears and relates to Diophanes, within earshot of the bystanders, the considerable misfortune he has suffered on his latest journey, nearly losing his life. The people laugh, the merchant takes back his money, and Diophanes is shown up to be a cheat.

  Naturally, people are wrong in saying that if a soothsayer cannot foresee for himself and protect his family and himself from misfortune, he is of no use. We know that the capacity for telepathy does not function at will, and therefore even someone who has such gifts cannot always save himself from falling into traps. It is the great crux in the investigation of these things.

  Something which happened here in Zurich very much impressed me. There was for a long time at the theater a man named Sabrenno who cheated sometimes. Once some people I know put him on the spot and asked him why he did card tricks and cheated in all sorts of ways, and he gave a very meaningful explanation. He said that actually, he never knew, when he went to give a performance in the evening, whether or not he would be in the mood to function. Sometimes his capacities were available and he could do all the guesswork through the unconscious, and at other times he could not, and therefore he had prepared and learned a lot of card tricks and cheating to fill up the evening. This must be so, because if ever a soothsayer or magician one day turned up on the stage and said, “I am very sorry, ladies and gentlemen, but I am badly disposed this evening; please ask for your money back,” he would be finished. A man who wants to make a living in this way has to have, on the side, some means of cheating. But then investigators can catch him out, and the man is finished. The same argument applies here. If, however, we try to put it into the context of the story, then we see that a man who assumes that he knows the future and how things are going to be just falls into it, and that is Lucius again. He assumes he is not going to be involved in studying witchcraft, but has already one foot in it. Just where he would need his scientific accuracy and interest in watching out, it fails him, and that is the terrible thing. One cannot observe parapsychological phenomena with a cool, detached, and concentrated attitude, because then nothing happens. Jung, for instance, when he went to Africa, made an oath that whatever curious things might happen he would write down in his little diary and give an absolutely accurate report. Sometimes some typically African things did occur, and each time when he looked in his diary, he had not written about them! Why? He had gotten emotionally involved, stared and watched and gone through the events, and in the end he had naturally forgotten to write anything down. Synchronistic phenomena and parapsychological phenomena are borderline phenomena. In order that they may appear, the intensity of our ego consciousness must be turned down, for they use that energy to appear. One cannot have the penny and the cake; one cannot with one’s normal, rational, observing scientist’s ego go through such experiences. Parapsychology is still up against such a crux, but here it is different. Lucius is sliding off into the abaissement du niveau mental without noticing it. The Diophanes story shows that the man who is supposed to know is the one who walks into the tra
p.

  At Byrrhena’s dinner party people again tell stories. A guest called Thelyphron tells the next inserted story (thelys = “feminine,” phronein = “to think, meditate”). The name would imply that this person has a feminine mental attitude or is someone who always thinks about women and the female, and the man bearing this revealing name tells the following story. He says that when he was a young man, after he had traveled all over Thessaly, he came in an evil hour to the city of Larissa and was in great need of money. There was so much witchcraft at that time that when anyone died, a guardian had to watch the corpse to protect it from the witches, who would sneak in and steal parts of the body for use in their charms. These would begin: Take the nails of a newly killed man—or the ears, or the nose, or whatever—and mix them with the blood, to make such-and-such a spell. Witches had, of course, to provide themselves with these ingredients, and corpses were taken from freshly dug graves in cemeteries. So Thelyphron takes on the job of staying up at night with a corpse to protect it from the witches. He is told that he must be careful because witches can transform themselves into animals or birds, and sometimes even into flies. He is taken to a house to guard the corpse of a dead man, and the widow shows him the corpse, which is complete in all its parts, and says that if it is the same the next morning he will get his money, but if not he will be punished by being mutilated in the same way as the corpse. The young man rubs his eyes and sings to keep himself from falling asleep, but about midnight a weasel creeps into the chamber and frightens him so much that he “marveled greatly at the audacity of so little a beast.” But he tells it to go and it runs off, but when it had gone he “fell on the ground so fast in the deepest depth of sleep that Apollo himself could not well discern whether of us two was the dead corpse.” In the morning he wakes up and, “being greatly afraid, ran unto the dead body with the lamp in my hand, and I uncovered his face and viewed him closely round about.” The matron and the witnesses come in and find the body “in no part diminished.”3

  So he gets his money, but he makes some tactless remark and gets chased out of the house. At the funeral an old man suddenly comes out of the crowd, weeping and lamenting, and says that the man who is to be buried has been poisoned by his wife. There is a great uproar and the crowd says that the woman should be burnt, but she insists that she is innocent. In order to find out the truth, the old man produces Zatchlas, an Egyptian, a great magician and necromancer who has the power to revive dead bodies.

  In antiquity this was supposed to be possible—the witch of Endor4 was also capable of bringing the spirits of the dead up from the underworld and calling up the ghosts from the underworld and making them reveal the truth. Tibetan lamas, as Alexandra David-Néel describes, are also said to be able to do this. A lama who came too late to see his friend alive lies upon the corpse and warms it with his own breath. The corpse comes to life and the two dance together for a time and so have their last contact. Such things are still practiced in Africa. And here this Egyptian turns up and succeeds in bringing the corpse back to life, and the man says, yes, that his wife did poison him, and as proof of the truth of what he says, he affirms that while acting as guardian over the corpse, Thelyphron’s nose and ears had been cut off by the witch, who had mistaken him for the corpse, and she had replaced these parts with wax. Thelyphron puts his hands to his nose and ears and they drop off. He realizes that he had been mutilated and had never noticed it.

  Here we have to go into antique magic. Most African, Cuban, or South American voodoo magic is still valid all over the world. To bewitch somebody you need a part of his or her person, the fingernails or the hair, for instance. Thus one gets the most powerful “medicine” in the African sense of the word. For the primitive mentality, a part of a corpse is a kind of gruesome, numinous object which has a tremendously impure and, at the same time, divine power. Anything which you mix with fluid coming from a corpse or parts of a corpse is therefore a potent medicine.5 There is a very good publication, the Papyri Graecae Magicae, edited by K. Preisendanz, in which there are a number of such recipes. For instance, a recipe for making any woman fall passionately in love with a man says: take two leaves of laurel, and a rose cut in moonlight, and the little finger of a newly buried boy, and mix it in such and such a manner, and say this and that, and you will see that that night the woman will stand burning with desire at the door of your house. Or, make the potion and when she is walking in the street, smear it on her back, and the next evening she will wail like a cat in love at the door or window of your house. There is an infinite number of such recipes, concerning such things as how to be lucky in gambling or how to get rid of an enemy.6

  I think the story is relatively transparent: Thelyphron is an aspect of Lucius himself who wants to investigate sorcery, and directly, but unconsciously, steps right into the problem. Thelyphron has women on the brain and is, so to speak, the shadow of Lucius. He is really involved, in contrast to Lucius who only wants to look on with intellectual curiosity, but they both fall victim to the witch’s trick.

  While Lucius still continues with intellectual investigations, his shadow, the more unconscious part of his personality, is already overpowered by the magic aspect of the feminine principle. Thus, the adventure of Thelyphron plays the role of a dream, which warns the hero what can also happen to him if he is not cautious enough.

  One of the most horrible effects of a negative mother complex is that it mutilates the man’s instinct to find the right woman. A man whose mother was cold or neurotic or unsatisfactory has a great longing for warmth and love, and as the devil has arranged it, he has the wrong “nose” and will always choose the girl who is like the mother and either cold or witchlike. The nose is the organ for “flair,” for orientation. It is the animal’s most important organ. In the development of the brain, man’s ability for orientation by the nose has diminished. It has also been said that shortsightedness is on the increase, that sight as well as the sense of smell is decreasing. Man is the animal with the smallest capacity for smell. In the whole animal world the nose is the organ for orientation and gives much needed information. The dog has the unattractive habit of smelling excrement, but by it he gains a lot of useful information, for if he follows the traces of a dog who has eaten well, he will find food, which is vitally important. This old instinct survives in spite of the fact that it is no longer necessary. The dog who urinates on the lamppost continues the old pattern by which he indicated his own territory. Formerly such habits were very meaningful, but their reasons have become blurred by civilization.

  Animals in the zoo have also suffered disorientation of their instinctive habits, but the wild animal has its natural instincts. Jung has remarked that if a man gets syphilis there is something wrong with his instinct, for if he were in harmony with his animal nature he would “smell a rat”—his “dog nose” would tell him to keep away, but unfortunately most men have lost their “dog nose.” Where there is a negative mother complex there is something wrong with the mother. She is an animus-possessed woman or neurotic or frigid, and then her instinct is blurred, so the son too has no nose. He falls for the wrong woman; he does not get the irrational warnings from his animal side. The ears are similar. Of Someone who is very sensitive, we say that he “can hear the grass grow,” his hearing is very acute. The man with a positive instinct may be fascinated by a beautiful woman, but a harmless remark may show him that she has no heart, and he can drop her in time. Another man would not notice and would continue to fall for her and one day discover that she was an icicle. But the man with good instinct can hear things. He has the awareness of the other person’s being. One could say that the witchcraft of the negative mother complex robs the son of nose and ears whenever he touches the feminine world.

  The group is delighted with the story, and Byrrhena talks to Lucius about the coming festival of the god Risus (god of laughter), which is to be celebrated on the next day, and says that she wishes he could “find or devise” something himself that might be in honor
of so great a god. Lucius says that he would be glad if he could and then takes his leave. In the street his torch goes out, and in the darkness he has difficulty finding his way home. He sees “three men” of great stature “heaving and lifting at Milo’s gates,” trying to get in. Thinking that they are thieves, he draws his sword and slays them. He then knocks at the door, Photis lets him in, and he goes to bed dead drunk.

  This is the end of a passage, and we have to look at this inserted story even more closely. In what preceded we took Socrates as a part of Apuleius-Lucius, the Platonic philosopher who evades the anima problem and is overwhelmed in the unconscious by the dark mother goddess. Now the danger gets nearer. Thelyphron is a man who is exposed to the problem of women. Lucius, on the other hand, has only an intellectual curiosity about witchcraft and a sensual interest in Photis, while the problem of the anima is not yet a concern except in the intellectual realm. Thelyphron would therefore be a shadow figure who has been deeply damaged by the mother complex.

  The weasel, like mice, owls, the hare, and many other little animals, is a witch animal. It is cruel and catlike in behavior and represents the cold cunning of the witch.7 Obviously, one of the witches has turned into a weasel. She looks at him in a peculiar way so that he falls asleep, then she bites off his nose and ears. The weasel, because of its great cruelty on one side and amazing shrewd intelligence on the other, is in a way similar to the fox. It is an animal that represents this superhuman native shrewdness which is the shadow of the feminine principle of women as well as of the anima principle in men. The feminine has not a logos, a scientific mind, but in general the feminine in men, and in a woman by nature, has the kind of cunning which can sneak around and look round corners and get things indirectly. It is an aspect of what Jung called in women the so-called “natural mind,” a kind of absolutely instinctive wisdom which can also be merciless and inhuman. It could perhaps best be illustrated by the woman who took a cure in Carlsbad with her husband and, looking at the beautiful country and setting sun, exclaimed, “Oh, John, if one of us dies, I shall move to Carlsbad!” She didn’t think of what she was saying. That is the wisdom of the weasel! Generally women cover this up with sentimentality, but the anima has the same kind of natural shrewdness, which is a kind of thinking along nature lines and always concerned with death and inheritance. Some women know exactly when the man they are interested in is likely to be alone one evening, and then they remember that they ought to return the book that evening! Some are honest enough to know what is happening in the background, but some really are absolutely naive about it in consciousness. But their weasel shadow knows exactly that this would be the right evening to come and be very surprised, saying, “Isn’t your wife in?” That’s the weasel! The anima of man can do the same thing very well, only men are even more unaware of it.