The Golden Ass of Apuleius

by Marie-Louise von Franz

  Here already the cure would come if Lucius could reach the roses of the mother goddess, but he is beaten back by a slave, by the completely undifferentiated primitive man.

  At this very crucial moment robbers break into the stable. They have attacked Milo’s house, whose inhabitants ran away or were killed, and have stolen everything. Probably the rumor has spread that Milo is rich. So the robbers come, take everything they can find, and load the animals with the things they have stolen. Because of this incident Lucius does not succeed in eating the roses. He tries to call out the name of the Roman emperor but can only produce animal sounds and gets beaten. Later he is forced to pass by a rosebush, which he dare not eat, because if he were to be transformed into a man at that time he would be killed at once by the robbers. So he has to continue with his load. After this second frustration of his redemption there follows the long account of how Lucius, as an ass, suffers under the hands of the robbers and must wait to be transformed back into a human being.

  The thieves rob Lucius of human contact, and if you take that as an inner psychological dream, it would mean that they make it impossible for him to become human again. The robbers are the typical shadow of a mother-bound man. As Jung points out in Mysterium Coniunctionis, we have always to keep aware of the fact that the sexes are a contrast, which accounts for the “alchemical” attraction to each other. This is why the coniunctio, the union of these two opposites, is a symbol of the union of the greatest possible opposites. Therefore, if a woman can dominate her son, she generally opposes any symptoms of primitive masculinity, his robber qualities, so to speak, since she realizes that they will lead him away from her and be the basis of his independent masculine personality. She gives him a “decent education” so that he may not walk with dirty shoes in the drawing room and not spit or use coarse language, or eat like a pig at table, and so on. Every mother feels very justified in teaching her son such things, because otherwise he will not be adapted to society. She is naturally completely right, but there are two ways of getting about it. One way is to sympathize, as a real mother does, while thinking inwardly that, thank God, he is a real boy, and then trying reasonably to cut down the wildest shoots. Other mothers, however, instinctively hate that aspect of the son, scenting the germ of his independent personality, and they fight it. Theoretically it is because a good education requires that one should clean one’s fingernails before eating, but underneath, the so-called good education has the purpose of castrating her son by laming any kind of enterprising masculinity.

  The primitive masculinity of a man with a mother complex is generally damaged because the mother’s animus has cut into it, so that it becomes an autonomous shadow and creates what one could describe as the incredibly inhuman brutality and cruelty of the weakling. A young man with such a mother complex becomes a weakling, and because he is not really masculine, he is inhumanly brutal, coldly brutal in the unconscious. He never dares to stand up like a man for what he wants and is a bit of a conformist, or wishy-washy, a mama’s boy. And then from time to time, out pops this shadow quality.

  The robber motif occurs just as much in women’s as in men’s dreams, and, with a grain of salt, I would say that it is the same thing. A completely related feminine personality may also have such fits of sudden brutality, directed either against her male partners or against herself. This means that the woman falls into an animus mood where she blots herself out: I am nobody and nothing, everything is wrong, and so on—a self-annihilation through negative opinions and negative judgments. That is very invisible. You do not see it outside, except that such a woman may look a bit pale and stiff, and be a bit not there, but the robbers have broken into the inner house and blotted out anything human and alive within by brutal judgments of the commonest collective value. Think, for instance, of the tricoteuses in Paris, who sat knitting and watching with delight while the aristocracy were guillotined. Sitting knitting, and enjoying the beheading! That’s the robber! Women who go wild and begin to display this robber or murderer animus are the women like Anna Paulker, or Mrs. Benjamin, the rote Hilde. Thus the robber represents in all cases primitive masculine brutality, which can also be positive. He is a nonconformist, which can be a very good thing. It implies not being bound to convention and tradition which tells you that you should not do this or that. He knows what he wants and goes for it, which is positive masculinity. He has initiative and is enterprising. He does not just sit and hope that the food will fall into his mouth, as the mama’s boy always does. If the mama’s boy does not have what he wants, he begins to cry, and mankind, or the state, or somebody else, has to run and help. The robber is the opposite. He says, “I want that, and I am going to have it.” All that, if integrated, and controlled, and connected with the conscious personality, is masculinity at its best. It means to have a goal, to know what one wants and to go for it, instead of just sitting and hoping a parent will bring it on a silver platter. All that can be extremely positive. It all depends on the measure, and on how much it is integrated. It is not the robber, but his autonomy, that which pops in and out in sudden unrelated actions, which is wrong.

  These robbers, as the stories show, endure many difficulties without too much fuss, and it takes positive masculinity not to collapse at once when things get disagreeable. But again, it is all wrong because it is autonomous, and that is typical for this setup. Here, falling into the hands of the robbers means falling into an abaissement du niveau mental, being overwhelmed by autonomous shadow impulses. Looked at from the deeper mystical aspect, it is approaching the layer where the god Seth kills Osiris, for it means approaching the instinctual, split-off layers of the personality from which positive masculinity will at last be born. So one has always to look at such things as a paradox, which is why it is so important to be conscious of what is happening. That makes all the difference.

  We must think of robbers of that time slightly differently from what we would now associate with the word. The state police at that time were to a great extent inadequate to meet the people’s needs and wishes, and also most of the state consisted of conquered countries not voluntarily adherent to the Roman Empire. Thousands and thousands of people were made slaves who, in their former country, had held quite important social positions. In a state in which the whole network of police and secret police did not function as efficiently as nowadays, numbers of people escaped into the woods and joined the robbers. They would have perhaps included a Celtic chief who had been made a slave and had run away because he would not be beaten to death by some low, foul Roman, yet he was not able to return to his country. The robbers at that time, therefore, were not all just plain criminals, but groups joined by runaway slaves of all classes, or by people who did not agree with the policy of the Romans, or who had got into some difficulty with the law in some other way. These robbers would fall into the category of the romantic children’s book about the noble robber, the man who does not want to submit to Father State but wishes to live a free life in the mountains. There is still some of that spirit alive, for instance, in the Mediterranean smuggling trade in which there are quite decent robber-adventurers who consider it a kind of sport to outwit the police and the customs officials.

  Observed from the psychological point of view, this motif means that so-called shadow figures overwhelm Lucius.3 Later we will see even more clearly that their names represent all the different aspects of crude primitive virility or masculinity, something which Lucius, the mother’s boy, lacks to such an extent. His whole life and good family background have made him what he is, and his mother complex has cut him off from this aspect of masculinity. We know of Apuleius that at least during his youth he was homosexual. This would indicate that he was cut off from certain aspects of his own masculinity, which he was searching for in projection with his male friends. Lucius is now overrun by the autonomous aspect of this primitive virility, which takes possession of him against his will. The cold, brutal, primitive man is in general a compensating, typical, even an archetypal
shadow of the mother’s boy.

  The adventure has even a deeper meaning: these robbers are living with an old woman who drinks. They call her “Mother” from time to time, so it is obviously a man’s society with one drunken old housekeeper. This strange group of men around the one female figure reminds one of the Greek and pagan mother cults, and the mother cults of Asia Minor. With the Greeks the young men were called Kuretes or Kabiri. They guarded the divine child, Zeus, and protected him. They were not considered human beings but demons. As with the case of the satyri later, they formed a group which gathered round the Great Mother. They represented at the same time the ancestral ghosts, and people believed that they could evoke madness, but also heal. The Kabiri were also identified with the demons who protected the smiths and ironworkers. In her book Themis, Jane Harrison deals with this situation from the sociological standpoint and makes comparisons with ancient primitive rites.4 One can observe similar circumstances in the groups of unmarried young men all over the world. In ancient primitive cultures young boys were taken from their homes and were not allowed to recognize their mother, neither might they eat food cooked by her. They had to live in the men’s houses until they married, and had to go through all kinds of torture. There was recognized permission for these men to be aggressive, primitive, and masculine, and in old Sparta they were ordered to steal and rob, to prove their independence and masculinity. That was the initiation into manhood.5 Such an initiation not only involves instinctual behavior but also plays a role in the spiritual realm: it concerns, on the one hand, the animalistic, but on the other hand, it means an initiation in the spiritual life of the tribe. In other words, it has to do with a widening of the personality between the two extreme poles of instinct and spirit.

  Therefore we can say that when Lucius falls into the hands of the robbers, he falls into the hands of these forces which would initiate him into a new masculinity. It is his initiation into manhood, even though in a negative aspect.

  When the robbers have eaten, they recount their adventures. One band has lost its captain, called Lamachus (“the fighter”). He had tried to rob a rich man who lived as a beggar, but he was caught and his hand nailed to the door. The robbers, to save him, cut off his arm, but when making their escape Lamachus was too weak to keep up with the others and thrust his sword through his own body. Another leader, Alcimus (“the strong one”), tried to rob an old woman who tricked him and threw him out of the window so that he died. A third man, Thrasileon (“the courageous lion”), disguised in a bearskin, helped his companions to steal gold and silver from the house of Demochares, but the dogs set upon him and reduced him to such a state that at last a man ran him through with a spear and killed him, while the robbers escaped with their treasure. Thus, one can see that in spite of their positive aspect, they fail and many of them are destroyed.

  Mother’s boys often have such sudden fits of doing something and then they go home to Mama to be spoiled, but they have no policy, no plans, which is why they fail in the end. Unconscious virility is of no use in this way, if it appears only sporadically. One can see from this that the robber world is a very ambiguous motif. It is a chance for Lucius to integrate his masculinity, or to lose it even more and in a worse way. It’s just on the razor’s edge, and depends on whether he realizes what it is and what is behind it. It is as though fate offered him an ambiguous possibility, either of initiation into manhood or of losing his identity still further and falling even worse into the claws of the Great Mother. What is still lacking here is the single most essential element of real masculinity—endurance. A man who can only be courageous in fits and starts, who can only do something sporadically, is not a man. Such spasms of virility without duration or planned consciousness are doomed from the beginning. They belong typically to a certain phase of a young man’s fight with the mother complex. They resemble the sudden outbreaks which we now see in these horrible deeds which certain teenagers commit. They dare each other to pour kerosene on a man and burn him, and they think that that is a display of masculinity, but it simply lands them in complete failure and a breakdown worse than before. This kind of robber-shadow figure which unfolds its activity autonomously is doomed to run up against conventional society, which is quite justified in resisting such behavior. It is a typical state of delayed puberty transition. For example, in Switzerland most of the boys from better families belong to the Boy Scout movement. And on the one side they have a very decent Boy Scout life. They learn to bicycle and make knots, play football, and perform a good deed once a day. But many Boy Scout groups lead a nocturnal life which is most amusing: the older boys, disguised as ghosts or wild animals, frighten the younger boys, and a lot happens which comes sometimes within a hairsbreadth of an accident. But generally they are lucky, thank God! The really wonderful Boy Scout nights are when they go at midnight and jump naked into an ice-cold lake and such things, daring each other as to who can do even worse. When the boys are grown up, their shivering parents, who are thankful that they did not know at the time, are told all about it. So one can say that a certain amount of that is normal at a special age and belongs to the initiation of a young man and the assimilation of his virility. But at forty it is deplorable or difficult to catch up on these adventures. Such youngsters also have the daring without much perseverance, but later they begin to challenge each other in a much more refined way, namely as to who can endure for a long time. To endure a disagreeable situation represents a higher phase of development, the next step after the dashing, daring stage is past. At this stage, however, our robbers fail. But behind them is the drunken old woman who knows such beautiful fairy tales and who reveals to Lucius, for the first time, the archetypal background and the meaningful secret at play behind his tragic fate.

  We must now examine why the old witch drinks. Again we come across, in this perverted form, an ambivalent element which could develop positively. The secret motivation behind drinking, as well as behind drug addiction, is, in most cases, the longing for an emotional experience of ecstasy, which originally and historically was a basic element in religious experience. Whenever people are cut off from this for some reason, being too intellectual or something else, then the longing for the spirit sometimes takes this rather concrete aspect, and is sought for in the bottle. We might, therefore, say that behind the mother complex, as represented by the robbers’ mother, is a secret longing in Lucius for something spiritual which has not been fulfilled. The problem lies in the split-off part of his personality, split off because it is not connected with consciousness and lacks spiritual understanding. Expressed in biblical terms: the powers of darkness long for the light. The robbers’ mother longs for something spiritual, but she takes it in this well-known surrogate form of liquor. Taken in the context of the whole book, it becomes more and more evident that behind the mother complex, even in the destructive form which is now slowly overwhelming Lucius, in the last analysis there is a secret longing for religious experience.

  Furthermore, this old woman is not altogether negative, since, in order to comfort Charite, a prisoner of the robbers, she tells her the beautiful story of Eros and Psyche. Before we go into that, we first have to see what led up to the telling of the story. The robbers irrupted into a wedding party where the well-educated girl of a very good family, Charite, was to have been married to a young man called Tlepolemos. Tle means “to endure,” “to stand,” and polemos means “war.” So he would be the warrior, the one who endures through a war, which is why he has the name of a famous Greek hero. The wedding ceremony of Charite and Tlepolemus is prevented, the robbers put the guests to flight, seemingly kill the bridegroom, steal all the wedding gifts, and abduct the bride. They do not harm her, for they are only interested in getting ransom money from her rich parents. The girl is in utter despair, and in order to keep her quiet the old hag tells her the story of Eros and Psyche.

  It has already been pointed out by Reinhold Merkelbach6 that the two couples, Charite and Tlepolemus as well as Eros and Psy
che, undergo much the same fate at the beginning, for, as we will see later, Psyche is also separated from her bridegroom, goes through a tremendous amount of suffering, and in the end is reunited with her lover. Charite, the listener of the story, goes through the same process, except that for her everything goes wrong. So here there is a double couple: Charite and Tlepolemus, two human beings, and Psyche and Eros, two divine beings. The constellation that appears thus in their paralleled stories is the famous “marriage quaternio.”7 Jung has pointed out that in every deep relationship between a man and a woman there come indeed four elements into play: the conscious ego of the man, the conscious ego of the woman, his anima, and her animus. The figures of the animus and the anima, owing to their numinous nature, were projected until now (for instance in alchemy) upon royal figures or upon a divine couple. Today, for the first time in history, we are confronted with the problem of integrating these “superhuman” elements representing powerful aspects of the unconscious. If their integration does not succeed, then the heterosexual elements of the unconscious overflood the ego: this is one of the reasons for the increase of divorces today. In Apuleius’s novel the functions of the animus and the anima are still represented by semidivine figures. However, one could conclude from the “human” behavior of these figures that in reality they are aspects of the human soul.

  While various commentators have not realized the profound relation of this tale in the whole context of the story of Lucius, others recognized, especially Merkelbach, the mystical connection with the initiation in the Isis mystery cult, which is described at the end of the novel.

  Immediately when Lucius sees Charite, a beautiful, innocent young girl, the ass in him is awakened with interest in her. Even the drunken old woman has pity for her. In Greek mythology, Charis is one of the three Graces, those semigoddesses who are usually shown in a group of three, and represent grace and beauty. They were the companions of Dionysos. In Greek, the word charis means charm, intangible beauty, like that of the trees whose leaves are still completely fresh, or like that of a flower which opens up. The name Charite, and that of Tlepolemus, will become very meaningful later.