In this present condition the girl cries, not only because of the robbers, but because she had had a horrible dream in which she saw robbers kill her husband with a stone; she is therefore convinced that he is dead. We know that this is not true, because later he turns up, but is killed at the end by the robber Thrasyllus (“the reckless one”) in a boar hunt. Although the dream does not correspond to the truth in this respect, it will become true later. Let us also bring to mind the fact that Charite commits suicide later, so the two are really already doomed to a tragic end.
The motif of the happy couple and of a masculine figure who disturbs the two is also to be found in alchemical symbolism. In The Chymical Wedding by Rosencreutz,8 for instance, a Negro steals the bride, and she must be brought back by the bridegroom. The motif is also found in an alchemical parable, which Jung interpreted in The Psychology of the Transference,9 where the thief who destroys the happiness of the couple is called Sulphur. It is the classical motif of the destructive masculine figure, the shadow figure of the man, or the animus of the woman, which disturbs the relationship. Jung interprets the thief as greed, the possessiveness of the ego, which makes the inner coniunctio impossible. Whenever one gets near the union of the opposites, the greedy ego wants to take the thing for itself and destroys the inner experience. This is true of the individual as well as on the level of the couple. This element destroys the love experience between two people just when it is going well, for then it awakes and destroys the whole relationship. If one remembers the attitude of Apuleius, then one can say that this male figure which disturbs the relationship with the female is the image of his own brutal shadow egoism, which disturbs his relations to women. It is his nonintegrated masculinity. The bride stolen by the robbers can be taken as a symbol of the anima who has been wounded by the chthonic masculine element. She represents the suffering feeling in the soul of Lucius. When a man falls for one-sided cold sexuality, he wounds the woman within as well as the woman without.
There is also a very revealing sentence, for the girl says that the robbers pulled her away “from the lap of her mother” and that is how her marriage was prevented. One would expect it to be “from the arms of her bridegroom.” If we take it as a dream, it means that all feeling of Lucius-Apuleius under the aspect of Charite is still with the mother. With Photis, he experienced only sensuality, but his feeling is still sitting on the mother’s lap. Men with a mother complex often prefer prostitutes to other women, and mothers who complain about such sons are really those who are most pleased about it, for they know that this is how they can keep their sons. But a suitable woman, whom he loves, would be a rival! In such a case the mother will say that she always wanted her son to marry, but not this woman. For she really feels that it is no longer only a matter of sexuality, but that this time his heart is pulling away from her. Here it becomes clear that Lucius is still dependent on the mother and that the robbers, despite their terrible deed, have done something positive for Lucius: through their intervention his feeling has at last been torn away by force from the mother, a necessary stage in order to be able to face the problems of life.
5
Amor and Psyche I
Introduction to the Tale
In order to distract Charite from her deep despair, the drunken old woman who lives with the robbers recounts to her the fairy tale of Amor and Psyche. Like all inserted stories we will look at it as a dream.
The first two inserted stories of the novel one could call “little dreams,” but here we are dealing with a big archetypal dream. The first story dealt with the murder of Socrates, and the second with the adventure and mutilation of Thelyphron, but this third mythological story occupies a large part of the whole book. Erich Neumann has interpreted it independently of the whole novel, using it as a model for the problems of feminine psychology.1 Taking Charite as a woman and Eros as her animus, Neumann analyzed it in terms of the problem of the woman getting away from the mother. He did not believe that the fairy tale belonged in the context of the novel, but thought it was a literary insertion. I do not agree with him here, because psychologically it fits completely into the context of the novel, and also we cannot ignore the fact that the book is written by a man who chose this fairy tale and inserted it at a certain point. Therefore I am going to take it from the standpoint of masculine psychology, representing the problem of Lucius-Apuleius.2
This type of fairy tale—the Amor and Psyche motif—is very widespread. “Beauty and the Beast” would be another example. The story is to be found in Russia, Spain, Germany, Italy, Greece, and even in India and Africa.3 Typologically, it is the story of a young girl married to an unknown husband who appears either in an animal shape or in demonic form or who forbids her to call him by name or look at him in the light or in a mirror. Then she loses him by disobedience, and after a long, painful quest succeeds in finding him again and redeeming him. Usually he has been bewitched by a witch or wizard. Most philologists believe the story to be over two thousand years old. Apuleius, changing it here and there, inserted it in his novel, thus representing his own anima problem and preparing his initiation.
Before we go on with this essential jewel of the novel, I would like to remind the reader of the whole line of the book. The downward line shows, as mentioned already, the worsening of Lucius’s state of consciousness, whereas the upward lower line points to a slow progress in the unconscious. Lucius sets out on his white horse, he meets Photis, is turned into an ass, and comes to the robbers’ cave, where a drunken old woman tells the story. He is then only an ass and the robbers’ prisoner. At the same time a slight improvement in the unconscious takes place: at the beginning there was the gruesome story of the murdered Socrates, then followed Thelyphron’s mutilation, and now comes the story of Amor and Psyche. The square drawn in the middle line of the scheme sets Eros and Psyche in connection with Tlepolemus and Charite.
As mentioned already, there is a certain parallel between the fates of the two couples. There are even late antique gems in which Charite is called Psyche,4 so that even for a man of Apuleius’s time, it was clear that these are two parallel stories with the difference that one couple consists of real people while the other consists of daimones, in the specific Neoplatonic sense. The mythological couple are mainly persecuted by the goddess Venus, while on the side of the human situation there stands the old woman, who recounts the story and who protects Lucius and Charite from the robbers. So the old woman and Venus are the forces which enframe this first encounter of the human and divine.
As I mentioned before, we are dealing here with the typical motif of the marriage quaternio, a scheme which, according to Jung, lies at the heart of every transformation process based on love, namely: a real couple, a man and a woman, and the corresponding archetypal aspects of their anima and animus, which are involved in every essential situation of mutual individuation between the sexes. The marriage quaternity is a symbol of totality. However, the first attempt at the realization of wholeness breaks apart within this story. Tlepolemus is killed and Charite commits suicide. Psyche and Eros are not killed, but they retire into Olympus, that is, into the distant collective unconscious. They do not realize themselves in the human reality. So this encounter means only a first abortive attempt to form a union of the two worlds. One reason why it is abortive is that Lucius, instead of taking part, is only an onlooker. He listens to the words of the old woman’s story completely passively and in his donkey form. If he had entered this formation of the quaternio, if he had taken the place of Tlepolemus, then perhaps the whole coming together of the upper and the lower layer, the conscious and the unconscious worlds, could have taken place. But because he only listens, without entering the process except a little bit at the end, the whole thing falls apart again.
One might say that the fairy tale had relatively no effect upon our hero, that it was just a nice story, after which the main story about the suffering of Lucius-ass goes on. But as we shall see this is not true. Just as a dream that is not
understood still has a certain effect upon consciousness, this story leaves behind a deep emotional impact. For after he has heard the fairy tale of Eros and Psyche, Lucius decides to run away with Charite, so he gets at least an impulse to try to free himself and return to a more human life. There is one more important detail: Charite sits on his back when they run away together, and Lucius, with the excuse of wanting to scratch his neck, tries to kiss Charite’s feet. There one can see a tiny attempt on Lucius’s side to become Charite’s savior and lover, that is, to replace Tlepolemus. Although this small attempt does not have any effect, one sees that the fairy tale has had a certain impact upon him. It has aroused the impulse of the conscious personality to enter the game and become involved, but typically enough Lucius only tries this flirtatious donkey kiss. He does not have yet a serious feeling in what he is doing. It is as if, for the first time, the inner totality, or the structure of the Self, turned up from the unconscious, touched consciousness slightly, and then fell apart to sink again into the unconscious. Afterward, and probably because this attempt toward an integration has failed, things get rapidly worse. Lucius falls into the hands of a sadistic boy who nearly kills him and whose witch mother tries to castrate and burn him. If an attempt toward integration has been built up by the unconscious and then fails, then there follows generally a new and especially bad depression before the possibility of a further integration offers itself.
We must now go more into the two main figures of the fairy tale, Eros and Psyche, so that we may understand what the whole tale is about. Eros is a god, and, as Richard Reitzenstein5 has proved, both he and Psyche are divine figures worshiped in local Greek cults. The goddess Psyche is of later origin than Eros, but she too had temples of her own in which she was worshiped. Both are relatively human figures, but are of that type of minor gods which the Greeks called daimones. The Romans called them genii. This Neoplatonic idea has its origin in the classical text of Plato, the Symposium, where Diotima explains:
You have thus admitted that Love (because of what is lacking in the good and the beautiful) desires what is lacking.—I admit it.—How, then could he be a God, he for whom the good and the beautiful are faults?—In no way, apparently.—You see then, she told me, that you cannot consider Love a God.—What then, I said, is Love? A mortal?—Certainly not.—What then?—A superior being, an intermediary between the human and the divine.—What is he then, O Diotima?—O Socrates, he is a great daimon. Because the nature of daimones is intermediary between men and Gods.6
When Apuleius writes a fairy tale in which the central figure, Eros, is a daimon, he means not a personal, but a superpersonal daimon. And the goddess, Psyche, would also be such a figure.
The idea of the god Eros went through a long development up to the late Greek-Roman culture, for originally he was a Boeotian god, and the Boeotians were looked upon as primitive, rustic, and uncouth. He was worshiped by them in the form of a big wooden or stone phallus or just as a stone; he was thought of as the creative chthonic god who effected the fertility of the cattle and the fields and protected the wells. He was attributed with the special ability of protecting the tribe and its freedom in wartime, as well as its love life, especially homosexual love. In ancient Sparta the groups in men’s societies were usually homoerotic and, thus united, became the protagonists for freedom and the protection of the country. Homosexuality formed a kind of bond which led to a heroic attitude and also to a strengthening of the inner political life. Thus Eros is very close to the Greek god Hermes, who was also worshipped as a phallus in stone or wood or as a man with an erect phallus. In earliest times Hermes and Eros were practically identical. In Plato’s writings, Eros is also considered the source of fertility and an inspiring force in all spiritual achievements. Later he became a literary figure and lost much of his original impressive power.
There are few large images of Eros left in antique art, but many little cut stones and gems on which he is represented as winged, sometimes as a winged being who shows his genitals, and frequently as a hermaphrodite. Or he is represented as a winged youth smelling flowers with a zither in his right hand, or as a winged phallus with a head on it or a small boy with a divine snake or a grown-up winged youth with a bow and arrow, as in Renaissance art. Or he is represented as a boy riding on Psyche as a butterfly, or sitting on the lap of his mother, the goddess of love, Aphrodite, or playing with her. Besides these representations the god Eros is also found in many Greek and Roman tombs as the protecting spirit of the dead or as the spirit of the deceased person. He is frequently shown holding a torch downward, the symbol of death. Again he is represented—and this comes closer to our fairy-tale motif—as holding a butterfly and sadistically burning it with his torch, which represents the idea that Eros, the god of love, is a great torturer of the human soul and at the same time its great purifier.
Love with its passion and pain becomes the urge toward individuation, which is why there is no real process of individuation without the experience of love, for love tortures and purifies the soul. Expressed differently, Eros presses the butterfly painfully against his chest, representing the soul being developed and tortured by the love god. On one beautiful gem the goddess Psyche, with her hands behind her back, is being tied by the god to a column which ends in a sphere. One could say that this image expresses in a beautiful way the process of individuation. Eros tying Psyche to the column surmounted by a sphere, the symbol of totality which is realized by suffering. Sometimes one would like to run away from the person to whom one is tied, in order to run away from the dependence, but Eros forces us to become conscious through this tie. Love makes us dare everything and leads us thus to ourselves. Therefore one of Eros’s main epithets, which he had in antiquity, was “purifier of the soul.”
One of the most beautiful prayers which I know is addressed to this great god. It has been preserved in a magic text:
I call to thee, Origin of all Becoming, that spread your wings over the entire world, you the unapproachable, the infinite, that inspires the living thoughts of every soul, who has joined all things by your power. First-born creature of the universe, of the golden wings, dark being, you who veil reasonable thoughts and inspire with dark passion, you who live secretly in every soul, you create the invisible fire, touching every living being, the untiring torment of sorrowful pleasures and delights, since the universe has existed. You bring suffering in your presence, you who are sometimes reasonable and sometimes insane, you for whom men violate their duties with bold endeavors and that they call to help them, you the dark. You the last-born, the lawless, the merciless, the inexorable, the invisible generator without body of passions, archer, carrier of the torch, lord of all spiritual perception and of all things hidden, lord of the forgetting and father of silence, by whom shines all light, young child when you are born in the heart, old man when you are consummated. . . .7
Eros is very close to the alchemical Mercurius, who also has the arrow of passion and the torch, representing the torturing and painful aspect of love. At the entrance of the Aesculapian temple in Epidaurus, where the sick came to be healed of psychological or physical diseases, were the pictures of the two healing principles of Eros and Methē (drunkenness).8 Love and drunkenness are the great healing forces for soul and body. The drunkenness referred to here is not that obtained through alcohol, though this vulgar aspect is in it, for in drunkenness you are out of your narrow ego confines and are lifted ecstatically to another world beyond the worries of everyday life. This experience of elevation and of eternity links us again with the archetypal basis of the psyche and has a healing and transforming effect.
Eros, one of the healing gods in ancient Greece, is also the “divine child” in some of its mystery cults. In the Eleusinian mysteries there took place the birth of a mystical divine child sometimes called Plutus, Iacchos, or Triptolemos and also sometimes called Eros. The central archetypal idea is that the divine earth mother gives birth to a divine boy, who is at the same time redeemer and god of ferti
lity. He corresponds to the Mercurius in alchemy. All the later associations and ideas about love in medieval times absolutely coincide with what was said of Eros in earlier antiquity, and he is therefore a symbol of the Self. In the symbolism of alchemy there is always the divine couple: a god and a goddess, or a king and a queen, who represent the transcendental personalities, and a cock and a hen as the empirical personalities. Psyche would be the divine feminine partner of Eros, but in our fairy tale she is an ordinary human being, though in some other instances she is looked upon as half-divine, like Eros himself.
Psyche appears less as a divinity in late antiquity. She is nearly always represented together with Eros, sometimes without wings when she corresponds more to our figure in the story and is more in contrast to the immortal god, Eros. More frequently, however, she has wings, with the typical points or dots or circles which characterize butterfly wings. Then she is more a figure of the type of the divine young girl, Kore, the central figure of the Eleusinian mysteries.9 In the Eleusinian mysteries, which, according to Jung, are mainly mysteries of the feminine psyche, the main theme is the story of Demeter, whose daughter, Kore (the divine maiden), was abducted by Hades-Pluto, the god of the dead and of the underworld. Finally, through the mediation of Zeus, she is allowed to have her daughter back from time to time. But this is only one aspect of the story. There must have been many more components of the mysteries which we do not know. But we do know that Kore gives birth to a mystical child, generally called Iacchus or Brimos (“the strong one”) and in some late texts also Triptolemus or Eros. That was the great event of the night of initiation into the Eleusinian mysteries. Exactly what the mysteries were has never been betrayed, and we know them only through certain allusions by the Church Fathers who were initiated before their conversion to Christianity. But even after becoming Christian, they seem either not to have had the courage or to have had too much respect for the mystical content of the mysteries to give away what actually happened. They sometimes merely made some allusion to them, so we have to reconstruct what really happened. We know that, after long fasting and many rituals, those elected to be initiated were called at midnight to a central part of the temple and a priest carrying an ear of corn said, “I announce the good tidings: Brimo has given birth to the divine child Brimos” (or, according to another text, Iacchus). In the museum at Athens there is the famous relief of Triptolemus—Triptolemus is another name for the same god. It shows Demeter, with her hand on the head of a youth of about fifteen who is standing in front of her, while Kore stands on the other side. As mentioned already, we do not really know enough about these mysteries, but we do know that they had to do with the mother and daughter mystery and the birth of a son-divinity. Ovid gave to Iacchus, the divine child, the festive name puer aetemus.
The Golden Ass of Apuleius Page 9
