Styx is a female goddess, the oldest of all, who rules over all the other gods. Her deadly water destroys any human being as well as every animal and cannot be put into any normal vessel, whether of glass, or lead, not even of gold, for it is even more destructive than the “water” of alchemy, which can be kept only in a golden vessel. Even the gods are terrified of this element, and their most solemn oath is pronounced in the name of Styx. If a god breaks this oath, he will lie dead for an entire year and be banished from Olympus for nine more years. The Styx symbolizes the frightening aspect of the mother archetype and in a certain sense also of the collective unconscious. The fact that we cannot “hold” it in a vessel seems to me to be very meaningful. We cannot indeed entirely grasp or manipulate the collective unconscious. It resembles a wild river of psychic energy which we cannot regulate and which we cannot make use of. The collective unconscious is like a powerful stream of images upon which man has no influence.
The only way to keep some of it, according to myth, is in the hoof of a horse, or the horn of a mythological (in reality nonexisting), one-horned Scythian ass. The horn, a phallic symbol, symbolizes the creative force of the Self,1 and the horse hoof has also, in a simpler form, the same meaning, because it was believed that horses could stamp springs out of the earth and that the kick of a horse fertilized the earth. So it shows that only the principle of creativeness in the human soul can hold its own against the destructiveness of the water of Styx.
Man never could—and from this mythologem it seems as though he never will—manipulate, voluntarily influence, or possess, even in part, the collective unconscious. This nature principle takes its own course through history. It supports civilizations or nations, or lets them decay, and nothing can prevail against it. One could say that the Roman Empire in the second century after Christ, the time of Apuleius, was already condemned to go under in the water of Styx. In the myth, Styx has also to do with the goddess of Nemesis, the mysterious, revengeful justice of nature.” If an empire or a religion is doomed to extinction because the collective unconscious does not express itself through it anymore, then man is absolutely helpless. The water of Styx governs military defeat or victory; from it stems Niké (“victory”), this mysterious power of fate, which in battle dooms a civilization or promotes its continuation in life. If we look at the dust of history and consider how many wonderful human achievements have been destroyed again and again by barbaric forces, then we realize the meaning of the water of the Styx. It seems to be an inescapable destiny, the cruel justice of nature which we cannot halt. That is why we cannot hold this water: if Nemesis has decided destruction in the water of Styx, we cannot prevail against it, except with the “hoof of the horse.” That is the one comfort we can take from this myth. Nature seems to want to protect its own deepest creative power against everything; and it seems also at times to attach to human creativity a value superior to any other activity. Only if we are in contact with our unconscious psyche can we be creative. Great creative achievements come from the depths of the psyche; if we can keep in contact with the depth of our psyche, we are able to form that which wants to be expressed through it. Sometimes this is a matter of life and death, for we simply do not know if we can bring it into reality. But if we can, then it looks as if nature rewards us with the highest price; and therefore one could say that creative achievement is the only “vessel” which can hold the water of Styx.
Here Psyche is given the vessel as a present. She cannot herself approach the water; the separation from Eros makes the solution of the task impossible for her. With him she might manage it, but alone she is up against an impossibility. However, through divine intervention, through the eagle of Zeus, the task is achieved. The eagle represents here intuitive spiritual elation and high-soaring thoughts.
At the moment when the human psyche cannot act by itself, it is supported by a heroic, intuitive spirit which arises from the unconscious. One could call it the mysterious force of hope, for sometimes when one is up against an impossible situation, one has a kind of intuition that things will come right if only one can endure. That is grace. Here, because Psyche courageously makes an honest attempt, she is saved by such an act of grace, by the intuitive vision, which anticipates what she cannot yet do herself.
As the continuation of the story shows, the solution of the problem does not reach the conscious level. One could connect this with the fact that Psyche could not fetch the water of Styx herself. The eagle—an autonomous power—intervenes, as will Eros later, when Psyche will fall into a deathlike sleep after opening the box of beauty. In between these two events, however, Psyche experiences her descent into the underworld.
After she has brought the water of Styx to Venus, Psyche is sent by her into the world of the dead, in order to obtain a certain box with a perfumed beauty cream in it from Persephone, the queen of the underworld, a parallel to the dark face of Isis. In great despair, Psyche wants to kill herself by throwing herself down from a tower, but the tower begins to talk, and it advises her to go down into Hades and then gives her further instructions. The tower, as Neumann interprets it, is a symbol of the Great Mother herself. It is also a symbol of introversion, of withdrawal into one’s own inner world, and of contemplation of oneself. It is the withdrawal that allows Psyche to face the tasks which await her.
While crossing the river of the underworld in Charon’s boat, a drowning old man, half-dead, begs her to take pity on him. But her task is to not listen to his piteous cries for help. A woman’s natural inclination is to mother, to nurse, and to have pity for everything. Wherever there is a wounded being around or anything that touches the natural, feminine, maternal instinct, she wants to support it. To say no to this old cripple is for a woman a more difficult deed than for a man. Not to have any sentimental love for something that is doomed to die and has to go is very hard. This applies also in analysis: a neurotic attitude in the analysand naturally cries out for our pity, but to give in here would mean to keep alive something dying or already dead. To have pity and love, combined with the reckless “cruelty” to allow the condemned thing to die, is very difficult in practical life. It is so much easier to be full of feeling and to give in to one’s feminine inclination to sympathize. To have a “knife” in the hand and, without listening to the cries of the patient, to cut off a wrong attitude, this can be very painful for the doctor himself. Naturally the same applies also to the contents of the unconscious which have outlived their time. One should not fall into retrospective sentimentality, but live forward, “letting the dead bury their dead.” Psyche succeeds in ignoring this old man who cries for help, and Charon takes her on across the river.
Charon appears here in his usual antique representation, as a miserly, ill-tempered old man who will only take those people over who can pay him. He is, in a sense, the negative personification of what Jung called the “transcendent function.”2 Jung meant by this the faculty of the unconscious for creating symbols. It is “transcendent,” for not only does it transcend our conscious grasp, but it is the only thing which, through the help of a symbol, enables man to pass from one psychic state to another. Hence the ferryman! We would be forever stuck in an acquired state of consciousness if this transcendent function of the psyche did not help us over into new attitudes by creating a symbol which shares in both worlds: being associated with the psychic state of the present as well as the future, the symbol helps us over. “Habentibus symbolum facilis est transitus.”3 Very often one sees in analysis that somebody has outgrown his old condition but feels lost and confused about the new thing. In this interregnum, or vacuum, one can only hold on to the chain of symbols which the unconscious produces, that is, to one’s own dreams, which never let us down, but safely lead us over from an outgrown into a new attitude of life. However, this stage between the two worlds of the conscious and the unconscious has also a quality of being narrowed in, of depression, and of having to cling to small things.
Charon has an Egyptian parallel in the god Ach
arantos, or Akeru, who, because of a similarity in the sound of the name, was identified with Charon in the syncretistic Graeco-Roman Egyptian religion.4 But Akeru has a more positive function in Egypt. He is depicted as a simple peasant who sows and reaps wheat, and so is interpreted in many texts of the Egyptian tombs as the agency of resurrection. One could say therefore that the “ferryman,” who from the extraverted standpoint is seen as negative—during his appearance there is a certain darkening of consciousness, and only the dreams go on producing symbols leading to the other shore—was seen more positively by the Egyptians, with their more introverted civilization. They saw therein a sowing of the wheat, which disappears in the earth and is awoken again to life. Jesus alludes to the same Osiris mystery of the “resurrection” of the wheat.5
The general belief in antiquity that one had to have money for Charon can also be seen in this light: in most of the tombs of antiquity the dead have under their tongue a penny or a drachma for Charon, who otherwise could leave them on the shore between the two worlds. This shows that the transcendent function requires a minimum of conscious libido. The healing function of the unconscious cannot bring us over “to the other shore” if we do not give it libido, that means conscious attention. One sees this so tragically in people who have dragged on for perhaps twenty years under terrific hidden suffering from a neurotic symptom. Such people have been arrested at the shore for lack of money for Charon. They did not have the right instruction, or they lacked the instinct or the generosity to follow it.
Then Psyche comes to an old man called Ocnus, who again and again winds up a black and white cord and unties it again. Ocnus means hesitation, and to him, also, Psyche must not pay any attention but must walk past and not take notice of what he tells her, otherwise she will get stuck with him. The rope, which also appears in other fairy-tale motifs, refers to a general mythological theme and is interpreted as the alternation of black and white, of day and night, and of other opposites. So one could say that Ocnus—hesitation—occupies himself incessantly with an endless chain of opposites in the unconscious and with the spinning of a yam from the opposites, so that he never comes to any deed or any breakthrough. This is another classical form of getting stuck in the unconscious: many people realize that everything has a plus and a minus, that everything in the psyche is ambiguous, that everything one undertakes can be naively interpreted as a wonderful deed, but has its dark motivations as well. If one realizes that, then one often becomes unable to do or think anything, and then one falls into Ocnus. Shall I, or shall I not? Everything has a disadvantage, and anything I might do has its absolute counterpart. Such a realization might lame the élan vital. The secret is to say, “Oh, well, if it has two aspects, to hell with it, I shall do this because this is me, and I am ready to pay for it; everything is half-wrong anyhow, whatever one does!” People with a weak ego-consciousness and a weak feeling function cannot take responsibility for their decisions but get lamed in the face of paradox. In analysis they argue, “You said last time . . . ! But isn’t there another aspect?” One replies, “Yes, certainly, but then . . .”Generally they want you to decide for them, and that is the worst of all, for then they could remain infantile. All this sounds simple, but in reality it is terrible and dangerous, one of the real devilries of the unconscious! Ocnus, who is quite rightly represented here as a superdevil, must be avoided!
Next, Psyche has to walk past three old women who are weaving. These, we know from the mythological context, are parallel to the Germanic Norns or the Greek Parkae or Moirae, the weaving goddesses of Fate.6 Them, too, Psyche must leave alone, which means she must overcome them. Here is a big temptation for women and also for the man’s anima: the temptation to plot and help fate along. It is very meaningful that after Ocnus come these three women, because one could say that plotting generally comes after a feeling of hopelessness. For example, if a woman loves a man and there is seemingly no chance for her to conquer him, she will start to plot in order to catch him. Had she the confidence that what is meant to come about will happen, she would not need to plot; but there is the temptation to corriger Ia fortune, to help fate. Here is a particular failing of women. If they happen to give in to the temptation, they destroy, as Jung explains in “Woman in Europe,”7 their Eros and their creative possibility. But it is also typical for the anima in men. If a man plots, one knows he is still possessed by the anima. To give a kind of blunt primitive example: a man really is only interested in his fiancée’s bank account, but that is not allowed to come to consciousness, so he maneuvers himself into feeling that he loves the woman. In reality he wants to have the money but cannot separate this wish from the feeling of uninterested love, and so he keeps himself in a half-dark state, where he makes himself believe that this girl is the right one to marry. There is also perhaps a certain attraction, yet with this other little “thing” in the background: she has a rich father. Psyche escapes this danger in that she walks past the three fate-weavers. Only when one becomes conscious of such unclean, half-unconscious motivations and “walks past them,” does not fall into them, can the individuation process continue. Therefore, if a man or a woman cannot desist from this plotting there is no true love, for the two are absolutely incompatible, though they are always close together. Psyche succeeds in escaping from all these dangers.
Psyche’s last task is to go down into the underworld and get from Persephone the box which contains divine beauty and to bring it to Venus. Here she is disobedient, opens the box, and falls immediately into a deadly sleep. But by a miracle Eros comes and wakens her back to life. Later, through the intervention of Zeus, Eros and Psyche marry, Venus is reconciled and even dances at the marriage festival. Later Psyche gives birth to a child on Olympus, called Voluptas (Pleasure). Being from the land of death, divine beauty is obviously something poisonous which is kept for the gods and which human beings should not have. One could compare this to the biblical story in which Adam and Eve steal consciousness from God and thus start the tragedy of mankind. But here the sin lies not in the stealing of the knowledge of good and evil, but in the wish to want to participate in divine beauty.
This has to do with the well-known aestheticism of the anima in men. A man’s anima whispers to him: what is beautiful is also good, in the Platonic sense of the word (kalon k’agathon, “the good and the beautiful go together”). One of man’s deepest problems is that he is practically incapable of loving a woman if she is very ugly. He cannot separate his feeling from aestheticism. There is the story of the man who couldn’t decide between two women. The one was beautiful, the other ugly but a wonderful singer. After a long struggle the singer won. Then on the first morning of the honeymoon he wakes up, looks at her, and shakes her, saying, “For God’s sake, sing!” It is a terrible anima problem, for the man feels that beauty is divine and that it goes with goodness, whereas evil and ugliness belong together.
As Merkelbach has already worked out, Kore, or Persephone, is a variation of Venus-Isis in her underworldly aspect. But why the problem of beauty? In the story, Psyche naturally opens the box—as in all fairy tales, for nothing has ever been forbidden in a fairy tale which has not been done—and what comes out is a confusion, a soporific mist, which puts her into a deathlike sleep. Thus, she is thrown even deeper into the unconscious. The ointment has a completely negative role in our context, for it was not created for Psyche. It was meant for Venus, who, probably quite legitimately, wanted to heighten her own charms. Venus would not have fallen into sleep if she had opened the box. Therefore we must go into the meaning of ointment.
Oil and many sorts of creamy ointment had, in Egypt, a sacramental or religious function: they represented life substance. The Egyptians bathed and anointed their gods. They brought their statues down to the Nile and washed them regularly and then anointed them with a creamlike substance; the idea behind it was to give them life.8 They realized, in a projected form at least, that even the gods would be without the slighest life function or importance if men did not g
ive them their psychic substance.
In the Christian tradition the holy oil still plays a great role in Catholic sacraments, representing the Holy Ghost and its gifts. For this reason the king is also anointed. He is the “anointed” one, because he represents the Christian principle on earth and because he fulfills his office with “God’s grace.” Jesus, the king of kings, is the “anointed” par excellence, but in a more invisible sense than the Egyptian kings.
So one could say that oil and creams represent the life substance of the psyche in its aspect of ultimate spiritual devotion, devotion with complete awe. By anointing the statues, the Egyptians gave their gods the best they could, unconditional devotion and reverence which made them alive.
The ointment has therefore also to do with love, with the reverential awe which a human being can give to a being who is greater than himself. If people try to exploit their dreams for their own purposes, without this loving respect for that which the unconscious conveys to them, then everything turns wrong. It turns dead, and after a relatively good time at the start they begin to doubt the analytical process and their dreams, doubting that they will lead somewhere or further. But they started this wrong way because they did not give unconditioned loving reverence, did not recognize that a living mystery within their own souls has to be kept alive, not for any other purpose than its own sake. Therefore it is right that the ointment should belong to Venus and not to a human girl. Human beings may not steal it; if it is stolen, it creates this soporific effect, which is visible here. Psyche is not killed, but she falls into a complete unconscious state, into the state of the gods, and loses the feeling for her own individuality.
The Golden Ass of Apuleius Page 14
