The fact that he goes to the seashore and, avoiding people, goes to a lonely place is meaningful. If we remember our diagram, we can see that this corresponds to the deepest place: he has reached the bottom of his misery. In his bitter experiences he has gone through personal tragedy and now finds himself at the sea, the border of the collective unconscious. For the first time, Lucius, rejecting involvement with people, seeks to be himself, to endure his own misery and his loneliness, and in this state he falls asleep. Apuleius reports through Lucius:
When midnight came I had slept my first sleepe, I awaked with suddaine feare, and saw the Moon shining bright, as when she is at the full, and seeming as though she leaped out of the sea.1
He wakes and sees the full moon over the sea, a most holy experience. He thinks of the mother goddess, Ceres-Demeter, and associates her with the moon, for it is at the moment of the full moon that the goddess has her greatest power. People assumed at that time that everything pertaining to vegetative and animal life depended on the moon, as well as the whole rhythm of nature, death, and life.
And I considered that all the bodies in the heavens, the earth and the seas, be by her increasing motions increased, and by her diminishing motions diminished: as weary of all my cruel fortune and calamity, I found good hope and sovereign remedy though it were very late, to be delivered from all my misery, by invocation and prayer, to the excellent beauty of this powerful Goddess. Wherefore shaking off my drowsy sleep I arose with a joyful face, and moved by a great affection to purify myself, I plunged my head seven times into the water of the sea; which number of seven is convenable and agreeable to holy and divine things, as the worthy and sage philosopher Pythagoras hath declared. Then very lively and joyfully, though with a weeping countenance, I made this oration to the puissant Goddess:
“O blessed queen of heaven, whether Thou be the Dame Ceres which are the original and motherly nurse of all fruitful things in the earth, who, after the finding of Thy daughter Proserpine, through the great joy which Thou didst presently conceive, didst utterly take away and abolish the food of them of old time, the acorn, and madest the barren and unfruitful ground of Eleusis to be ploughed and sown, and now givest men a more better and milder food; or whether Thou be the celestial Venus, who, in the beginning of the world, didst couple together male and female with an engendered love, and didst so make an eternal propagation of human kind, being now worshipped within the temples of the Isle Paphos; or whether Thou be the sister of the God Phoebus, who has saved so many people by lightening and lessening with thy medicines the pangs of travail and art now adored at the sacred places of Ephesus; or whether Thou be called terrible Proserpine, by reason of the deadly howlings which Thou yieldest, that has power with triple face to stop and put away the invasion of hags and ghosts which appear unto men, and to keep them down in the closures of the Earth, which dost wander in sundry groves and art worshipped in divers manners; Thou, which dost luminate all the cities of the earth by Thy feminine light; Thou, which nourishest all the seeds of the world by Thy damp heat, giving Thy changing light according to the wanderings, near or far, of the sun: by whatsoever name or fashion or shape it is lawful to call upon Thee, I pray Thee to end my great travail and misery and raise up my fallen hopes, and deliver me from the wretched fortune which so long time pursued me. Grant peace and rest, if it please Thee, to my adversities, for I have endured enough labour and peril. Remove from the hateful shape of mine ass, and render me to mine own self:2 and if I have offended in any point Thy divine majesty, let me rather die if l may not live.”
When I ended this oration, discovering my plaints to the Goddess, I fortuned to fall asleep again. . . .3
Lucius invokes the great goddess in the four names of Demeter, Venus, Artemis, and the underworld goddess, Proserpina: three light aspects of the great cosmic goddess of nature and a fourth, dark aspect. He has now fulfilled the whole cycle of his mother complex. He has experienced all the aspects of this great archetype, and that he can invoke her in four ways means that he has become fully conscious of most of the essential paradoxical aspects of this great unknown power which has ruled his life. He knows that the bad fortune which has pursued him is this goddess, and that only the goddess who is the cause of his misfortunes is able to turn them. For the first time, he does not even ask to go on living. He is weary of life, not even caring whether she grants him a continuation of life or releases him through death. The only thing he asks is that she give him back to himself. This attitude is the most important thing in individuation; the ego must take it when it is confronted with fate: not to want this or that; to give up the ego-will which would like this or that or the other; to want neither to live nor to die, or no longer to suffer. Lucius has been worn down so much that he has realized that nothing is more important anymore than to be able to be himself.
Here Lucius, for the first time, turns directly to the unconscious. This is so infinitely simple and yet the most difficult deed in the everyday psychological situation: when one is gripped by something and made to turn toward it, rather than being possessed by it from behind. This turn, which one could also call reflection, needs an inner quietness, a keeping still, stopping and looking at the situation in which one is driven, asking what it is that drives one, what is behind it. This is infinitely simple and infinitely difficult at the same time. But having gone through so much unhappiness, Lucius has reached this stage. He then bathes in the sea.
Then comes the famous prayer which begins with the words “Regina coeli, O blessed Queen of Heaven.” This invocation has been partly taken over by the Church in the cult of the Virgin Mary and has been used as a model and inspiration for numbers of prayers and litanies to the Madonna. After these opening words comes something which may seem a bit artificial, a mentioning of various goddesses, but here we must remember that the time is that of late antiquity, when many of the more educated people were impressed by the fact that all the different nations worshipped similar types of gods, and had begun to discover the archetype behind these different names. Lucius means that there is only one great mother goddess and that different people call her by different names and worship her differently. He directs his attention to the absolute essence behind all regional goddesses. He addresses the archetype of the Great Mother itself. We would say that he recognizes one transcendental power behind all these different goddesses. Therefore he says:
. . . whether Thou be the Dame Ceres which art the original and motherly nurse of all fruitful things in the earth, who, after the finding of Thy daughter, Proserpine, through the great joy which thou didst presently conceive, didst utterly take away and abolish the food of them of old time, the acorn, and madest the barren and unfruitful ground of Eleusis to be ploughed and sown. . . .4
He alludes there to the Eleusinian mysteries, in which the secret cult is based on the myth that Proserpina, the daughter of Demeter, was abducted by Hades, and her mother went to look for her, and so the great cult of Demeter’s search and the reunion with her daughter was established. Lucius alludes secretly also to the cult of Venus-Aphrodite when he says, “. . . or whether Thou be the celestial Venus, who through her son Eros has united all people. . . .” He addresses the goddess as the mother of Eros, “. . . being now worshipped in the temples of the Isle Paphos; or whether Thou be the sister of the God Phoebus . . .”—that would be Artemis—“. . . that has power with triple face to stop and put away the invasion of hags and ghosts which appear unto men, and to keep them down in the closures of the Earth.”5 Persephone is the goddess of death. Lucius gives the Great Mother four names: Ceres-Demeter; Diana-Artemis; Venus-Aphrodite; Proserpina-Hecate (the underworld goddess). Proserpina is the dark, underworld aspect, ruler of death and of the ghosts, but also protectress of the living against the ghosts.
He gives the goddess no more and no less than an involuntary quaternio6 of aspects, which represents a totality in a female form. He exhorts at this moment the mother-anima figure as being identical with the Self. This iden
tity appears often in the beginning phase of the development of the Self. In a series of dreams on which Jung has commented in Psychology and Alchemy,7 there are, for instance, dreams in which a woman appears with a round object which shines like the sun, and Jung says that there the anima and the Self are still identical.
Later Lucius realizes that the goddess is only a guide, a mediatrix who will help him to find Osiris, the real symbol of the Self.8 Only at the end of our book does the direct realization of the Self appear. But in the present moment it appears to him through the mediation of the goddess, indicated by her fourfold aspect. She is for him the totality of the psyche in its female aspect. The anima personifies here his overwhelming religious emotion. If we think back to his sensual attitude and his cynical intellectual attitude, we can see this new attitude as an astonishing change. Even the style of writing, the tone, has changed (though some mannerisms remain), which has even caused certain philologists to assume that this part of the novel has been added by another author. When Apuleius, however, ceases to be ironic and mocking, it is a tremendous achievement, for he now gives himself naively to the inner experience. It is an experience of the totality of the godhead, conveyed through the anima, revealing what was really behind all the experiences through which Lucius had passed.
Proserpina-Hecate especially personifies the magical aspect of the mother goddess. She transforms her lovers into beasts. Lucius suffered from the magical aspect of the feminine in his experience with Photis, but everything he has gone through has been along the lines of personal involvement; now, at last, the archetypal meaning has become clear to him.
At the end of the prayer Lucius reaches an attitude in which wanting to live or to die are no longer important; what is important for him is to be himself. There is an analogy between this text and that of the conversation in The World-Weary Man and His Ba, an old Egyptian text studied by Helmuth Jacobsohn.9 The Ba in this text personifies the soul or the Self of a man who wants to commit suicide. It says to the desperate man that it is a minor problem whether one returns to life or kills oneself. The only important thing is the man’s relation to his innermost soul, the Ba-Osiris, that is, to be one with the Self. The realization of the Self is an experience of eternity and conveys the feeling of being beyond life or death. To live or to die becomes secondary in the light of an experience which transcends the ego and our way of attributing importance to time and space. People who have had such an experience can die, as some primitives still do, with dignity and calm and without the struggle of the ego which does not want to submit to its fate.
After this prayer there follows the revelation of the goddess. Lucius falls asleep and dreams that the goddess appears to him in a personal form.
. . . and by and by (for mine eyes were but newly closed) appeared to me from the midst of the sea a divine and venerable face, worshipped even of the Gods themselves. Then, by little and little, I seemed to see the whole figure of her body, bright and mounting out of the sea and standing before me: wherefore I purpose to describe her divine semblance, if the poverty of my human speech will suffer me, or her divine power of eloquence rich enough to express it. First she had a great abundance of hair, flowing and curling, dispersed and scattered about her divine neck; on the crown of her head she bare many garlands interlaced with flowers, and in the middle of her forehead was a plan circlet in fashion of a mirror, or rather resembling the moon by the light that it gave forth [Helm: “picture of the moon”]; and this was borne up on either side by serpents that seemed to rise from the furrows of the earth, and above it were blades of corn set out. Her vestment was of finest linen yielding divers colours, somewhere white and shining, somewhere yellow like the crocus flower, somewhere rosy red, somewhere flaming; and (which troubled my sight and spirit sore) her cloak was utterly dark and obscure covered with shining black, and being wrapped round her from under her left arm to her right shoulder in manner of a shield, part of it fell down, pleated in a most subtle fashion, to the skirts of her garment so that the welts appeared comely. Here and there upon the edge thereof and throughout its surface the stars glimpsed, and in the middle of them was placed the moon in mid-month, which shown like a flame of fire; and round about the whole length of the border of that goodly robe was a crown or garland wreathing unbroken, made with all flowers and all fruits.10
Here we have four colors, and before there were four names. The goddess wears a black garment with stars and a full moon on it. She emits a wonderful perfume, and she speaks to him.
There are a few details in this description of the goddess which need discussing. She wears a moonlike mirror in her hair, something like the third eye. The mirror would symbolize seeing oneself by reflection, for a mirror throws our image back at us. Just as we cannot see ourselves physically, except to a limited extent and never in full, and are unconscious of our own form, we need the outer thing to reflect us. So the mirror as a symbol gives us the possibility of seeing ourselves objectively. It gives one a shock when one suddenly sees oneself in a mirror or hears one’s voice on a tape recorder for the first time. All such experiences show how little knowledge we have of our inner and outer appearance.
If, through analysis, one has gained a certain amount of objective knowledge and then hears or reads the honest attempts of people who have not had such an experience, but who want to better and reflect upon themselves, one realizes that what they have done is extremely restricted, for these people seek to understand themselves only with the ego and without the help of the reflecting unconscious, in other words, without dreams. The Godhead, the Self, is that which reflects us objectively, as without it we could not see ourselves. In Saint Paul’s letter (1 Corinthians 13:12) it is said: “Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” This means God knows us before we recognize Him, and He sees us before we see ourselves. Expressed psychologically, this is about reflection and having insight into our innermost being. We can only get reflected knowledge of ourselves from dreams, just as we need a relationship to others to know more about ourselves. So the goddess carries potential insight, the round mirror, as a symbol of the Self which gives Lucius objective Self-knowledge.11
The poet Lucianus interprets the moon itself as a huge mirror, and moonlight is a symbol of the diffuse light of the unconscious, contrasted with the more focused light of consciousness. In our example, the mirror is surrounded by snakes, the symbol of the deep unconscious and of the wisdom of the goddess.12
Now we come to the motif of the many colors: the garment of the goddess shimmers sometimes white, sometimes yellowish, sometimes reddish, and covering it all is a robe of black. The black would correspond to the nigredo of the alchemists, followed by the albedo, the whitening, then by the rubedo, the reddening which transcends the opposites, and finally the citrinitas, the yellow of gold as the fourth color.13 All these colors were also ascribed in antiquity to the underworld. They were the colors of the Beyond, and from there stems their correspondence with the four stages of the alchemical process in which the idea of totality is associated with the goddess who contains within herself the four stages. Black is the first color that one encounters in the decomposition of the prima materia, the so-called nigredo, when one enters deeply into the unconscious and discovers one’s shadow. This is also the case for Lucius, for until now he has only experienced the nigredo, a state of depression and folly. Even the garlands of flowers and fruits are found in the texts of alchemy. In the intermediary stage between the nigredo and the albedo there appeared generally a stage of varied colors, an experience of the world of plants and animals.
Black, white, and red are not only the typical colors in the alchemical process. They were used long before in the decoration of coffins and everything which had to do with the cult of the dead. In the Graeco-Roman, as well as in the Egyptian epochs, they were the colors of the Beyond. Black and white are in a way no colors, therefore one can really say that they refer to the Beyond. They are the most extreme opposites outside the sp
ectrum of “life’s color game.” In old Sparta, for instance, white was the color of mourning and death, just as black is with us. In China also, white is the color of death. So black and white, all over the world, are associated with the Beyond, with everything that lies outside the visible, earthly human life, while red was looked on more as a symbol of the essence of life. One finds red colors in Egyptian tombs, and even earlier, in prehistoric times, the corpses or the whole insides of coffins were colored or smeared with red, which was meant to symbolize the secret continuation of life in the Beyond and the idea that the dead are not dead but still have a life of their own.
These four colors of alchemy have been compared by Jung to the typical stages of modern man’s descent into the unconscious, in which blackness would correspond to the first realization of the unconscious, of the shadow, where one’s former conscious attitude is blackened out. This is a stage where mostly the shadow problem comes up. The shadow at this stage represents the whole unconscious and everything that has remained “in the shadow” as a result of the former conscious attitude. Very often, therefore, the first meeting with the unconscious brings deep depression, a feeling of confusion, of being lost in the dark, and the undoing of the former conscious attitude. Then comes the green aspect with its flowers and animals, which would mean that after having worked through the stage of the impact with the shadow, life begins to return.
The Golden Ass of Apuleius Page 19
