The Golden Ass of Apuleius

by Marie-Louise von Franz

  The chthonic, the earthly or nature mediator between the two opposites, is, in most texts, Thot, the baboon god, the god of medical art, spirit, and wisdom. He is connected not only with the sun principle, like the Ka-mutef, but also with material nature itself. Thot is the Egyptian forerunner and partly the model for the alchemical spirit, Mercurius. He personifies the nature wisdom of the unconscious. Taken in this way, Thot would belong to the lower trinity. The upper triangle in the diagram represents all aspects of the solar principle, and the lower triangle the aspects of the passive principle of Isis. One could say that the whole lower triangle belongs to the Isis principle.

  After Osiris was killed by Seth, Isis flew down in the form of a hawk onto his corpse and was able to extract some semen from his penis, so that she became pregnant after his death and was able to give birth to him again.

  She gave him birth in the form of the Horus child, often called Harpokrates; he is the “divine child” of all the late Egyptian mysteries and is generally represented as a little boy holding his finger to his mouth (the gesture of a baby), but it was interpreted in later times that he points to the great secret of the Egyptian mysteries. He is quite aptly called Horus, because he is really the restored cosmic wholeness, the restored totality in all its aspects. I have, therefore, put him in the center, between the two opposing triangles. He contains in nuce all the different aspects of the other gods: he is the new sun god, the renewed sun principle, and the divine child, who renews all life on earth. He is the secret spiritual goal which comes from the goddess Isis. When Isis reveals herself to Lucius, she brings to him the promise of spiritual renewal. She presents herself to him as Mother of the Cosmos—one of the names, domina rerum, given also the Virgin Mary. “I am the ruler of all nature: I am the highest of all the Gods and Goddesses; I am the queen of the ancestral ghosts (Manium).” She is the ruler of the ghost world.

  In later Greece and in Egypt there was a strong tendency toward monotheism, which culminated in the worship of the goddess Isis, or Nut. In Egypt the heavenly sky was the one all-embracing divinity, Nut, and all other gods were stars in it; their polytheism is the internal multiple aspect of the One.

  From the psychological perspective, monotheism tends toward a strengthening of consciousness and a unification of the personality and a movement away from the stage of possession. We inherit character traits and have contradictory ancestral elements in us, which drag us from one psychic condition to another and which the ego cannot quite bring together.5 Education and self-will try all they can to form us into one unity, but they can have no success without the help of the Self. This unity, individuality, can only be attained with the help of the transcendent function,6 expressed particularly in dreams, and which was personified in late antiquity by the god Hermes-Thot.

  Isis, the ruler over ancestral spirits, is a symbol of psychic wholeness, the Self in a feminine form. She governs human society through dreams. For instance, she gives instructions to Lucius and to the priests in their sleep, and synchronistic events accompany the dream. In our case she appears to Lucius and to the priest for the first time the same night, so that two people come together, through the principle of synchronicity, to perform what is necessary for Lucius’s transformation.7 Later the same thing will happen when they have to fix the moment of his initiation.

  From now on Lucius acts entirely under the guidance of dreams, even in connection to the amount of money that he needs for his initiation. If, in our times, a minimum fee is fixed for analytic sessions and if the therapist dreams that he must take a patient for less, what is he to do? I would do it, but insurance and professional rules prohibit most therapists from doing so. Intervention into the social order by the gods is destroyed by all kinds of bureaucracy or totalitarianism. Therefore, only a minimum organization is desirable in a society, for otherwise it kills the spontaneous spirit and destroys the secret work of the transcendent function. A too intensive organization and too many laws exclude the secret play of the gods and prevent the appearance of something irrational, which can be the germ of transformation. One believes in norms and that plans must be established, and by doing so one inhibits the possibility of a much greater spontaneous psychic event. If such a thing happens, it is either not noticed, pushed aside, or devalued. Thus the natural human community is disrupted and replaced by an artificial one.

  One speaks of “coming closer together,” one believes that one works toward it by “organizing” human relationships, while suppressing the one thing that will be effective: the irrational play of dreams. Mystery cults were secret communities formed by those who were “one” in spirit, wherein the irrational play could move freely. In the same way, there was a vibrant spirit in the primitive churches, a spiritual impulse which was neither utilitarian nor “reasonable.” Yet there everything was organized by the gods. It was and still is the “invisible church.”8

  Above all, Lucius must recover his human form. The Goddess commands him to take part in a procession which is arranged in her honor the next day, and says to him:

  Moreover, think not that amongst so far and joyful ceremonies, and in so good company, that any person shall abhor thy ill-favoured and deformed figure, or that any man shall be so hardy as to blame and reprove thy sudden restoration to human shape, whereby they should gather or conceive any sinister opinion of thee; and know thou this of certainty, that the residue of thy life until the hour of death shall be bound and subject to me; and think it not an injury to be always serviceable towards me whilst thou shalt live, since as by my mean and benefit thou shalt return again to be a man. Thou shalt live blessed in this world, thou shalt live glorious by my guide and protection, and when after thine allotted space of life thou descendest to hell, there thou shalt see me in that subterranean firmament shining (as thou seest me now) in the darkness of Acheron, and reigning in the deep profundity of Styx, and thou shalt worship me as one that hath been favourable to thee. And if I perceive that thou art obedient to my commandment and addict to my religion, meriting by thy constant chastity my divine grace, know thou that I alone may prolong thy days above the time that the fates have appointed and ordained.9

  When the divine Isis has spoken these words, she vanishes away. This is important. The Goddess demands that Lucius wholly accept his interior obligation with his feeling: he must be engaged, bound to his religious experience, for without this total engagement it is as though there were no religious experience at all. There are many people who have some great experience which somehow is swept away again. They have not recognized and accepted it, or realized that they had to do so. The moral obligations of gratitude do not only apply to our society but also to that of the gods. The inner factors also have the right to the human attitude of gratitude and loyalty, and of abiding by the experience. People lose that in moods and extraversion and do not feel the obligation. They eat the fruits of paradise, but then the experience is lost in the adversities of life, for they have not drawn the consequences of their experience. That is the alchemical task of keeping the fire going!

  On the other hand, one should ask why an event so numinous and impressive as the transformation of the ass-Lucius into a human being should happen in such a shocking way, in public. One aspect which has simply been omitted in Adlington’s translation, a detail which many translators omit, is the very last sentence of the book where Lucius, speaking to the priest of Isis, says this:

  . . . he chose me to enter the college of the Pastophores,10 nay he allotted me to be one of his decurions and quinquennial priests: wherefore I executed mine office in great joy with a shaven crown in that most ancient college which was set up in the time of Sylla, not covering or hiding the tonsure of my head, but shewing it openly to all persons.11

  The tonsura, the shaven crown, points to the consecration to the service of Isis, for all her priests and initiates had shaven heads, just as the monks of the Catholic Church do. The sentence continues, and many translators omit it:” . . . without being ashamed.” T
his detail furnishes the answer to our question of why the transformation has to happen in public. The tonsure has the meaning of the sacrificium intellectus. Some of one’s own self-willed thoughts are sacrificed to a higher principle. It is also a symbol of spiritual rebirth, and therefore he has, like a newborn child, a bald head. It is just as the myths say, when Jonah came out of the whale in which he experienced the great mystery, he became quasi modo genitus, again reborn. For from the heat of the whale’s inside he had lost his hair. That is very often a symbol for being a reborn child, a renatus in novam infantiam, which is another aspect of baldness, of having sacrificed oneself and one’s intellectual thoughts, of having gone through a process of rebirth through the underworld, and of being now and forever the sun child of the goddess. By that Lucius-Apuleius really becomes Horus, the reborn child, son, partner, and bridegroom of Isis. That is what he shows by his tonsure, and he has to stick to that in every aspect. The other transformation, during the procession, illustrates another awkward situation. He must eat those roses and stand there naked, and the priest has to get a shirt to cover him up, for everybody will wonder who that is and what is happening. I think the reason for this goes partly along the same lines as the reason for the tonsure, but beyond that it implies that he has to take the full force of the mockery in the open daylight of human life, of the fact of having been an ass, and of having become a human being again. Jung once wrote: “We owe mankind not only our good, but also our inferior side.” Mankind has a claim on that too. We owe that to it, so if we have an inferior side and realize it, then we have to accept it and the humiliation of taking it as such. But then, as Lucius would otherwise not have experienced, the redeeming grace lies in the fact that, to an amazing extent, other human beings then generally become charitable. It is a positive experience for the human beings around you to see you once in your weakness, and through that for you to see them becoming charitable. If you are always top dog, always the one who swings the situation, always the one who behaves right according to your conscience, you become a stone of offense to everybody else, because you give them feelings of inferiority. You never get into the animus or anima; your shadow never gets you; you are always right. So everybody else feels absolutely outdone. Therefore, it is really a worthwhile experience to have to once face the fact that you have done everything all wrong, and that you are just at the bottom of the pit, and then to find that even jealous colleagues suddenly become human, because you are not up but down. One could say that when you are on the top of the mountain, the water of life always flows away, but if you are at the bottom of the pit, then it flows toward you and you are given back to humanity. You are just one of those many poor devils who has struggled, fallen down, and got up again, and that is a tremendous feeling experience. Think how lonely clever Lucius-Apuleius, the philosopher, was!

  A religious experience means a total experience in which nothing must be excluded. For a mocking intellectual and coward like Lucius, it would be the greatest act of courage to stick to his inner religious feelings and his transformation in front of the public, even when confronted with the mockery of the educated Roman society to which he belonged; he must remain faithful in front of a frivolous collective attitude, of which he had formerly been a part. Thus he makes his inner experience into something whole, by excluding himself in this way from social vanity and intellectualism.

  Apuleius was loyal to his inner experience, but he never revealed its real religious secret. In the Bible it is said that the man who finds “the pearl” (the kingdom of heaven) hastens to conceal it.12 The pearl must be hidden, and it has no value unless one keeps it secretly within oneself, not taking pride in declaring it publicly or by trying to convert others and founding a new sect. Apuleius does not even say exactly what he experienced during his descent into the underworld. He finishes with three little sentences: “He descended into the underworld; he saw the midnight sun; he returned to the threshold of the upper world.” He maintains an almost total silence about his experience during the initiation, and that is right. This is the hiding of the “pearl,” the treasure, which one must not show to anyone unless on the basis of an inner command. This does not necessarily mean that one must no longer join collective social activities. One must only adhere firmly to one’s own inner experience, without exteriorizing it uselessly, and also without denying it. If this numinous experience is accepted with sincerity, genuineness, and courage, it will bring forth a conversion, a “metamorphosis,” a profound transformation of one’s entire being. This will then indirectly affect one’s behavior and will thus have repercussions in one’s social life.13

  Two attitudes are thus to be avoided. First is the desire to tell one’s experience to everyone, whatever the costs, at the risk of suffering misunderstanding and making a fool of oneself. This is frequently the result of an inflation, wanting out of vanity to impress others, which makes one lose the experience completely. The second attitude to avoid is the desire to guard everything for oneself, pretending that one is the same old intellectual or pious Pharisee, or whatever one was before.

  One can, as much as possible, hide the numinous experience under the veil of the persona;14 but if, by an interior command, one is told to unveil the experience, one must have the courage to do so. One may have to say: “I am not going to do anything tomorrow.” There is evidently no need to say that one acts so because of a dream, or to give an inner reason. But it can also happen that one has an interior command to stand up now and to say what one thinks, even if that means some kind of persecution. For instance, one may be led to go against a collective opinion, though without taking oneself to be the wise sage whose mission is to enlighten others, or by playing the martyr. Naturally the introvert will always be tempted to keep it too much to himself, and the extravert to blurt it out.15 Both are wrong. The oscillation between these two rhythms belongs to the work of the Self, if the inner experience has been understood rightly. In general, dreams indicate clearly how one must act. The Self determines when one should expose the secret and when one should hide it.

  It is very meaningful that Lucius-Apuleius, who was shy about standing up for naive feeling experience, should have to be exposed before Roman society, where all the nice mocking grins and pointed remarks of the others would certainly be directed toward him. They would mock at his shaven crown saying, “Ah, he has been initiated into the Isis mysteries,” and they would drill into that. Previously, mockery, intellectualism, and aestheticism were all part of Apuleius’s ego defense mechanism, and so to stand openly would be for him the test of total acceptance. His experience is not just a new small thrill which he can keep for himself, carrying on with his old outer life as before. Isis knows what she is doing when she imposes upon him the public confession. It is not what happens normally, but doing that fits his problem and his pattern.

  The question arises why Lucius’s redemption comes about through the intermediary of an Egyptian mystery cult and why the Isis-Osiris cult has such redeeming power over him. Why not the Christian or the Mithraic? We have knowledge of the fact that Apuleius knew much about other mystery cults and must have had therefore a personal reason for being more attracted and moved by the Egyptian. Because of his mother complex, a purely patriarchal mystical cult in which the masculine archetype of the god image was in the foreground would not have meant much to him. At the beginning it might have been of use to him by reinforcing his masculinity. If instead of falling into the hands of robbers he had gone into a masculine cult such as Mithraism, it would have been a better way to find his masculinity. But now it is a question of getting to the bottom of the mother complex and realizing its deepest meaning. Here the Mithraic cult or the Christian religion, both of which have a patriarchal character, would have been out of the question. For it was only in the third century that the cult of the Virgin Mary began to take on life and form, particularly in Ephesus. In the age of Apuleius, and later as well, that devotion was not very widespread, or was only locally recognized. Anot
her reason, which may have played a certain role, was the fact that Apuleius came from North Africa and that the whole of the African civilization was under the domination of Egypt at that time. Therefore, when the cult out of the unconscious appears in this Egyptian symbolic form, all his native earth returns to him. His earliest childhood memories are connected with this experience. They are his “roots”—to suggest more modern examples.

  In order to understand more clearly the problem of Apuleius-Lucius, we must consider the role and the meaning of the Isis and Osiris cult, in which the goddess always played an important part, in the late Egyptian religion. It is only at the end of antiquity that the absolute domination of Isis and Osiris came to the fore.16

  Helmuth Jacobsohn, in his excellent article,17 developed the idea that through the three thousand years of the development of this religion there is a further step, which seems to complete itself within the Christian civilization. After having emphasized the analogy between the Egyptian trinity and the Christian Trinity, Jacobsohn remarks that one can distinguish two basic rhythms in the emanation of a god and his becoming conscious. The first rhythm would be the phase of emanation and creation, and the second the phase of going back and gathering together what had been dispersed. The rhythm of Brahman, for example, could be compared to the diastole, while Atman would correspond to the return, or systole, symbolized in India by the sacrifice of the horse, or sometimes by a spider which, after having spun its web, consumes it again. The god loses himself into his own creation, and, in an opposite process, takes himself back again and becomes conscious of himself. Osiris’s progressively increasing role in the later Egyptian religion follows such a systolic movement: retiring from the multiplicity of his creation, the god condenses again and becomes conscious. But while in the Indian myth this movement is cyclic and extends over billions of years, the Egyptian myth contains a new element of progression and evolution, for the return of the god is not like his first appearance: it is not a simple repetition. If one were to diagram this movement, it would be a spiral and not a circle; its new quality consists in this: Osiris, when he is reborn, resembles the Ba, the human soul. He has acquired by his death and resurrection that mystical something which is human individuality, which adds something, an otherness, to the divinity.