The process repeats itself with the coming of each new sun-king. When the pharaoh died, he became Osiris. Then came the figure of his son, who had to lead all the sacrificial rites and take over the role of the Sem priest; with the iron hook, he opened the mouth of the dead, so that the dead could eat and drink and speak in the Beyond.
What would that mean psychologically? Let us compare this myth with what happens in a human being. A man identifies with the principle of consciousness and makes its meaning his own: he knows how to bridle his own impulses, he can work, propagate; in short, he becomes a socially adapted ego. On a smaller scale, he represents the development of the sundivinity. He feels “I am,” “I think.” He believes himself to be the owner of his thoughts and considers himself a small sun. When in the midlife crisis he falls into a depression, it is as though the sun descended below the horizon: all conscious values have disappeared, he no longer knows what he thinks and even doubts his own identity. This would correspond to the death of the sun-king in Egypt. This state is represented by the death of the king, though not the actual death. In a situation of this type the psychotherapist would try above all to help him carry on; instinctively he would feel like dropping everything and becoming completely passive, and, to a certain extent, this is wise. But one cannot simply remain in this state and await return: something in the person must assure continuity. A certain interior attitude is necessary during this time. I would compare Horus the younger with that attitude: he is the image of the consciousness which lives in death and which works on the corpse of the king. It is that which “brings about the redemption of his father.”18
In the process of individuation, the young Horus would thus be that psychological attitude which keeps up enough ego activity to say, “I will write down my dreams (the opening of the mouth), for the depression must convey to me what it is.” While you are attending to a deep depression, you are looking after yourself in a dead state, nursing and serving yourself, your greater Self. It is Horus, I think, who represents this psychological attitude at the moment of complete darkness. In predynastic days in Egypt, when the king died, everybody could steal and murder for three days. There were no laws. Everyone waited till the king died! You can imagine what happened. But later in dynastic times in the interregnum, madness did not break out because Horus stood on guard. This was a very long time before dynastic Egypt. Therefore, Horus represents the psychological semiconsciousness which caries on while one is knocked out and then becomes the new principle of consciousness.
The god Thot, too, took part in the process of the renewal of consciousness, but since Apuleius mentioned neither Thot nor Anubis, I do not want to go into their meaning. But I must mention that Seth, who was first a murderer, later also played a positive role in the resurrection of the king, when he was linked with the upper light and killed the Apophis serpent every night. Since he was thus cooperating with the sun god, he represented rather integrated aggression, instead of simply the autonomy and the brutality of aggression.
This development of the Egyptian solar religion appears to us as a projection, a process of integration of the psychic totality. It is what we would call today the process of individuation,19 but here the process is projected onto mythical images and dramas of gods and fates of kings. One can say that in the course of this process “the god” became conscious, step by step, in the human being. At first, it was assumed that only the pharaoh went through this process of death and resurrection that lead to immortality, but later it spread to the masses and was no longer considered a royal prerogative.
At the same time, toward the end of the old Empire, probably around the year 2500 B.C., the unconscious began to revive the myth of the feminine principle. (One could compare this end phase to the time of Christianity, in which the Pope, Pius XII, exalted the feminine principle and declared as a dogma the corporeal assumption of the Virgin Mary.) At that time (2200 B.C.), when the problem of restoring the inner totality of man became urgent, the one divinity which kept its unity and was never split into many figures was Isis. That is why it must be Isis who leads Lucius to wholeness. In the myth, Isis collects the bones of the dead Osiris and performs the rites of his resurrection. She is the instrument of his rebirth, hence Egyptian coffins often represented the dead resting in the arms of the mother goddess, Nut or Isis. The coffin and the lid carried her image; the dead await rebirth in her arms. Interpreted psychologically, Isis would represent the emotional and feeling experience of the totality which leads the way. Later one may also realize the process in thoughts, but she is the element of the religious feeling experience.
But the Isis myth also means something else. In the case of a man who, like Apuleius, repressed his feelings through a negative mother complex, the anima often appears as a prostitute, and in the dream this is generally interpreted as sexuality or sexual fantasies on a relatively impersonal level. It often does have this meaning, but I have seen people in whom such figures had nothing to do with sexual fantasies but had the meaning of a mental prostitution, namely, that such a man was not loyal to an idea or a mental image, but flirted and misused his ideas, the way he might misuse a prostitute, paying the money and walking out. Such men are not capable of recognizing a truth and abiding by it, for they have no feeling for it. To them, intellectual and mental processes are a sort of amusement or game or a means of gaining prestige. If they think that they can have success with it, they will stand for something, even if they do not believe in it themselves. Spiritual life becomes for them an instrument for prestige and for the furtherance of personal vanity.
Such men pursue an idea not out of conviction, but only in order to show off their own intelligence. An enormous intellectual output is produced by such methods with nothing behind it. This is mental prostitution, and often called so in dreams. The anima, or soul, of such a man is a whore who flirts with all kinds of philosophical ideas or political theories, but does not marry any, and has no children, so that his ideas remain sterile. John Dee, an alchemist of the seventeenth century, often held conversations with God. One day God attacked him, accusing him of whoring. Poor Dee could not explain what this was supposed to mean; he thought of all his sins and sexual fantasies and found nothing to correspond to the insult. But as Jung emphasized, his whoredom lay in the fact that he did not stick to what he realized to be true and was not loyal to his spiritual task.
Apuleius, too, flirted with practically every philosophical system and every mystical cult, without taking a stand. One can judge this behavior from the aspect of his sexual instability and the degeneration of his feeling function in relation to women, but it is equally a mental prostitution. This persisted until he had the vision of Isis that he describes in his book, where it is said in the words of Lucius that he is “going unashamed with shaven head.” He had finally decided to be loyal to his inner truth.
Apuleius probably was not aware of all these deep truths as we have discussed them here. But one wonders how the Isis mysteries could have had such a redeeming effect, that from then on he felt that he had found his place within, his relation to the divine, and the meaning of his own life? I think that one can see how much this motif belonged to Apuleius, if one remembers all the adventures through which his Lucius went. As long as he was a purely intellectually interested, idealistic Neoplatonist philosopher, Apuleius-Lucius was identified with the sun god Ra. That is literally so, because the idea of the good and the beautiful really dominated the Platonic ideas, like the sun in heaven in the center of all the stars.
Seen from this new perspective, the story of the murder of Socrates, discussed earlier, is also comparable to a story in Egyptian mythology. When the sun god Ra aged, Isis wanted to have his power and therefore created a huge snake, which lay in his path and bit the god, so that he suffered but, being a god, could not die. So Isis offered to cure him if he would tell her his secret name. In order to be cured, he had to sacrifice his power. The philosophical principle which has aged—the old king, the petrified conscio
us principle, which is unable to act—is overpowered by a dark mother figure, the image of the unconscious.
The transformation of Lucius into an ass corresponds in mythology to the killing of Osiris by Seth. His human side is covered by the ass or the asinine principle, comparable to the moment in which Seth kills Osiris. But Osiris survives within him, insofar as he suffers being an ass: Lucius, through all his experiences as an ass, is never really an ass, for he always suffers as a human being. One can say that in this case the divine in the human being is overwhelmed by the shadow, acting together with sexuality and all brutal impulses. Lucius’s humanness is drowned in the ass. His conscious personality is still there, but its fate can be compared to that of the dismembered Osiris. Then Isis appears, and in the Egyptian myth it is she who recollects the dispersed parts of Osiris and helps to bring about his rebirth and resurrection. She always does what has to be done. She does the negative thing in order to dissolve consciousness, then the positive thing in order to bring forth the process of individuation. As the destructive and at the same time redeeming Great Mother she is everywhere. She is the feminine principle which furthers the inner transformation. In the world of Ra she is the divine mother and eternal, and therefore we can say that when she wants to care for Lucius she wants to develop the Osiris quality in him. What she really cares for is his divine inner Self. She is that feeling experience which is meant to give birth to the higher inner personality of Lucius and can heal his inner split. Therefore, through the initiation in the mysteries, he experiences the inner feeling that his fate is comparable to that of Osiris. He recognizes the deeper meaning of what has happened to him. To suffer from neurotic complications, without knowing their meaning, is the worst that a person can experience; but to realize the deeper meaning behind them is already half healing. Then one can see one’s difficulties as part of a meaningful process, which helps one to accept and transform them. Isis solves for Lucius the problem of the opposites, the problem of Seth and Osiris. In Christianity the Virgin Mary does the same. Jung has pointed out that the new title of the Virgin Mary is domina rerum and regina coeli, which lays emphasis on her role in the Catholic world and expresses mankind’s longing to heal the split which our civilization has brought us. It seems as if there were tendencies in our civilization parallel to the end phase of the Egyptian development.
The Isis cult is described by Apuleius with poetic emotion, but he says practically nothing of his later experience in the Osiris cult. The experience of Isis was an emotional one and could be conveyed in poetic language. But about the other he clearly could not talk, for it was even more important and a real mystery.
But what happened to the mother goddess archetype when Christianity followed on the dying Roman Empire? Mary was given the title of Theotokos (Mother of God) and Sophia (Wisdom), and played a certain role in the Eastern Church, but in the Western Catholic Church she had to step into the background. Naturally, there were survivals in legends and local cults, so when I say that with Isis the archetypal image of the Great Mother disappeared, this must be understood only relatively. But in the official Christian Church there was a strong tendency not to take the problem of the feminine seriously, for the cult of the Virgin Mary was not a center of attention. In the Western Church she was actually replaced by the image of the institution of the Church, so that a part of her mystical quality was projected onto the institution of the Church, the Mater Ecclesia. Jung discusses this problem in Psychological Types when he comments on the book The Shepherd of Hermas,20 in which the author writes of his conversion to Christianity. The book was probably composed from elements of Jewish, Oriental, and Greek material. Hermas has made it into a pamphlet of early Christian propaganda, describing his visions and the inner experiences which led to his conversion to the Catholic Church.
To Hermas there appears in a vision an old woman whom he calls Domina, the goddess, or mistress, who gives him advice and shows him the vision of a tower which is the Church.
This vision is probably not all genuine, for much conscious material has been added to it. But the idea of his being initiated into the Catholic Church by an old woman, a dark figure, is certainly genuine and shows where the goddess continued to live. She had been transformed into the Ecclesia, the mother Church, so that a motherly quality was projected onto the institution of the Church, which replaced the figure of lsis.
Two aspects got lost through this development: First, the human-personal aspect of the goddess (an institution is never very human) and, second, the relationship to matter. For Isis was also an image for cosmic matter, and this aspect is not contained in the institution of the Church. There is, however, a certain concretism which compensates negatively for the lack of matter: the Pope represents God on earth, and matter is somehow contained in the Church, insofar as it is a concrete organization. But matter in our modern view is also a divine cosmic principle, as modern physics might discover soon. In the Middle Ages, however, these two aspects disappeared from the general consciousness, while some other aspects survived in the institution. If one has Catholic priests in analysis, one sees that their anima is projected into the Church. She is the carrier of the mother anima figure and partly replaces the real woman. The priest experiences the Church as mother-bride not only allegorically, but quite concretely. On the other hand the priest is the bride of Christ, he is therefore “feminine” and wears feminine clothes. He is thus simultaneously male and female. If he understands what he is doing, this could offer him the possibility of an experience of psychic totality, reached by the painful sacrifice of sexual life. On the other hand, the fact that a human institution replaces a divine power obviously creates a great problem.
This situation has also led to other consequences. If the human and material aspects of divinity—certain elements of an archetype—fade away from the conscious field of attention, we must expect them to reappear in the form of obsessions. When something essential disappears from conscious life, it will appear somewhere else more strongly. One sees this later in the persecution of the witches, upon whom the shadow of the vanished Great Mother was projected. Another obsession that is typical of the entire Christian theology, and which I believe is important, expresses itself in a certain concretism of ideas, as I would like to call it. The Christian teaching with all its dogmas suffers from it. If we try to compare the forms of thought of psychology with those of theology—and it does not matter whether Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish—there is always the same argument of the theologians, an objection often repeated, which must be respected, for it is extremely important: “God,” the theologians say, “is not only an image in the human soul or in the collective unconscious. All your psychological interpretations of the Trinity are ’only psycho-logical’; the Trinity must also have a metaphysical reality, and we, the theologians, are talking about that and not about the psychological aspect.” There is the implication that this “metaphysical reality” is the real thing. All theologians can agree with us if we tell them that there is somewhere a metaphysical space in which God and Christ exist, and that we are only speaking about their psychological mirroring in the soul. If we say that, the theologian is pacified. What he does is subdivide the cosmos in the old Platonic way, into one world which is “only” an analogy to the other, or an experimentally observable psychological world, and, beyond that, a second cosmos which is called “metaphysical reality,” and there God is as He is absolutely, and Christ as he is absolutely. Yet there the theologians speak of God as if He were describable! In analysis we can experience God in our own souls. The theologians know God, not by psychological truth, but through revelation, which is in the Bible, but God ceased publication two thousand years ago. Our God is an image in the soul, but the other is God from revelation. If you argue that the Bible was written by people, you come to the main complex, and then comes the difficulty. After all, the revelation somehow reached us through the human psyche!
If you look at it without emotion, then you see that it is a subdiv
ision of the idea of reality. There is something like a metaphysical or transcendental reality which is concretely real, and what flows into that is the suppressed matter aspect of lsis. That creates a kind of idealistic materialism. Theologians are generally caught in this mental materialism through what they call a “metaphysical fact.” It is a name obsession which exists in most theologians, and one cannot switch them out of that projection. The great mother goddess has been taken into the institution of the Church and has not been recognized as matter, so there is a compensatory unconscious materialization of ideas. Christian theology is much too mental. It is a patriarchal institution, and the mother aspect gets them from behind, and thus they are convinced that their ideas are somehow materially real. Our hypothesis, on the contrary, is that there is a living x behind the archetypes. We have not made the separation; matter and the collective unconscious are not two separate dimensions for us.
The Golden Ass of Apuleius Page 22
