The Golden Ass of Apuleius Read online

  This woman had been widowed for fourteen years, and her former husband’s father had constantly pestered her to marry a certain other man, but she had remained single for all that time. Then Apuleius turned up and was ill in her house and she nursed him; the romance took place and he married her. That annoyed some members of her family who had planned what was to happen to her fortune after her death. Together with the second son of the first marriage (I am skipping details because we are not sure of their authenticity) these family members worked up an accusation that he had used magic to win the lady. He obviously, as we will see from the story, had a huge mother complex, so to fall for a slightly elderly but still beautiful and rich lady was not entirely unnatural. In the Roman Empire the use of magic entailed capital punishment. So Apuleius was in great danger because the accusation was not all that ungrounded. He was passionately interested in what we would now call parapsychological phenomena, so he could not deny that he was absolutely steeped in and well versed in all the current knowledge on magic. It would not be possible for him to defend himself against those charges very well. We still have his Apologia,3 his court defense, in which he relied more on eloquent, scornful, aggressive attack in defending the purity of his motives in the marriage, and elegantly evaded the most dangerous point of magic. Thanks to his brilliant self-defense, he won his case. That episode gives us a small amount of information as to his private life. He had no children, but it seems to have been a very happy marriage. His wife became his intellectual collaborator, even writing parts of his many speeches and sermons and going around with him, and also lecturing herself. He treated his stepsons, his wife’s sons by her first marriage, very generously, and even before his accusation had arranged that they should get the mother’s money. This was a major point in his defense, for he could prove in court that without any foreknowledge of a coming accusation, he had never tried to get her fortune into his own hands.

  In later times he held several official posts in the Roman religious administration, and for a while was Aesculapius’s priest—as sacerdos provinciae—in Carthage. These posts were purely administrative at that time. They were well paid but had very little to do with what we, from a Jungian standpoint, would call religion. He was very much admired as a successful lecturer and got many awards. Later he retired once more to Rome and practiced there as a lawyer. His initiation into the cult of Isis, of which he wrote at the end of his life, is also in my view an absolutely authentic bit of autobiography.4

  When I first read this novel I was put off by the mannerisms, the joking, the irony, the too-flowery style. If we ask ourselves what this kind of writing betrays psychologically, we would have to say that it is the typical language of a split personality.

  Whenever somebody is split, cut off from his primitive, naive deeper emotions, he lacks the possibility of simple self-expression. It is replaced by all sorts of artificial formulations.

  We also have to know that Apuleius was in a situation which we still can observe in modem Europeans. He was a member of a Roman family which settled in North Africa and which in the second generation shows certain typical defects that we now express by saying that those people have “gone native.” If people of white civilizations go to such countries, where the primitive modes of life and behavior are better preserved within their natural frame than with us, then the instinctual layer of the personality, and the original primitive impulses, are reinforced. If this is not observed and dealt with consciously, a split personality develops. One can observe this for instance in British people who have lived a long time in Africa. They have a wonderful way of not being disturbed in their own habits, and even when in the bush they will change for the evening into a smoking jacket and décolleté, and read home newspapers while surrounded by mosquitoes, snakes, and panthers. But it does not help, for the “native mentality” gets into the white people who go to Africa, and if you visit such families, you will find that they have the style of the white man as far as their way of living is concerned, but that little African traits come in negatively: the crockery is chipped, the curtains are not clean, everything becomes a bit sloppy.

  This is really a symptom of something which is deeper, for it indicates a slight abaissement du niveau mental and a reinforcement of the primitive layer of the personality. If, on the contrary, the culture of the primitive people was accepted and studied consciously, it would be for the white settler a great enrichment. For the white man who lives in such conditions, it is a task to get again into tune with the primitive man within himself, but he has to do it consciously. This is something which happened also to pure-blood Romans in the second generation after they had invaded North African countries. Apuleius demonstrated this even more than certain other Romans of the time, because, as we shall see, he had an African unconscious and a Roman consciousness. Lucius’s initiation at the end of the book is the positive breakthrough of African spirituality. In a part of himself, Apuleius lived in North Africa, mainly Egypt, which had the highest form of African civilization at the time. In another part of himself, he was an intellectual Roman philosopher. As an African person he would have been able to express his emotions freely, but as a Roman intellectual he could not admit them. As soon as a person does not, or cannot, express strong emotions, he loses his simplicity of self-expression, because emotion is the great simplifier and unifier of expression. This explains Apuleius’s flowery style, which gives one the feeling that he is not touched by his subject. Actually he is, but he tries to keep away from it. His attitude is ambivalent, as if he were touched somewhere but then tried consciously to hover ironically above it.

  Here one could ask oneself whether there is a parallel between the attitude of a man of the second century A.D. and of a man of today. We do have such analogies, especially marked in papers and articles on parapsychology, magic, and occult matters, where people display just this split attitude of being fascinated or touched somewhere by the irrational, but at the same time—partly to show off their own enlightenment, and partly because they are afraid—acting scornfully superior to the material and implying that of course the writer doesn’t believe it!

  To my great amazement, I have also met in Europe primitive people who are deeply steeped in magic, believing in it one hundred percent, believing in ghosts and seeing and talking to them, and who also have the same split attitude. In my family we had a maid who came from a very primitive Bavarian peasant family, and who was psychic and could talk to ghosts. Three weeks of the month she talked to ghosts and exorcised them, and did all sorts of things with them. But then, suddenly, she would feel that this was going too far and she would actually say, “You know, ghosts do not exist; that’s all junk.” The next day she would talk to them again. I was amazed when I discovered this in my childhood, until I learned that the Siberian shamans who have to cope in particular with parapsychological phenomena and have the living experience of such occult matters, and therefore know more of the subject than anyone else, do the same thing among their colleagues. When they meet together they make fun of it all as though it were nothing but trickery and cheating.

  There are therefore two reactions: the one of the shaman is fear, because such material is dangerous and uncanny, and there is a kind of effort to push it away so that the ego may be preserved to keep one’s head above water; the other attitude is specifically that of the civilized man and is a split reaction of curiosity, attraction, and fascination. It will be shown that Apuleius had the same problem. He was completely fascinated by the occult parapsychological phenomena on the one side, and on the other he had a scornful reaction which we can either interpret as intellectual distance-keeping or as some understandable fear.

  If we go deeper into what is happening behind the screen of the time in which Apuleius had the bad luck to be born, we can see that it was an age which in many ways resembled our own. The Roman Empire was outwardly, politically, still at the height of its power, but the original religious impulse, the whole moral setup of the Empire, was
already completely decayed.5 To use drastic language, Apuleius was really born into the decaying corpse of a dying civilization, as far as spiritual values are concerned. Within the decaying form, in the most unexpected corner, the process of renewal had already taken place and somewhere where nobody had ever expected it—Nazareth—and it was already slowly spreading surreptitiously and subterraneanly among the simple people, mainly in the circles of the slaves.

  If you want to get an impression of what the cultured layers, the privileged, educated people in the Roman Empire, thought about Christianity at the time, one must read the letter which Pliny wrote to the Emperor Trajanus in A.D. 119, which is the most revealing document that we have of the period.6 When Pliny became administrator of Bithynia, there was submitted to him anonymously a list of people who allegedly belonged to a sect of Christians accused of being dangerous to the security of the state. He wrote to Trajanus that he had picked the people up and, as Roman citizens could not be tortured, he had tortured two slave women who belonged to the sect. But, he said, he could not get any more out of them than a prava superstitio (distorted superstition). These people met on Sundays, a day which they called the Lord’s Day. They sang certain songs and said certain prayers together and afterward dined. Because that could be the hatching place of political plotting, he forbade the Sunday dinner parties, but otherwise dismissed this “distorted crazy crowd.” The investigation, however, had the desired results, for the meat market improved again. What the cattle dealers and butchers had complained of was that no more animals were being bought for sacrifice, but now the market had recovered!

  The words prava superstitio—“distorted superstition”—indicate how the educated man of the time felt about this new subterranean movement and shows the principal line of interest among people who were looking seriously for religious consolation. What flourished were the Mithraic, Dionysian, Sarapis, and Isis mysteries, in which people found some inner fulfillment. Yet only a smaller part of the population were initiated in such secret mystery cults. The greater part did not believe anything any longer. They adhered to some kind of nihilistic or rational philosophy, and the religious interests of the lower layers of the population regressed into the original level of magic and superstition, astrology, soothsaying, palmistry, and other archaic connections with the unconscious.

  Apuleius first went to school in Carthage and then to Athens where he studied philosophy and rhetoric and became one of Plutarch’s adherents. He endeavored to obtain admission to as many mystery cults as possible and through his family background was able to get introductions to them. He was probably initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries; he went to the cave of Trophonius, and later traveled in Asia Minor in search of other mystery cults—probably Mithraic.

  Of Apuleius’s works, only his Apologia, a few philosophical essays, and this novel have been preserved completely.7 On account of its pornographic episodes, The Golden Ass was the favorite reading of all the poor little monks and novices in monasteries throughout the Middle Ages. They copied it out and got all their forbidden information from it and, owing to this habit, the book was fortunately preserved until today.

  In order to come closer to the content of the novel, we must now look briefly at the philosophical ideas of the author, especially insofar as they relate to his theory of the human soul. As a parallel to Plutarch’s De Genio Socratis, Apuleius brought out his own ideas under the title De Deo Socratis. In this writing about the daimon of Socrates8 he develops a highly interesting theory with the following essence: the Olympic gods in whom people were supposed to believe at that time, he says, were too remote to bother about human beings in an emotional way. Zeus occasionally looked down, so to speak, and if things were too bad he sent a thunderbolt, but otherwise the gods did not concern themselves in any emotional way with human affairs. Man could not, therefore, communicate with the Olympic gods about his little sorrows and what one might call his emotions and feelings. Such intermediary traffic was made by the daimones, the demons, in the positive sense of the word. Much later, these daimones were the archetypal models for what in Christianity became the angels. They brought the prayers of human beings up to the Olympic gods, and intervened to and fro as messengers.

  In contrast to the Olympic gods, the daimones could be emotionally touched. They could show pity or anger, and were, so to speak, concerned with human affairs and could be influenced. Using magic or prayer one could have a positive or negative impact upon them. But besides that, each individual had his idios daimon—his own specific daimon. I do not say demon, for this evokes negative associations—something which would be wrong in our context, since we are dealing with a later period of time—but rather daimon, the Greek word which Apuleius translates quite adequately in Latin as “genius.” From the Jungian point of view, one could say that it is the preconscious form of individuality—a preconscious ego and a preconscious self—and the nucleus of the whole personality. In Rome on one’s birthday, one brought a sacrifice to his own genius, so that it might bring another good year. The genius made one genialis—sparkling with spirit and life. Naturally, the root of the word has also to do with genus—sex—so it made a man or a woman sexually potent, capable of functioning, spiritually fertile. It made one witty, put one into a good mood, made one emanate vitality and feel happily alive in all fields—creatively genial. Our specific use of the word genius is very restricted. As for women, they are endowed with a feminine psychic nucleus, a juno instead of a genius.9

  If one cultivated his own daimon, the genius-juno, by leading the right kind of life morally and religiously, then, according to Apuleius, one developed it, after death, into the positive figure which he calls a lar. The lares, like the Roman penates, are the household gods. In a Roman house the memory of somebody who had died was still worshipped. The son poured out wine for the lares, who inhabited those little statues of household gods generally kept on the hearth, and who also personified the spirit of the dead. They were supposed to increase the fertility of the family and to protect the house from damage by fire or water. They watched over the descendants in a place as protective ancestral spirits. If one neglected one’s idios daimon, according to Apuleius, one became after death a larva, a ghost, an evil spirit. Since they brought possession and illness, these spirits had to be exorcised.

  In such beliefs the oldest archetypal ideas of mankind were still preserved. The idea of the ancestral spirit becoming the household spirit is, for instance, found among many African tribes who keep the skulls of their ancestors in the hut as a kind of protective spirit. The idea that one’s conduct in life determined whether one became a positive or a negative ghost after death is more particularly Roman, though it exists also with certain primitive tribes. In western Nigeria they have the same ideas but say that the positive or negative behavior of an ancestral ghost depends on whether the person has behaved well according to their standards during life, so that a good man becomes a good ghost and a bad man a bad ghost. But this is complicated by certain taboo problems. For instance, if a cat or some other unclean animal jumps over a good man’s corpse before he is buried, the man might also become an evil ghost. According to Apuleius, however, it only depends on the religious and moral conduct of the person as to whether the daimon becomes a lar or a larva. He says that certain outstanding religious personalities such as Socrates and Aesculapius cultivated their inner daimon to such an extent during their lifetime that it became an actual part of them. Socrates, for instance, during his lifetime had such an intimate connection with his greater personality, that part which after his death would remain as his “soul.” Outstanding religious personalities developed their daimon to something higher than the average person did. They charged or loaded up the potential of their unconscious greater personality to such an extent that after death their daimon became a kind of collective or local god. Not only did the few descendants pray to that lar in ancestral worship, but many other people prayed or turned to it for help as well, so that lares became
protective spirits of whole communities.

  There are innumerable parallels to this. Thus, one still sees today in Egypt those beautiful little tombs of the sheiks all over the place. Exceptionally pious men were not buried in the common cemetery, but had little funeral chapels in the desert where others besides their relatives could go to pray. The worship of the lares, as it was practiced in Rome, was also the germ, the beginning of the cult of the “saints” in the Catholic Church, for this has its roots in part in this worship of the postmortal genius of an outstanding religious personality. In the Catholic Church it began with the tombs of the martyrs and later developed into what we now would call the cult of the saint. This did not become part of the dogma until the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

  It is important to look more closely at this theory of Apuleius because, apart from few exceptions, it has not been examined seriously until now: in literary works his writings are simply referred to in a cursory way as a repetition of Neoplatonic or Plutarchian ideas. It seems to me that the way he represents it means more than that. To my mind it is not only a creed or theory, but was what he really believed in consciousness. If one reads it with the key of psychology, it gives a very meaningful picture. One could say that the daimon represented a man’s greater inner Self. Jung describes the “Self” as the conscious and unconscious totality of the psyche—a kind of nucleus or core which centrally regulates the psychic processes, and which is in no way identical with the conscious ego. The Hindus, like some of our Western mystics, have, among other things, sought direct experience with this core and have recognized in it an inner reality; more frequently, however, it was projected onto an outer figure or a protective daimon. At the end of The Golden Ass, this daimon or symbol of the Self appears in the form of the god Osiris; before that he has been already embodied through the god Eros. Osiris was for the Egyptians a collective god, but one assumed that he also lived in every individual human being and that he represented the soul which survived after death. According to Plutarch, Osiris is a daimon. In all older civilizations the unconscious is seen as an outer being, whether it is in the form of an invisible spirit which accompanies us or is projected onto a talisman or medicine bag or any other such object. The Gnostics called this spirit a prosphyes psyche, an additional soul. However, it is especially in the mystery cults of late antiquity that one began gradually to recognize more and more clearly that one is dealing with an inner element of the individual of a purely psychic, but not subjective, nature. Apuleius was one of the first who experienced this deeply.