The Golden Ass of Apuleius Read online

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  The Two Companions and the Tale of Aristomenes

  At the beginning of the book, the hero, a young man named Lucius, decides to go to Thessaly, from which place his mother’s family is said to have come. He is riding a white horse and is going there with the intention of investigating witchcraft, Thessaly being in the whole antique tradition the place where the great witches lived and where black magic and occult phenomena took place. On the way he meets two people who are engaged in a heated discussion about a story which Aristomenes, a cheese and honey merchant, is telling. This is the first inserted story, together with the strange events the merchant experiences with his companion, Socrates. Aristomenes’ other companion seems a hardboiled rationalist who rejects the superstitious old wives’ nonsense Aristomenes is relating. Our hero, Lucius, who joins in the discussion, asks to have the story repeated and takes a third standpoint. Aristomenes believes it, having actually experienced it; the counterpart scoffs at it with rational arguments; and Lucius enjoys it aesthetically just as an amusing story, evading whether it is true or not.

  Apuleius has all three aspects of these personalities. He is the primitive man who believes and experiences such things in a naive form, but by philosophical training he is a rationalist and so also says it is all nonsense. Then, for the moment, too, Lucius probably represents more or less his original conscious attitude that whatever it is, it’s very enjoyable (which is also a way of keeping out of it a bit).

  Lucius has a meaningful name. It comes from the verb lucere, “to shine,” and from lux, “light” (which fits well with Photis, his female friend, whom we meet later and whose name is derived from the Greek word phos, which means “light”). Lucius thus represents the principle of consciousness or the possibility of becoming conscious through lived life experience.

  We will see, in fact, throughout the story, that names are used in an intentional way. The name Aristomenes—the best, the most valiant man—is naturally ironic because the man in the story does not behave at all like a hero. But it is also not by chance that such a very positive name is given to the man who believes in supernatural phenomena. The book is written in the first person and the hero calls himself Lucius,1 “the light one.” And this introduces us to the ticklish problem of the relationship between the hero in the novel and the author. What relationship had Goethe to Faust? Naive people who jump to conclusions assume that the hero represents the author’s ego complex, and more or less the author himself: Goethe would then be Faust, his shadow2 would be Wagner, and Mephisto would be his unrealized Self. That is true in a way, and in a way it is not. The hero of a novel or a story represents only a part of the author’s conscious personality. Whatever Goethe was, he was not an abstract scientist lost in academic dust, which is where Faust begins. Thus Faust could represent only a part of Goethe, but not his whole ego. And so it is with Apuleius-Lucius. Lucius probably represents an extraverted youthful aspect of the author’s ego, which lets itself get involved in an adventure in search of the truth.

  So, in the beginning of the novel, Lucius is on his way to his mother’s native land, Thessaly. He is a cheerful, lighthearted young man, normally interested in women, and rather the Don Juan type. He is intellectually curious about magic, but not deeply so. We know that Apuleius was a philosopher, that he wanted to be initiated into religious mysteries, that he had a mother complex, and was an intellectual, spiritual personality. Therefore, Lucius cannot represent his shadow but rather is his young extraverted side, that part in him which looks for life. With our ego we can split off an imaginary part of ourselves. We do it when daydreaming, when we say, for instance, “If I had my holiday now I would go to Greece and Istanbul.” You cannot call that your shadow, for you have used a conscious part of your ego to imagine something which you cannot do at the moment. Usually introverts put the extraverted part into such fantasies. An elderly man will imagine all that he would do as a young man. He imagines a personality which personifies certain parts of the ego complex, for the younger man in him wants to throw himself into life. Apuleius has been parked in his mother’s lap and stayed there, and his wish for adventure has not been lived, and probably that is what he has put into Lucius. So, filled with the spirit of adventure, riding on the hero’s white horse like the sun god, not carried by the chthonic, but by the light forces, Lucius is going to the land of the “mothers.” Like Faust, he goes where his mother complex is projected, to where he feels hidden things are taking place. He is fascinated by black magic and the chthonic side of reality which he has ignored until now.

  Within the intellectual who cuts himself off from the immediacy of life experience through his intellectual theories, as Apuleius did, there remains a kind of hunch or idea that certain things can only be made conscious through being suffered or lived, and not by intellectual philosophical views alone. Hence, Lucius also represents an aspect of the Self3 of Apuleius, the most essential nucleus of his personality, which will lead the author to a state of higher consciousness through life experience. He represents a preconscious form of his future ego, everything which for the time being is no more than a fantasy image in him, which he would like to realize. Generally such a figure of imagination expresses a wish, a naive hero fantasy, for almost all of us wish to be more brave and noble than we really are. I would therefore interpret Lucius as this aspect of the writer Apuleius: a model for his ego, which acts in the “right” way in order to acquire a higher state of consciousness and at the same time lives all the things Apuleius would have liked to have lived and never did to such an extent.

  Lucius has throughout the story only one main motif: he wants to experience the mysteries of the dark side of the feminine principle, of witchcraft, magic, and ghosts. That this is his main purpose shows that Apuleius probably had an enormous mother complex which took the form the mother complex often takes, that of being threatened by an overwhelming power, namely the archetypal feminine principle. If a man is too much impressed by the figure of his mother, whether by her fault or by his own disposition, she interferes with his contact with reality, with women, usually inhibiting or eating up his chthonic sexual personality. He may, being oversensitive, not have a strong enough masculine brutality to escape the mother and fight his way to freedom. Instead he escapes into the intellect where generally she cannot follow. In poetry or complicated philosophical systems, for example, he builds up a masculine world in which he can live his own life freely with masculine friends. I call this the escape from the mother into the stratosphere: one leaves the earth, takes an airplane and goes twelve thousand meters above the earth, where the old lady cannot reach, and one feels a man and free, but this has naturally some disadvantages. This is a very widespread type of young man who has a form of the puer aeternus4 problem, namely, as soon as he wants to touch the earth, either to have sex, or to get married, or to do anything that means descending to the earth again, there the old lady stands, awaiting him at the airport, and he still has to fight her. This is not as negative as it looks because at least in this excursion into the intellectual world where the mother has no say, he has acquired a certain amount of freedom, courage, insight, and so on, which later might enable him to come down and conquer his mother complex on the level of reality. So this detour is not a waste of time and nonsense, for if a man knows how to return at a certain moment it can be a good thing.

  From the little bit of data we have of Apuleius’s life he seems to have been one of these men who evaded for a long time an ultimate fight with his mother to free his masculinity. By escaping into homosexuality and into an intellectual way of living, in a way eliminating the feminine principle, the man of concrete enterprise in him did not get into life, did not fight the fight against the mother principle. In his novel Apuleius tries now to compensate for what was lacking. Lucius is now the man in him, that part which, at least in anticipation, goes right through the real fight with the mother complex in all its positive and negative aspects. In this way Apuleius created a figure
of a man who is now penetrating, not with the intellect but in actual reality, the realm of the dark mother and the emasculating tricks she plays on him; he is bringing into reality that part of his personality which had been left out of his life. Unfortunately we do not know exactly when he wrote the story, but most probably after his marriage. Consciously he must have been a man who feared the irrational, chthonic aspect of the feminine principle, because as we know he married an intellectual woman who became a cowriter and colecturer with him. Men who are sensitive in their feelings are often frightened of the elementary unconscious primitivity within themselves, and in women, and therefore are happy if they can find a woman to share some of their intellectual interests, because that protects them a bit against the chthonic underworld. Judging by the woman he married, Apuleius must have been such a man with a strong spiritual leaning and a certain fear of the chthonic feminine principle. This was compensated by a fascination for this dark world into which now Lucius, his fantasy hero, penetrates.

  Lucius, however, takes over an attitude from Apuleius: he wants to explore this whole darkness without committing himself. This feature which Lucius displays in the very first scene is his main problem: his absolute determination not to commit himself personally to his adventures, which is naturally wrong. Either one keeps out of it, but then one does not experience anything, or one studies it honestly and then one gets involved. One cannot study anything without getting involved inwardly. That is the case even in science. The effect of this story, toward which Lucius keeps an aestheticizing literary attitude, does not help. One sees so clearly what always happens—it just creeps up on him from behind.

  On the road Lucius relaxes and lets his horse feed. Then he meets two men, one of whom is Aristomenes, the traveling merchant of honey and cheese who has just joined up with another commercial man going the same way. One must imagine what traveling meant when there were neither trains nor police. Robbers could steal all your possessions and you could be sold as a slave at the next market and not be able to protect yourself. Even Plato once had to be bought back by his friends from the slave market. Traveling was therefore very dangerous. What helped was a widespread belief that travelers were under the protection of Zeus and Hermes and that murdering them would bring bad luck to the murderer. In such conditions travelers liked to join up to defend themselves together in case of need. In this way Lucius joins the two men and finds them in the middle of a fierce discussion. Aristomenes tells his companion what had happened to him and the latter refuses to believe it. The man who believes in miracles and witchcraft is for very real reasons the traveling salesman in cheese and honey, for these form a sacred food in many mystery cults, especially in those of the Great Mother in the Dionysian, Eleusinian, and Orphic mysteries. For you either drank milk and honey at sunrise or had your tongue smeared with a little honey, which meant that you were inspired.5 Poets were thought to have eaten honey, the divine food of the gods, which made you perfect and gave you a subtle spirit. Cheese is solidified milk and has also to do with the mother cult. In ancient times people would know about such things, and a honey and cheese merchant would believe in magic. The merchant tells his story, the one which the other man did not want to believe, and that is the first “inserted” story in the book. For reasons which I presented in the introduction, we should interpret the story as a dream, as an inspiration of the unconscious.

  The cheese and honey merchant goes to the market and finds an old man in rags, without money and in a sadly dilapidated state. It is his old friend, Socrates. He says to him, “Alas, my Socrates, what meaneth this? How fareth it with thee? What crime has thou committed?” He tells Socrates that there is lamentation and weeping for him at home and that his wife has been forced to take a new husband. He discovers that Socrates, on his travels as a merchant, had been set upon by robbers, but escaped with his life. He was allowed to go free, for he was too old to be a slave, and so went to the house of an old woman who sold wine and who was called Meroe.

  The name Meroe is generally associated with the Latin merum, meaning wine unmixed with water. A man who drank wine without water was a drunkard, and therefore this old woman is an innkeeper and herself likes the bottle a lot. Meroe is also the actual name of an island in the upper Nile, very little known at that time, which was said to be a magic place like Thule, or the Celtic Avalon, the faraway fairy-tale island. Perhaps this association was also somewhere in Apuleius’s mind, more so since one met there Pan and Isis.6 The old innkeeper is sex-mad, as only an old woman can be, and she takes possession of poor old Socrates, who has to serve her day and night. He tries to get away from her but discovers that she is a very powerful witch. He says:

  Verily, she is a magician, a witch! She hath power to bring down the sky, to beare up the earth, to turne the waters into hills, and the hills into running waters, to lift up the terrestrial spirits into the aire, and to pull the gods out of the heavens, to extinguish the planets and to lighten even Tartarus, and the deepe darkness of hell.7

  That is the classic description of a witch in antiquity;8 but what is interesting is her bringing together of the opposites: heaven and earth, waters and mountains. Terrestrial spirits are lifted into the air and gods are pulled down from heaven; planets are extinguished and the deep darkness of hell is illuminated. This witch interferes with the play of opposites; she is powerful as only a great goddess can be. All her lovers have to stay with her as long as she wants. She either castrates her lovers or, like Circe, turns them into animals. She does all that the “Great Mother” in her terrible form does to man in all myths.

  Aristomenes now wants to help Socrates escape the witch. He takes him to the baths and then to an inn to eat and sleep. They have two beds in their room. Socrates at once falls asleep. Aristomenes bars fast the door and puts his bed against it, but is too frightened to sleep. And at midnight the door opens, in spite of his precautions, and his bed is turned over with him lying under it “like a snail in his shell.” He recognizes the two women who walk in: one is Meroe, the other Panthia, her sister (Panthia means “all-powerful goddess”). After some vulgar but typical witch talk, they consider what they will do to Aristomenes, but say that first they will deal with Socrates. Then Meroe takes a knife and plunges it into Socrates’ throat, and afterward pulls out his heart. But the wide wound in the throat they fill up with a sponge, and they stop the bleeding with a magic spell. Then they turn to Aristomenes and, turning over his bed, urinate on his face and then walk out of the room. When he has recovered from the shock, Aristomenes realizes that everybody will accuse him of having murdered Socrates, and that he will not be able to prove his innocence. That was why the witches did not kill him but said he would regret it if he resisted them. In his despair he tries to hang himself, but the rope, being old and rotten, breaks in the middle and he falls, tumbling down upon Socrates. Socrates wakes and curses him, so Aristomenes discovers that he is not dead. Early in the morning they depart and Socrates seems to be all right, but after breakfast he is thirsty and goes to the river to drink and the sponge falls out. This time he really dies, and Aristomenes is again faced with the same situation. So, after he has buried the body, he disappears as fast as he can. Here ends the story.

  One could say that to give such an honorable name as Socrates to a poor old wretch as this old man who has fallen into the clutches of an old nymphomaniac witch was simply a joke. However, if we are not satisfied with that explanation and ask, “Why Socrates?” then at once we get into deep waters. As is known, it was the endeavor of the famous Socrates (or how he appears in the Platonic dialogues) to be apathes, which means not to have and not to display strong emotions. To have absolute emotional detachment was one of the main aims in Socrates’ search for wisdom. He displayed this apatheia in a complete form at the end of his life when, in prison, he drank hemlock at his execution. By this time what had happened to him is what happens, amusingly enough, to every man who represses his emotions and with them his anima, his feminine element.9 H
e had a wife, Xanthippe, the most emotional lady you can imagine, because if the husband does not have the emotion, it is generally the wife who has to have it, or the children. In this case it was the wife. We have, in Xanthippe, an archetypal model figure of the overemotional woman who moves from one noisy scene to another. Since, as a woman, I identify myself with the woman of the story, I must honestly admit that I would have made even worse scenes with Socrates. We know that Xanthippe went to prison to say goodbye to him and, in spite of his having been such a damn rotten husband, she showed some feeling and, according to the records, said, “Oh, Socrates, we are seeing each other for the last time!” He did not even speak to her but said to a slave, “Take her home.” You can excuse it all and say it was the trend of the time, that for a man to detach himself from his primitive emotionality and build up a mental attitude of apatheia, of philosophical detachment from life, was at that time a great cultural achievement. We know that this development toward building up a superior consciousness, detaching from primitive animal involvement and emotionality, and constant abaissement du niveau mental and its shifting mentality, was a cultural necessity. But we must also add that here we are dealing with a rejection of the anima by men, which among other things led to the homosexual development of the Platonic-Socratic circle. There was in that time a rejection of the anima as well as of the positive value of emotions and of the feminine sensibility.