After the articles on the spiritual dimension of love and the planet Venus, presenting the views of Liz Green and Alan Oaken, here is what Marie Louise von Franz has written on this very important topic, adding new and very important aspects to it. To this end, I would like to recall the nature of the psychic dynamics in the embodiment of archetypes on Earth, namely that it is a specific two-way process of simultaneous contraction and expansion.
“Whenever a god incarnates, there takes place for him this process of kenosis, of narrowing, while at the same time human consciousness widens… A relationship is never only a one-way thing, so the gods get pulled into the human realm and, in the countermovement, the ego expands its conscious awareness.
That is the process of the incarnation of a god.”
Marie-Louise von Franz, “The Golden Ass of Apuleius”∗
This process also refers to the incarnation of the goddess Venus. The story that Marie Franz analyses is the story of Amur and Psyche from Apuleius’ book The Golden Ass. Although at first glance the main relationship in this story is between Amur (Eros) and Psyche, the real dynamic actually takes place between Venus, his mother, and Psyche, his earthly beloved. He is merely the agent for the embodiment of the principle of love, for Venus and Psyche are one and the same thing – one is in the world of the gods, the other is his representative on Earth. So from the side of Venus this incarnation looks like a narrowing, but from the side of Psyche it is an expansion – what is expanded is the understanding and the realization of the principle of love. Below I will present a translation of an excerpt from this book, but now I want to present the main idea in it, which I find extremely valuable and important because it gives a psychological explanation of ideas I have read about in esoteric texts (I will comment on this elsewhere):
“The incarnation of Venus symbolically signifies the incarnation of God on the feminine side of development.
The incarnation of god on the male side of development has historically already happened – it is represented in Christianity by the birth of the son of god. The task of embodying the feminine side of the deity has yet to be accomplished – it is a task of the coming centuries that is becoming increasingly relevant today.
Thus, in the incarnation of the male god there is a descent into humanity and into matter, and in the incarnation of the female goddess, an ascent of an ordinary human being to a nearly divine realm. We are dealing, on the one hand, with the materialization of the abstract logos, and, on the other hand, with the spiritualization of matter.
The latter process is still today in its beginnings.”
Marie Louise von Franz
Here I briefly retell the story of Amur and Psyche as presented by Apuleius in his book The Golden Ass.
The story begins with Psyche being a royal daughter, the youngest of three. She was so beautiful that people began to worship her as a goddess and neglected their reverence for the goddess of beauty, Venus. As a result, Venus felt very neglected and jealous. She decided to take revenge by sending her son Eros to Psyche with the task of using one of her arrows to make her fall in love with the lessre of creatures. However, when Eros saw Psyche, he fell in love with her and chose to become this lesser of creatures himself.
Eros kidnapped Psyche to his heavenly palace, but without revealing himself to her. He came to her only at night, forbidding her to ask who he was or to see him. At first Psyche was extremely happy, but as time passed, the knowledge of who her secret lover was began to torment her more and more. So when her envious sisters told her that her lover might be a monster and she should check him out, she gave in to temptation.
One night after her lover fell asleep, she secretly slipped out of bed, took a lamp and a knife (to kill him if it turned out he was really a monster). But when she illuminated his face, she was deeply struck – it turned out that her secret lover was the god of love himself, the most beautiful of all. Her hand twitched with the shock, the lamp swayed, and a drop of oil fell on his shoulder. Amur awoke and was very angry that she had broken her promise. He left the palace and never returned.
Psyche deeply repented and began to look for him everywhere. Finally she reached his mother Venus. Venus told her she would help her, but first she had to prove herself worthy of him by completing several tasks – each one more difficult. The trials were overwhelming for Psyche, and on several occasions she was so desperate that she was ready to end her own life. However, with the support of various forces, she eventually managed to pull through. The tale ends with Venus finally giving her blessing and Zeus making her immortal. Psyche reconnected with her beloved, and from their marriage a daughter was born, whom they named Voluptas (pleasure).
Marie-Louise von Franz interprets every element of this tale and the four tasks and the way Psyche handles them are particularly interesting. I will write about them separately, but first I will present the translation of the opening part of her analysis where she comments on the nature of the principle of the incarnation of the goddess Venus. I suppose it may sound too abstract for some people, but it is the abstraction that helps us to see the commonality behind the multiplicity of concrete phenomena and thus to understand the root cause of what happens to us. So:
“This type of tale – the Amur and Psyche motif – is very common. Another example is Beauty and the Beast. This story is found in Russia, Spain, Germany, Italy, Greece and even in India and Africa. It is usually the story of a young girl married to an unknown husband who appears in either animal or demonic form, or forbids her to call him by name, to look at him in the light or in a mirror. She then loses him through disobedience and after a long, agonizing search manages to find him again and redeem him. Usually he has been bewitched by a witch or wizard. Most philologists believe the story is more than two thousand years old…
Here we are dealing with the typical motif of the marital quaternio, a schema that, according to Jung, underlies any transformation process based on love, namely: a real couple, a man and a woman, and the respective archetypal aspects of their anima and animus, which are involved in any significant situation of mutual individuation between the sexes. The married couple is a symbol of totality.
The fairy tale of Eros-Amor and Psyche begins with the story of a king and a queen who have three daughters. The youngest is so beautiful that she attracts all the collective admiration, and a rumor spreads that she is an incarnation of the goddess Venus. The people begin to prefer this concrete incarnation to the rather abstract Olympian goddess and begin to worship her, which raises her to the status of a goddess, thus making her lonely and making it impossible for her to find a husband. She also attracts the jealousy and hatred of her less beautiful sisters and of Venus, who discovers that her temples and cult are deserted.
The people’s idea that this beautiful girl, Psyche, could be a human incarnation of Venus is not just a naive opinion.
We will see that this corresponds to some extent to the reality, which is why Venus gets so angry with her. Psychologically, Venus would represent the archetype of the mother-anima figure. From Jung’s point of view11 the anima figure in man is a derivative of the mother figure, which is the first feminine figure to impress the young male child. She means his first encounter with the feminine, which, so to speak, shapes his disposition for reactions toward women and gives his anima certain characteristics. Thus, in an undeveloped state, the mother and the anima figure are more or less one in the man’s unconscious.
Hence, one could say that Venus embodies the mother-anima archetype per se.
Every man has by nature a predisposition to live such an experience, since its structure exists latent in the collective unconscious, somewhere “in Olympus,” to use the language of Apuleius.
There is no primary connection with that structure until it becomes visible by a human drama: the anima experience of a man begins, for instance, when he is interested for the first time in a woman.
The feeling which he experiences thereby does not involve his personal conscious memories only; rather the whole mother-anima archetype comes into play and leads him to the love experience, with all the richness of the relationship to the other sex, as well as its difficulties and complications. Later still, it can lead to the realization of an inner psychic factor, independent of the outer woman: to one’s own anima. For a human being, the experience of this realm of the psyche brings a fertile widening of the personality, which is why it has a healing effect. Here lies also the reason why Eros and Methē in Epidaurus were worshipped as healer gods.
The problem of the incarnation of Venus is still pendent: a modern English writer, John Erskine, wrote a book about it entitled The Lonely Venus. Erskine is very amusing and must know a bit about feminine psychology, or must have become a bit conscious of his anima. He wrote another most amusing book called The Private Life of Helen of Troy. It is the story of Troy after conquest. Menelaus is furious and is forced by convention to kill his unfaithful wife, who by running away had started the whole war. Blazing with fury and conformist indignation, he storms after Helen, but the latter meets him with her natural charm and first makes a gesture of devotion, showing her beautiful breasts, and saying that she completely deserves it and he should please kill her. In a bitchy way, she slowly reconquers the whole situation. She comes home, where the old servants are indignant and treat her as a prostitute. But Helen, humble, friendly, and typically feminine, modestly and slowly takes the reins in her hands, and at the end of the book she rules Menelaus and the household, and people begin even to think that it must all have been Menelaus’s fault. Erskine had certainly got a whiff of certain problems, and is very well orientated in antiquity.
The Lonely Venus, Erskine’s other work, is the story of the love affair of Venus, who is unfaithful to her crippled husband, Hephaestus, and falls in love with the war god, Ares. In this way she gets mixed up with human affairs. In the Trojan war, in contrast to what Apuleius writes about the Olympic gods, the gods were very much involved. Zeus and the other gods tried to keep out of human dirt, but Ares went to fight on the side of the Trojans, and through that Venus got pulled into it. In the end there is a regressive restitution of the persona of the Olympic gods. After the burning of Troy on earth, the gods retire and become aloof again. The end scene has Zeus and the other Olympic gods looking down from a kind of balcony in the Beyond onto the burning city with all its dead and the destruction of war. Only Venus, by having fallen in love with Ares and having therefore been more deeply involved with human affairs, is unhappy and restless and cannot make peace with the aloof attitude of the Olympic gods. In the last sentence of the novel she suggests that the gods should really become man—an allusion to later Christian development.
Looked at broadly, what happened then was that at the end of antiquity the Olympic gods had worn themselves out in their aloofness and inhumanity and had become obsolete, and then came the great new myth of god becoming man.
Historically, the masculine godhead has become a man, Christ. Incarnation has taken place on the masculine, not the feminine, side of development.
But actually there was a germ or beginning of the development in late antiquity by which the feminine goddess should become a woman, and incarnation should not be only on the masculine side, but on the feminine side as well. Erskine, interestingly enough, has projected that into the love stories of Venus. In Virgil’s story of Dido, Venus, more than the other Olympic gods, again gets involved in human affairs and, so to speak, elects a woman to act out her plans. Venus is the mother of Aeneas the Trojan, and in order to have him well received in Carthage she arranges that Dido, the queen of Carthage, should fall in love with him. Later, because politics advise otherwise, the love affair is ended, Dido is deserted, and she commits suicide. So one could say that Venus always has a tendency to get involved in human affairs, but generally the women she uses for her purposes get destroyed or are deeply unhappy. These tendencies toward an incarnation, or a linking of the feminine goddess with a human woman, therefore remained scattered attempts and did not lead to a great new religious, mythological event, as in the birth of Christ.
One can say that the incarnation of the feminine principle in a woman is still on the program for the coming centuries, and is beginning to become urgent today.
Seen in this context, the fact that the people wanted to worship a human Venus in the form of this girl Psyche, a king’s daughter, is most meaningful. For it expresses the wish of the people that Venus should also become human and change in that way. If we look at the process of the incarnation of a godhead in psychological terms, then it is the mirror effect of a realization by man, or the archetypal background of a psychological realization.
We think generally of modern man having an ego, then a threshold of consciousness, with the unconscious below. In dreams we distinguish the personal unconscious from a structure underneath (that which we call the collective unconscious), the energetic nuclei of which would be the archetypes. Normal man has no idea of this reality and experiences it therefore in projection. Through modern Freudian and Jungian analysis one has begun to discover this substructure of the human psyche and to see that the motivations behind our fate stem from there, and, coming through the filter of the personal unconscious, modify and influence consciousness. In the analytical process we use the word integration for what happens, meaning that the ego relates to these contents, has an Auseinandersetzung, a confrontation, with them, recognizing them as the deeper part of its own psychic substructure…
In our fairy tale, then, we can understand that Venus does not like to incarnate in a human being and resents being robbed of her all-encompassing divinity. She feels a typically feminine and rightful jealousy toward the girl Psyche.
Reinhold Merkelbach has taken great trouble to find out, step by step, the analogy between Isis and Psyche.13 He is convincing to a certain extent, but he stumbles over the fact that Psyche as well as Venus can be looked at as identical with Isis. That Venus is a parallel to Isis is clear, but that would mean that Isis fights Isis! We are dealing here with a split within the symbolic figure.
A fight arises between one part of the archetype which wants to remain in its original form, in its inertia, and the other part which wants to incarnate into human form.
The conflict is represented in a projected form as jealousy, when Venus says indignantly, “And now a mortal girl, who will die, walks about in my shape,” which very clearly expresses her feeling. She protests against the narrowing of her immortal omnipotence.
Venus then orders her son, Eros, to make the girl fall in love with the lowest of all human beings, but Eros, on seeing his victim, elects to be that lowest human being himself. Then it is arranged that the king, because his daughter has not married yet, is told by the Delphic oracle that she will never marry but is destined for a terrible dragon, or monstrous thing, and that, therefore, she should be exposed on the top of a mountain. This is a typical Greek version of the fairy tale.
In all the more modern folklore stories it is the girl who brings this fate upon herself. Some versions run: A father or a king has three daughters. He goes for a journey and asks them what he should bring back. One wants clothes, the other money or jewels, but the youngest girl asks for something nonexistent, something fantastic. For instance, she wishes “ein singendes, springendes Löweneckerchen” (“a singing, springing lion’s lark”), or a squirrel called Sorrow, or a white bear named Valemon, or a white dog from the mountains, or some such apparently whimsical thing. And when the father finds it—the lion’s lark or white bear or wolf or a squirrel called Sorrow—it says, “All right, you can have me, but in return your daughter must marry me.”
So, by a kind of wishful fantasy, the girl brings this fate upon herself.
Here it is replaced by the Delphic oracle, which is not much different if one realizes that the oracle was simply the place where people asked, with the help of a medium, for an explanation of the present constellation of the collective unconscious. Even before the greatest military and political enterprises, the Greeks never omitted first consulting the collective unconscious constellation to find out whether it was favorable for a war or not. That was very wise and corresponds to the fact that until the First World War the Japanese parliament still officially consulted the I Ching before great actions, and I think if they had consulted it before the Second World War they would perhaps have been better off. There they were already “enlightened” by our not doing so.
One could therefore say that something from the collective unconscious voices the wish for a union of Eros and Psyche and for an incarnation of Venus. It is the wish for a divine marriage between the masculine and the feminine principles.
Because Venus is the mother of Eros, and Psyche is Venus, we are dealing here with the famous mythological hieros gamos (“sacred marriage”) between the mother-daughter-sister and her own son, but this time in a partly incarnate form, since it is not only that an archetypal image of Venus is approaching the human realm, but also that the whole image of the sacred marriage is coming down onto earth.
The girl is exposed on the mountain and left there for a death marriage. The hieros gamos is often mythologically identical with the death experience, so this is not only a play on the words of Apuleius, for Psyche goes through a kind of anticipation of a death experience. This has also been pointed out by Merkelbach, who says that this first part of the love affair of Eros and Psyche is really something which happens in the Beyond, in the underworld of death, though in its blissful aspect. It is so, because Psyche is carried away by the wind into a kind of unreal, beyondish, magical situation, far away from all human experience and existence, where she is served by invisible servants and united with an invisible partner.
The underworld, which is identical with the unconscious, here shows its paradisiacal, fairylike, alluring, and soporific beauty, and Psyche is caught into its magic realm. Whenever a deeper love experience between a man and a woman takes place, there has opened up another dimension of reality; a divine dimension breaks into the psyche and washes away its egocentric pettiness. There is an element of romantic unreality about it which every passionate love experience also generally contains, at least in its beginning stages, a kind of Olympic spring blossoming where everything is divine and somehow uncannily real. That is why people in love are laughed at by those around them. If they are wise they disappear out of human society, they fall out of it, because they are now in the realm of the gods… (for more see Marie Louise von Franz on the “romance-triviality” duality in love )
Psyche herself could best be compared to all the young mythological daughters of the great mother goddess. From Kerényi’s paper on the Kore myth, and Jung’s commentary on it, in Essays on a Science of Mythology, we find out more about these two figures. One could take Psyche as a variant of the Greek goddess Kore. Besides the mature woman there is the young girl who simply represents the mother goddess in her rejuvenated form. Mother and daughter are one, in the same way as the Father and the Son in the Christian religion. We have to ask, however, what the difference is between the mother and the daughter goddess, and in general we can say, looked at mutatis mutandis, that the daughter goddess is closer to the human than the mother goddess, just as God the Father is more removed from man than Christ.
The same difference is true in regard to Kore. The girl goddess is closer to humanity, being a more incarnated form of the mother goddess, and Psyche would correspond to a more humanized form of the Great Mother, a form which has almost completely reached the human level. Only her name still implies that she is divine. In the great Demeter-Kore myth, Kore sometimes has to live with her mother in the upper world, and sometimes with Pluto in the lower world. Psyche, too, is connected with the underworld through a daimon who seems to be a god of death. Only at the end is she redeemed and taken up to Olympus. So one sees that her fate is a new variation of the old Demeter-Kore myth, and that she herself is an incarnated form of the Great Mother. In a man’s psychology this myth represents the problem of making himself conscious of and integrating his anima.
If a man is capable of integrating the anima, of establishing human contact with his anima, then he brings something archetypal into the realm of his humanity. From the man’s side this would be making the anima conscious, but seen from the side of the unconscious itself it means that the archetype incarnates.
As Apuleius believed, the gods are removed from man and cannot be contacted directly. When the archetype appears as a synchronistic phenomenon you cannot do anything with it. You can see a meaning in it but you cannot influence it. Gods are, so to speak, the archetypes among themselves, and among them is the mother archetype—the great queen of heaven. Closer to man comes Kore-Psyche, the archetypal image entering the personal field of a man’s ego. I would like to illustrate this with an example.
A young man who had a positive mother complex dreamed of a mother goddess, a huge green woman with huge green hanging breasts, who was quite terrifying. He ran away from her in many dreams, so I got him to do an active imagination on the dream, that is, to take up contact with her in a waking fantasy.16 He approached her in a little boat and tried to enter a conversation with her, but he could not get close to the figure, for she was too frightening. All the same he saw that the whole had to do with his mother complex and his romantic veneration for nature. Then in outer life he got into contact with a beautiful, hysterical woman who behaved as a nature demon would. I said that he should talk to this woman inside himself, and when he did this, she said, “I am the same as the green one with whom you could not talk.” This irrational, catty woman said she was immortal! He said that he did not accept that, but she answered that she was the beginning and the end, meaning that she was God. Then a long conversation started in which the whole of his Weltanschauung had to be rediscussed. He had to review his whole attitude to life, which she pulled to pieces bit by bit. The green woman on the first level would be practically unapproachable, and the next step would be the Kore figure, which had a personal connection with him and with whom he could make contact…
We have seen that Psyche and Venus are two aspects of the same archetype, Venus symbolizing more the anima which is mixed with the maternal image and Psyche the actual anima which is no longer contaminated with the maternal image. One could imagine the archetypes like atomic nuclei in the field of the unconscious. Most probably, there they are in a state in which every element is influenced by all the others.
Thus an archetype in the unconscious is in some way also identical with the whole unconscious. It contains in itself the opposites: it is everything, masculine and feminine, dark and light, everything overlaps. Only when an archetype approaches the threshold of consciousness does it become more distinct. In our story, Venus resents that she, the omnipotent goddess in the Beyond, has now a rival on earth.
This is a widespread problem in late antiquity. It appears with variations, for instance, in the so-called “Songs of the Fallen Sophia,” which were written about the time of Apuleius. According to some Gnostic systems, especially in the book Pistis Sophia, there was with God at the beginning of creation a feminine figure or companion: Sophia, Wisdom. In the Apocrypha of the Old Testament, too, she is represented as the Wisdom of God. (See the Song of Solomon, Jesus Sirach, and Proverbs.) There she says: “Before God created the world I was there. I played with Him. . . .” But, since according to Christian teaching God is not married and has no feminine companion, the interpretation of these texts gave some trouble to the Church Fathers, who therefore said that this was the pre-incarnate form of the “anima Christi” before his incarnation.
In many Gnostic systems it is said that Sophia was with God at the beginning of, or before, creation, but later she sank down into matter and was cut off from God. She had lost her connection, and in seeking Him when looking down into matter she saw a lion-headed demon, Jaldabaoth, and she thought that that was God the Father and went down, and Jaldabaôth caught her. There are very beautiful songs and poems in which she calls back to the Heavenly Father asking for his help to free her from matter and from her contamination with the demons and with Jaldabaôth.
The Gnostics in late antiquity were the philosophers and thinkers in the early Church, and it is not by chance that they have amplified the myth of the fallen Sophia, because as Jung says, if a man identifies with the Logos or the intellect, his emotional and feeling side falls into the unconscious and must be redeemed from there.2 His soul then becomes contaminated with primitive chthonic passion. This myth, developed especially by the Gnostics, was forgotten after the Church decided to expel the Gnostic philosophers and declare their system as heresy.
Were we to compare the incarnation of the Father God in Christ with the incarnation that occurs in the story of Amor and Psyche, we would have different images. God comes down from the heavenly sphere, carefully purified from any macula peccati, and takes on human form. In the parallel of our story, the incarnation of the goddess is not the same. Venus does not come down and incarnate in a feminine being, but instead an ordinary feminine being is elevated and regarded as a personification of Venus and rises slowly up to Olympus.
In the development of the Catholic teaching, too, the Virgin Mary is first an ordinary feminine being who slowly, through the historical processes, is elevated to nearly divine rank. Thus, in the incarnation of the male god there is a descent into humanity and into matter, and in the incarnation of the female goddess, an ascent of an ordinary human being to a nearly divine realm. We are dealing, on the one hand, with the materialization of the abstract logos, and, on the other hand, with the spiritualization of matter. The latter process is still today in its beginnings.”
Source : Amor and Psyche; The Golden Ass of Apuleius: The Liberation of the Feminine in Man
Marie-Louise von Franz
Next: Eros is Puer Aeternus
∗The quoted passages reflect paraphrased formulations already present in the original Bulgarian text. The English version aims at a faithful translation of that text, not at reproducing literal quotations from Marie-Louise von Franz’s original works.
