Psyche’s First Descent into the Unconscious and the Symbolism of the Lamp

This is the next part of Marie Franz’s analysis of the story of Amour and Psyche, told by Apuleius in his book The Golden Ass. The previous parts are:

Although you will not yet read here about the psychological interpretation of the four tasks Venus gives to Psyche to reunite her with her beloved, from this part you will understand the meaning of other very important symbols of psychic processes and how they relate to love. Since the text is long, I have divided it into smaller parts with subheadings (the same applies to underlining and paragraph divisions). I believe that anyone who wants to know the deeper root causes of their mental processes will find this text very interesting. Among the things you will read there are:

Why the stage of initial falling in love is still not love and this is the reason Eros runs away from Psyche.
What is the meaning of the symbol of the lamp, with which Psyche illuminates her secret lover, and why Psyche’s passing through the series of trials is the necessary means of transforming unconscious love into conscious love.
Why the connection with our soul (Psyche) goes through the connection with our feelings and that is why contact with them is so important, even if it brings a lot of pain and suffering.

About these things, and many others, below in the text. Happy reading!

The first descent into the unconscious

“Psyche, who is looked on as an incarnation of Venus, incurs her wrath and is condemned in the Beyond to marry the lowest of men. But Eros, falling in love with her, decides to be her mysterious bridegroom. Psyche is placed on the summit of a rock for her funeral marriage and left there. But a soft wind lands her in a paradisal country where she lives very happily with her husband, who remains invisible, only visits her at night and forbids her ever to look at him.

In contrast to what happens later, the first descent of Psyche into the unconscious has a misleading aspect which takes her into an ideal place, a fool’s paradise of happy love. And, as with all fairy tales which run parallel, this cannot last. In this form, her process of becoming conscious is delayed, since for Psyche the event indeed seems to be lucky and a great blessing, but from the human realm it means a loss.

In the human realm, a female being who has already carried the first characteristics of Venus in an incarnated form, has disappeared into the unconscious, and thus the human world has suffered a “loss of soul.” At the beginning of the coming up of a new content from the unconscious, energy is being used, and hence there arises often on the other side a loss of libido, depression or emptiness, until one discovers what comes up from bellow and what has happened there. Therefore, we cannot be too angry with the two sisters, who, with jealousy, learn of the secret of Psyche’s happiness and who weave their poisonous intrigues by telling her that Eros is a dragon.

The slander that Eros is a monster is in itself very meaningful, because in antiquity Eros was very often represented as a dragon or a snake. In alchemy, the snake or the dragon is a symbol of the prima materia of the “philosophers’ stone” or the symbol of the “divine child.” So the two sisters are not too off the mark. In a way, they are even right: if the whole love problem has again regressed into such deep layers of the unconscious, one could say that it was completely inhuman and cold.

The dragon and the snake always refer to something in the unconscious which is inhuman – either in the positive sense of being divine or in the negative sense of being demonic. In either case they are not human and lack the possibility of human contact. Jung always pointed out that wardens in the zoo say that from the snake on downward even specialist in animal contact cannot make any feeling connection. One can tame and handle a snake for years, but one day it will bite and even the very experienced warden cannot foresee such a reaction. With warm-blooded animals, one the other hand, someone with enough experience and knowledge can foresee or guess their reactions. If we live close to warm-blooded animals, we can have an empathy for them that we cannot have for snakes.

As soon as a content in the unconscious appears in a snake form it is therefore often difficult to make the meaning understandable to the dreamer. He does not feel any empathy towards this content of the unconscious, which sometimes shows itself only in physical symptoms, especially in those which involve the sympathetic nervous system. It is therefore almost impossible to come into contact with anything which is stirred in this form in the deepest layers of the unconscious. We feel, quite innocently, that it has nothing to do with us, and generally it takes, in my experience, months before such a content becomes visible enough for one to be able to say,“Now, that is the snake.” Therefore, if the sisters slander Eros, calling him a snake, they describe it in the way Eros appears when seen from outside. It is too far away from the human and therefore the unreal, divine paradise in which Psyche lives has to be destroyed.

The symbolism of the lamp

The symbolism of the lamp, whose oil burns Eros, is double. In a modern German parallel, recorded by the brothers Grimm, it is the light (not the oil) that drives away the hidden lover. In a mythological context, light symbolizes consciousness. The light of the lamp represents in particular that which consciously is at the disposal of a human being and can be controlled by him, in contrast to the light of the sun, which is of a divine and cosmic nature.

Jung has pointed out frequently that it is not possible to describe the unconscious life of the soul using conscious and logical categories. Too much “light” damages the soul. Symbolic analogies are much more adequate, because the all psychic reality is never “nothing but” this or that, but rather is a living entity with innumerable aspects. Moreover, the hot oil of the lamp makes Eros suffer greatly.

In every devaluing interpretation of personification and of psychic events of this kind there lies hidden a secret motivation: the desire to escape the “divine” aspect that manifests in all archetypal manifestations of the deeper layers of the collective unconscious. The true motivation of this rationalistic devaluation is fear. We see this depreciation at work in the common modern psychological theories in which the great divine symbols of the unconscious are seen as “only” sexual or involving the power drive.

Beyond the fear, there is contained in the oil of the lamp still one more element, namely, “burning” passion, but a passion which has more to do with demand for power and possession than with true love. Psyche here embodies some personal traits of Apuleius-Lucius’ anima: his passionate longing of knowledge (curiositas) and his inclination towards magic, whose purpose of which is to manipulate divine forces instead of serving them. These intellectual qualities of his anima have prevented Lucius until now from getting to know the goddess Isis through personal experience and subordinating himself to the unexplorable mysteries of the soul. Love can endure neither an intellectual standpoint (these are interpretations of “nothing-but”) nor the passion which strives for possession. That is why Eros runs away, deeply wounded, and Psyche must suffer long trials before she can find him again.

When personal love becomes tragic

As Erich Neumann has pointed out, in that moment when Psyche begins to love truly she is no longer lost in the unconscious of the distant paradise of joy and death; rather, she awakens and behaves towards Eros like a loving partner. The personal love has taken the place of the purely collective principle of pleasure, but exactly at this moment love becomes tragic.

Generally in fairy tales the woman achieves individuation by suffering, while the male hero is more active. There are exceptions, but the hero slays dragons, fights with giants, or climbs mountains, while the heroine more often completes her quest by enduring suffering without giving up her love. Psyche is a typical example of the latter. There are innumerable fairy tales in which the girl goes in find the water of life, and so on. There are also texts from late antiquity, as I have mentioned, which describe the endless sufferings of the goddess Sophia and her descent into hell.

There is a certain amount of the same motif in Jewish teaching, that the divine aspect of the feminine in God, the Shekhinah, has to be redeemed from matter and return to God again. These Jewish Shekhinah tales were probably influenced by Gnostic traditions, or they may come from the same source.

The detached anima

Jung mentions this in his book Alchemical Studies. He says that wherever motifs come up in which the feminine side of God has separated from the male, it is the separation from the anima through the Logos, who wants absoluteness and the victory of the spirit over the sensual world. The more a man wants to establish order in consciousness, the more it will cut itself off from the anima and she therefore falls into the lower level, into matter. This means that he dissociated away from his anima, who sinks down into suffering and endless emotions.

Where the man does not respect his anima and keep in contact with her, she becomes more and more involved in sensual impulses and primitive affects. That’s why the academic man often has a worse character than the man in other proffesions, since he is the type who is the typo who tends to reject the anima and who therefore regresses onto a lower level. If you take away the academic persona from the professor, you might find just a baby. He is often the man who marries his cook for he is too lazy to find a proper wife and has no time to develop his feelings and woo a descent woman to whom he may have to give in to a certain extent.

The man who is absorbed in his books all day needs some ordinary woman, so he marries his cook because she’s there, and after few years she’s ruling him! He has devoted himself to the Logos, and the anima has regressed into primitive sensuality, affect, and emotion. Naturally, this is only a caricature of what happens when a man rejects Eros too much. And this is mirrored in the motif of the anima falling down from heaven and having to go on a long quest.

As started earlier, mithologically, the woman usually reaches the goal through suffering rather than action. It is a quest of endurance and of more and more suffering, while the hero often has to be active, though this is not always the case. Like the suffering, fallen Sophia in Gnosis, she accepts her suffering and goes a long way to find Eros.

Voluptas – the child of Eros and Psyche

In the tale of Eros and Psyche, however, one fact is definitely altered by the interference of the evil sisters, a little fact that Neumann skips in his book but which is an important point to me: in leaving her, Eros tells Psyche that the child she has in her womb will now become a girl instead a boy. “If you had not broken the secret,” he says, “it would have been a boy, but because of what you have done, you will not lose the child, but will give birth to a girl.” We know that at the end of the story, when she is on Olympus, she gives birth to a girl called Voluptas, sensuous love. She would have given birth to a boy, whose name we do not know, if she had not broken the spell.

If we interpret this turn of events from a human aspect and connect it back to Apuleius, then it becomes clear that Charité and Psyche are a personal aspect of the same figure in his unconscious, which is tied up to the positive aspect of the mother complex and to the great puer aeternus naivité. When one has a positive mother complex, he identifies directly with the divine child. He behaves like a winged god, refusing all the essential tasks of life, such as taking a firm standpoint of reality on his own, earning his own money, finding his appropriate line of work, and similar hardships.

Lucius has a negative mother complex, as we saw in the beginning. One could say that he, the ass, is completely imprisoned by the negative aspect of the mother archetype. The Psyche-Eros myth now shows an enantiodromia, an beginning turn into into the opposite. But since this positive aspect is still completely unadapted and unrealistic, the sisters can break into it.

This leads us to the question of what the “masculine child” who is not born could have been. The answer is: the child of the anima, that is, the Self. The result of the hieros gamos, of the sacred marriage of Eros and Psyche, would have been the birth of a symbol of the Self. A divine child would have been born, which we could have called the emergence of his Self in relation to Lucius.

In the psychology of the man, the girl who will now be born is a renewal of the anima. She appears as Voluptas, as sensual lust, of which one would think Lucius had already had enough. Though born on Olympus, this maiden Voluptas is closer to man, so that a humanization of the pleasure principle arises in her, but is almost immediately swallowed back into the collective unconscious.

A similar and somewhat parallel process is presented in St. John’s Apocalypse, which Jung commented on in hisAnswer to Job. A woman appears with a crown of twelve stars on her head and is pursued by a red dragon. She is to give birth to a new saviour figure, but is again taken to heaven and so the divine child is not incarnated on earth. Here we also have a description of the possible birth of a new symbol of the self, which, however, sinks back again into the unconscious.

This means that the time has not yet come when this aspect could enter the collective consciousness.

It also parallels the myth of Lethe-Apollo and the still living paganism of late antiquity. Here also is described the possibility of the birth of a new symbol of the self that is again removed into the unconscious. Here and there there are only the germs of such realizations, which are then lost again.

We should view the failed birth of a boy in our story as a parallel to the apocalyptic story; instead, “only” a girl is born and is taken to the afterlife. The question of why this is about Voluptas, sensual lust, I would like to leave for the end of the story, when we have to comment on the box of beauty that Psyche finds in the underworld, because it is connected to this.

The problem of divine marriage in human life

The bringing together of the divine, elevating, transpersonal, and freeing aspect of the hieros gamos, the sacred marriage motif, with the incompleteness and disappointing narrowness and dirt of human life, is still one of the greatest of unsolved problems. People either let themselves be intoxicated by the “divine” and romantic aspect of love or cynically remain in its banal aspect.

There is a beautiful representation of this problem in the novel Aurélia by the French author Gérard de Nerval. He was a deep-feeling and romantic poet, which is a very unfortunate predisposition for a Frenchman, and he liked therefore to live in Germany, where he felt much better. This he occasionally was able to do, visiting a German uncle in the Schwarzwald. As a young man and a gifted writer, he fell very much in love with a little midinette. Completely overwhelmed by his feelings and emotions, he wrote poems about her. He felt that Dante’s relationship to Beatrice could not be greater than this experience. But then suddenly the French rationalism and Gallic cynicism came up, and he decided that, after all, she was just une femme ordinaire de notre siècle, an ordinary woman of our time. So he threw her over.

The girl really loved him, and she fell into despair. Later a woman friend tried to bring them together again, but somehow, probably because of the cynical way in which he had thrown her over, really destroying his and her own feelings, the break could not be mended. When this woman brought them together again, the girl looked at him rather reproachfully and with tears in her eyes. That hit him very badly; in the night he dreamt that he went into the garden and saw that the statue of a beautiful woman had fallen onto the grass and broken apart in the middle.

This dream shows what really happened in Nerval. His anima had split, because now the woman was for him either the unobtainable goddess or une femme ordinaire de notre siécle, with whom you can just have a little pleasure. He could never bring those two aspects together again. He then slowly slithered into a psychotic crisis, which at the end overwhelmed him, and finally he hanged himself in a fit of mental confusion. He was a sick man, but he could have probably overcome his split if he had only understood that the hieros gamos and the ordinary aspect of every deep human relationship is a paradox.

Love is a moving, divine, unique mystery, and at the same time just an ordinary human event. This split is constellated in the same way here: at first the pendulum goes too much toward the divine Beyond aspect, where Eros and Psyche live in a kind of paradise, and then follows the countermovement initiated by the interference of the sisters, who, through bringing in all the most wicked and cynical aspects of life, destroy the connection.

I believe that a sense of humor is the only divine quality with which one can hold together these irreconcilable aspects of every deeper love experience. But people like Gérard de Nerval lack that; and so he became psychotic. He had no sense of humor at all, and thus he could not accept the paradox and say, “Yes, it is both, she is Beatrice, the experience of the divine woman, and also une femme ordinaire de notre siècle.” When a woman goes through such a process, generally the animus is the cynical commentator who tries to destroy every deeper movement of feeling.

The conflict between Eros and the drive for sex and self-preservation

C. S. Lewis, in his novel, retells the story from the standpoint of one of the wicked sisters, who in our fairy tale are described as weak, jealous, intriguing, and witchlike women. Lewis, however, projected onto this motif a rational woman who serves the idea of power and duty. She takes over the throne from her father and rules the country. She is in opposition to her romantic sister, who falls into Eros’s clutches and seems to be lost in a romantic dream. But at the end of the novel, in a moment of truth, this jealous sister realizes that she has missed the point and has betrayed the principle of love.

Lewis has therefore confronted the domination of Eros with opposing drives: sex and self-preservation. That conflict exists already in nature. The female sacrifices herself for the young, and the male often ignores his own self-preservation in the moment of sexual drive. These drives are the basis for many human conflicts, for here two genuine human urges do not coincide, and the still deeper drive to be oneself has to be constellated in order to overcome the difficulty.

One could ask now what would have happened if Psyche had not disobeyed her husband. The answer is that mythological laws are always transgressed, otherwise there would be no story! But there may be more to it than that. Such stages of unconscious harmony, like that in the story of Paradise, result in the stagnation of life, and naturally certain disharmonious or evil impulses are excluded.

Some people by a great mental and psychological effort will sacrifice the one pole of an essential conflict in the hope of establishing peace in their souls with the remainder. For instance, in the monastic life money and sex are cut out, and with them the source of innumerable conflicts, and by retiring from these difficulties the establishment of peace in the soul is sought. The whole Christian idea of inner peace is in this direction; that is, one first cuts out a certain aspect of evil which seems impossible to integrate, and then one tries artificially to establish harmony with the remainder.

All over the world mankind has a tendency to go in this direction. It is probably inevitable, for one needs from time to time to be able to set aside an insoluble problem. It is as though there were rest places where one has a moment of peace, though one has the dim feeling that the conflict is not solved and will reappear after a time.

One can observe this in people who draw mandalas and in doing so leave a part outside. They put the dark things outside the border of the mandala and imagine that they have now reached a state of relative wholeness and totality. But in this way they exclude certain aspects, and they can be sure that this state will not last. Some of these left-out elements will break in and a new process of integration must begin. At this point we have the essence of the whole novel, for all through it (though sometimes the author seems to be gripped by feeling) a mocking, skeptical tone creeps in, a devaluating judgment which works like the knife in Psyche’s hand. When things go well, a devil whispers in our ears that it is “nothing but,” a rational devaluation which destroys everything.

In a woman it is generally the animus who is the artist in this field, and in a man it is a certain aspect of the anima. The more sensitive and delicate and untouchable a man’s feeling is on one side, the more he tends to mock himself. The Swiss recognize this type of man in their poet Gottfried Keller, whose feeling, on the one side, was extremely delicate, while on the other he showed the typical mockery of an old bachelor. That was his defense against his own hypersensitivity. He drank too much and was incapable of dealing with the anima problem. Apuleius-Lucius has some of the same characteristics.”

Marie-Louise von Franz, “The Golden Ass of Apuleius”

- Source: Amor and Psyche

Next up: Psyche’s first task.