At last it is my turn to present how Marie-Louise von Franz interprets the various tasks Psyche receives from Venus in order to win back her beloved. I begin with her psychological interpretation of the first task, the sorting of the pile of seeds (a motif found in many fairy tales), what the ants symbolize, and why it is through the function of feeling that we can make choices and prioritize, i.e., sift the wheat from the chaff. Recall that the psychological meaning of these tasks is the embodiment of the principle of love on Earth through the feeling function (Eros). In the process of this embodiment, the archetype undergoes a narrowing of the infinite possibilities it contains, and human consciousness expands. The archetypes that make up the skeleton of the human psyche only begin to take on flesh when we have an actual human experience – the cognition of the archetype of love is solidified when we bond with another human being. And so:
“We come now to the different stages of Psyche’s journey in her search for Eros. Back in heaven, Eros is imprisoned by his resentful mother. In her despair, Psyche wants to kill herself and throw herself into a river, but the god of the running waters brings her back to the shore, where she meets Pan, the goat-god; with his great wisdom he advises her not to end her life but, on the contrary, to honour Eros, “the most exalted” of all gods, with her prayers. The great god of cosmic nature therefore helps Psyche to go on living. In between, the enraged Venus searches for her everywhere. Finally, Psyche surrenders herself to her and as Psyche arrives at the heavenly palace, Venus has her seized by her servants, Sorrow and Sadness, who torment her and then bring her back to face Venus. This part, I think, is understandable to anyone who has ever experienced an unhappy love affair.
Venus then orders Psyche to sort out a quantity of different kinds of seeds during the night. The sorting out of grain is a motif found in numerous fairy tales, for instance in the Russian tale “The Beautiful Wassilissa,” in which an unhappy girl comes to the great witch, Baba Yaga, the nature and death goddess, and there she must also sort out seeds or corn. According to Merkelbach’s interpretation, this could have to do with the Eleusinian mysteries, for corn is the mystical substance which represents the mother goddess as the goddess of corn.
The chaotic host of seeds is, in a way, an image of the collective unconscious, which seems to be, at the same time, a single essence and a multiplicity of images and creative impulses. One could say that as long as the archetypes of the collective unconscious are not realized by a human being, they are not real. They only become psychologically a reality if they are experienced by the human psyche. It is for this reason that the archetypes of the collective unconscious resemble a host of chaotically dormant “seeds” inborn in every human being, which, if not activated through contact with human consciousness, could just as well be regarded as nonexistent.
We can perhaps guess what such a heap of potential archetypal contents looks like if we observe a person in a psychotic episode. On the one hand patients in this condition pour out, at terrific speed, one archetypal fantasy after the other. But two minutes later they do not remember anything they have said. The most amazing, beautiful material pours through them, but they have no memory of it.
Thus the collective unconscious is seen as a kind of chaos of contents, all of which have the latent possibility of becoming something meaningful within human consciousness. But instead there is confusion, and consciousness is too weak to stop the flood.
Jung spoke of a patient he had, a woman, who talked a lot of absolute nonsense all the time, but then she would suddenly stop and say, “Hello, yes, ah-ha, thank you.” And after this “telephone call” she would be all right for a while, and Jung would succeed in worming out of her what she was really doing, and she would say that she had been telephoning to the Virgin Mary, who was very helpful to her and who would say, “Now don’t talk so much nonsense!” And that would quiet her down for a while, but then it started again.
One saw that there the normal personality somewhere still functioned but could not hold its own. One could say that a good mind is needed to sort out the material, but that does not help either because one cannot bring any intellectual order into these things. What is needed is the feeling function, the function of choice, which says, “Now I will fish out this and discard the rest” and “I will relate to what has become conscious to me and stay with it.” Without the evaluation through the feeling function one cannot know what is important and what is not. One cannot sort the chaff from the corn in the unconscious.
In the tale Psyche cannot cope alone with the corn. But there is still something that can rescue her, for ants turn up and sort out the grain. The chaos of the unconscious always contains a relation to order as well. In talking about the unconscious one must always talk in paradoxes, and when we emphasize its chaotic aspect we know at the same time that the unconscious is not only chaos but is also order. In the last analysis, only unconscious order can overcome unconscious disorder. Man cannot do anything but be attentive and make the utmost and, so to speak, hopeless effort, until order is established again by itself.
This is something which Christian theologians would call faith. Having faith and doing one’s best, when one is faced with what seems hopeless, gives one the underlying feeling that, even when one is lost, one has at least done what was possible. This is essentially human and it is a behavior which a god or an animal could not do.
Here in our story the same unconscious which is chaotic manifoldness cures its disorder by another chaotic manifoldness, the invasion of ants. We, in our Western countries, often speak of ants negatively, saying that “if we go on like this we shall soon be an ant heap.” This is naturally a negative metaphor for the complete blotting out of the individual, but the ant in itself, in mythology, is generally a positive insect. For instance, according to an Indian myth (recorded by Herodotus), it helps to carry the sun in its night journey under the earth. In Egypt the scarab does that.10 In some Greek sagas the ant extracts gold from the earth; it is the symbol of the secret orderliness of the collective unconscious, contrary to our bureaucratic state organizations. Karl Kerényi has connected the ants with the people of Myrmidones, who, according to a Greek myth, were the first inhabitants of their country:11 the Greeks believed that these people were born directly from the earth mother. Thus, in the Attic comedies, whose texts are unfortunately lost, there were antpeople, “Myrmekanthropoi,” who represented the first inhabitants. Contrary to the destructive mother Aphrodite-Venus, these “children of the earth mother” help Psyche.
The ants, and especially their cousins the termites, have also in reality very mysterious and unexplored qualities. One knows that hundreds and hundreds of termites will build a complete architectural structure. In an experiment to try to find out how they communicate when building, a lead plate was placed through the center of a termite building at its beginning; the termites on the left half built their parts for the whole building in a way that met exactly with those on the right half. One could take the plate out and the two halves fit. So one knows that they have no telegraphic signal, but work synchronously in a complete organization, which is something still unexplained. We know of bees that they signal each other when they wag their tails, but we don’t know anything yet in this respect about termites. One sees therefore that this beautiful image is more than just a simile really, for these things also happen in reality.
An artist who lived for a long time in Bali described to me the same process: a temple had fallen into ruins and for some reason the villagers decided to build a new and bigger one. To his amazement, there was no organizer, no plan, no architect, and in fact not even a stone mason to organize. One villager sat in one corner and made a column, another sat in another corner preparing stones. No communication went on, but everybody worked extremely zealously. In the end they put the temple parts together and every stone fit! The artist could not understand how the Balinese did this. They worked together inwardly, via the unconscious. The temple lived simply in their inner vision. That is the whole explanation. So one can say that in the right way faith is a great achievement, or rather pistis: loyalty to the internal law. When this loyalty or feeling constellates, it calls forth the secret order which is in the chaos of the unconscious.“
Marie Louise von Franz, “The Golden Donkey of Apuleius“
- Source: Amor and Psyche
For me, the most important of all said by Marie Franz above is contained in the last sentence – we activate the healing, sustaining powers of the unconscious when we are loyal to our internal law. This means to make the choice to follow what the feeling function tells us is the right thing for us among a variety of options, even if it means taking risks, rejection, and blazing trails. It’s the only way we can summon the ants’ help.
To be continued: “Psyche’s Second Task – Bringing a Golden Wool of Wild Solar Rams.”
