Psyche Papers 1.

1991

Dry Bones in a Dry Season

UCIUS APULEIUS was born in 125 AD. It was his misfortune to live in interesting times, in which he managed, however, to live an unusually varied and productive life. He was born in Carthage, then a Roman province, and educated mostly in Athens, where he picked up a leaning toward what is now called neo-Platonism, and also, apparently, some knowledge of those old Mysteries into which Socrates and his friends had been initiated.

He lived in the best of times, and also in the worst of times. His life began in the reign of Hadrian, one of a brief series of four "good" emperors. After Hadrian came one Antoninus, almost unremembered by us, but good enough to have been called "Pius" by his own people. After the Pius came Marcus Aurelius, surely the only Roman emperor whose writings are still read. Marcus Aurelius died in 180, in which year Lucius Apuleius would have been only fifty-five. No one knows the death-date of Apuleius, but he may well have had the misfortune to live on for some time in the reign of the next emperor, Commodus. He was not one of the good emperors.

Hadrian and Trajan both have, to this day, walls named after them. The Empire in those days was hard-pressed everywhere by what the Romans would surely have called "lesser breeds without the law." The walls were last ditches. Marcus Aurelius, whom I usually picture meditating to the plash of fountains, tablet and stylus ready to hand, actually may have spent most of his time reading dispatches from the front. In his reign, the barbarians attacked Rome for the first time and did considerable damage to what we now call the infrastructure before they were defeated and driven off by the scholarly Marcus Aurelius.

And then there was pestilence. Roman legionaries returning from the East brought with them the smallpox, and many thousands died. They brought with them also another sort of contagion, of which our knowledge is severely limited by the fact that only its enemies survived to tell us about it. It was the strange worship of a god called Mithras, the divine son of a divine mother.

The most interesting and momentous current flowing through the lifetime of the Apuleius was surely religious turmoil. Because we trace our descent from the winners, we think of it as the time in which Christianity was growing into its strength and beginning the march that would end in its official establishment under Constantine. (He was not himself willing to convert to that creed, but he saw some good use to which that powerful organization might be put.) Others, including Marcus Aurelius, who did what he could to stamp it out, and probably Apuleius as well, thought it just a plebeian and anti-social conspiracy against all orderly government. But that was only the beginning of the more or less standard Roman distaste for the new belief that was growing so alarmingly quickly. There was also a truly religious objection. It must have been that Christianity, in some deep and not entirely explicable way, just didn't feel right to an educated Roman of the upper class.

The official religion of the Roman Empire was little more than a convenient fiction, much larger in consequence, of course, but theologically of no greater strength than our cult of Santa Claus. In its practice, no one was required, or expected, to believe that the Emperor was a god, and except, perhaps, for idiots and very young children, I think it unlikely that anyone did. And thus one of the lesser but perpetual complaints against the Christians: Just what is wrong with these babies that they won't perform a tiny symbolic act which no one takes seriously anyway? It probably had no more meaning than we intend by sticking a Love stamp on the envelope we send to AT&T. The competition between Christianity and the cult of the emperor may have been religious from the point of view of the Christians, but for the Romans it was social and political.

But Christianity also had truly religious opponents beyond counting. My ancient Britannica says that Lucius Apuleius lived in an age of "reaction against a period of scepticism." Scepticism, or, more accurately, I think, a materialistic cynicism, a condition not unlike our own, might well have been an unintended product of the official cult itself, which offered "Neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain." It was no golden branch, but a dry bone in a dry season. But there were some golden branches to be gathered in his time, and at least one of them had long been understood both to offer and provide those very things, all the way from joy to help for pain.

They were what we now call by what I think a deliberately wrong name, and one so chosen to mislead us. What Socrates and his friends referred to simply as mysteries, we have come to call Mystery Religions, in order to make a distinction that was truly not the case. It allows us to say, and to think, that Christianity is one religion and that a Mystery Religion is another, and therefore, that one might be chosen in place of the other, but this does not usefully describe the difference.

The Greeks may have had religion, but, as we understand the term, they did not have a religion. They had no churches, but only temples, which served many purposes, more of them social and civic than religious. They had no scriptures, no written roots of doctrinal authority invested with holiness in themselves, but only the poets, truthful and beautiful no doubt, but poets all the same, often obscure and ambiguous, suggestive but tantalizing. And, most important of all, they had no clerical class with a vested interest in orthodoxy; their priests and priestesses, all very narrowly specialized in their functions, became such, and often only briefly, sometimes because of family, sometimes by vote, and sometimes by tradition or even by accident. Greek religion had no Creed, no Articles of Religion, no Commandments, no rituals of admission to the role of the faithful, no way at all of testing who was a member and who was an unbeliever or, even worse, a mistaken believer. It was not, like the Church of Rome, or even so amorphous a thing as Protestantism, for instance, a system.

But it was also unlike the Roman Catholic Church, or Protestantism, for that matter, in another way; it was not in some special and clearly bounded compartment separately established and set aside from the rest of life. The Greeks did not go to church; they were always in religion. Some of them were doubtless hypocrites and deceivers for useful purposes best known and kept to themselves, some doubtless serious and credulous, and some suspicious but puzzled by doubt. Of the poets they might well have said, as even Aquinas said of the scriptures, that they are truly the revealed Word, but that, all the same, their meaning was far from clear, and the best pursued hesitantly, tentatively, and very slowly, through thought and contemplation, through art at one end of a grand spectrum, and rational discourse at the other, and even through just plain living and the continual examination of living.

Of all such undertakings we see many examples in the conversations of Socrates and his companions. Even when they are talking about triangles and negative numbers, they are cheerfully engaged in an enterprise which they would have understood as "pious." To us, that seems an inappropriate word, for we want to hear it in terms of a religion, and we are little likely to put it into the company of the word "cheerfully." Our notion of piety wears a straight face, with the eyes turned somewhat upward.

Entry into the mysteries was not like joining a church. It called not so much for the believing of something, but for the learning of something. And that learning was apparently not the sort of mental act that we regularly, and to our disadvantage, call learning. By that, we ordinarily mean the acquisition of information. We say that we "learn" the days of the week and the capitals of the states, and in like manner other "facts" beyond counting. And then, we "know" them.

But such particles of information are not usefully to be called facts, not at all what Wittgenstein must have meant by "that which is the case." That a certain portion of the face of Earth is Arizona, is not the case. Just now, we happen to call it Arizona, and when that day comes when no one calls it Arizona, it will not "be" Arizona. And so it is with almost everything that we suppose that we have learned. But our "knowledge" of such things is strangely misty, and, like the zip codes of our friends and the principal exports of Japan, always subject to change without notice.

The learning of the mysteries seems to have been of a different sort. Socrates often refers to them in metaphor, saying what seems to be the case, that is, that one who would learn the greater would first have to pass through the lesser. This suggests at least one useful way in which we might distinguish between various sorts of learnings. Whether we learn the names of the states before or after we learn the days of the week matters not at all, but with such things as algebra and calculus, that is not so. But Socrates seems not to have meant, although also not necessarily to have excluded, such a pedagogically practical notion. He had in mind, I suspect, the sort of thing that we mean when we say, sometimes contrary to all evidence, that we learn by living and by experience, or, more accurately, as we are reminded when the evidence is contrary, not simply by living and experience but by reflecting on living and experience. Whatever it was that the Greeks "learned" in those mysteries, it must have grown out of reflection.

In the time of Lucius Apuleius, the ancient mysteries of the mother goddess were still being taught and celebrated in the little city of Eleusis not far from Athens. It would be very interesting to know what was done there, but we don't. The initiates were sworn to secrecy, and they seem to have kept the secrets. There are hints dropped here and there, but none of them are useful. How those rites and learnings brought so many, as many did indeed claim, into joy and light and help for pain, we do not know. Furthermore, since we ourselves gnaw on dry bones in a dry season, it seems most likely to us that those who had passed through the Eleusinian Mysteries were either lying or deluded, either deceivers or deceived.

Lucius Apuleius may not have passed through those mysteries. His time was in some ways like one through which we have recently passed. It was an age of enthusiasms, of appetite for wonders, and all through the Empire people of all classes were "into" fads and notions, like hippies meditating with incense and chanting mantras. Mithraism had taken hold among the legions, and for a while ran neck and neck with Christianity, itself an exotic Eastern import. Religious curiosities from the East, although not exactly new, were drawing new crowds. The cult of the Great Mother of the Gods had been established in Rome since 204 BC, in obedience to a prophecy in the Sybilline books. It held its own until 394 AD. But it was to yet another version of the mysteries that Apuleius was drawn, probably in those years that he spent, after his schooling in Athens, wandering and studying in the Eastern provinces. It was the cult of Isis that he chose, and he became not only an initiate of it but even something of an apostle.

All of those Mysteries of the Mother cults were probably much the same. The ancient Mother had countless names, and her history is very long and widely spread about the face of the Earth. Stories of her nature and doings are told everywhere and naturally subject to all possible variations in its particulars of time and place. It seems very unlikely that the mysteries could have been in serious competition with one another. They did not, as would seem only natural to us in the case of churches or denominations, generate what we would call "congregations," regulars who could be counted on to put something in the plate every week.

(Nor did the mysteries compete with other religions. Apuleius spent the latter part of his life as an honorable and prosperous citizen in Carthage, where he was elected to priesthood in the imperial cult and found, obviously, no conflict of interest or belief in performing his "sacred" duties. He kept the accounts of the temple funds and superintended the decent and proper management of the games in the amphitheatre.)

Most of those who came to be initiated at Eleusis came from very far away, and there was no duty laid on them ever to return. They were done with that. If they were expected to grow in what they had learned, which seems very probable, then it was obviously up to them to see to it on their own and for themselves, but they were not under orders to return. In fact, they were not permitted to return, for no one could repeat the process. It was obviously seen as a "passage," something like birth or maturation, a complete change through which a person could pass only once, and in only one direction. It was not, as we think in religious terms, a "conversion." It is better named a metamorphosis.

Lucius Apuleius was a philosopher, a rhetorician, a bureaucrat, and an advocate at law, but he is best remembered, where he is remembered at all, as a novelist. He wrote only the one novel, but it is a wonder. Like ever so many other writers until relatively recent times, he simply stole most of his best material. He would not have been annoyed in the least could he have known that others, Boccacio and Cervantes, for examples, would re-steal from him in their time. Until some time well past Shakespeare, originality and novelty were not thought virtues in art, and a good story was always thought well worth another telling. So it is that Apuleius' novel bristles with entertaining little tales gathered here and there, but mostly from an earlier work, The Metamorphoses of one Lucius of Patrae, which no one reads anymore. So unashamed of his plagiarism was Apuleius that he did not even look for a new title. His novel is also called Metamorphses. The name under which we now know it is The Golden Ass, but that name was given it later because of its popularity. It is about an ass, to be sure, but the "golden" is not a description of the ass but a judgment of the book. "Golden" was something like "super," maybe, in the sense that put it into titles, like that of St. John Chrysostom, of the golden mouth.

The Golden Ass is a rollicking tale of a young man's misadventures following his richly deserved transformation into an ass. It is, by turns, funny, fantastical, frightening, raunchy, and lyrical. One can easily see in it how this and that story seem to be tied together only by the hero's presence, and how such stories might be just as well told with different sets of particulars. But there is one story, truly the heart of the book, which stands out as somehow not like any of the others. For one thing, it is not something that happens to the ass, whose name also happens to be Lucius. It is a story that he hears, and also a story that he is not supposed to hear. It is a secret.

But it is more than a secret; it is a secret of women. It is told in a darkened cave by a wrinkled crone to a crying virgin. The crone is stirring a kettle, probably, as we would understand it, making a comforting potion of chicken soup. She tells the story for the girl's comfort. The men, the band of robbers who have abducted the girl right out of her wedding, are all away. The women do not know that a man is listening, a man in the form of an ass, to be sure, but still a man, and a man who will one day tell us the tale that he was not meant to hear.

The story within the novel is variously named. The worst name is Cupid and Psyche. A cute Cupid won't do. Psyche and Eros is better, since even among us Eros has some power and dignity left, in spite of his diminution into the uniquely sexual. In my own mind, I think of the story as simply Psyche. It is her story.

Such is the quality of that story that we have come to suppose it a myth, one more myth in the great collection known as the Greek Myths, which just happens to have been dropped into the novel along with other diverting tales. But that seems to me not right. Although it uses a few well-known characters out of the Greek myths, it places them, especially Eros, in very uncharacteristic roles; it has no readily identifiable family of versions, and no known source.

I would like to believe, and I intend to behave as though I did believe, that the little story of Psyche is the most audacious and valuable of the many plagiarisms of Lucius Apuleius. Of the story of Psyche, I will say that it either is, or might as well be, one of the secrets that initiates of a mystery cult was supposed to keep. It has all of the necessary attributes.

It is dramatic and engaging, and tells a story at once magical and exotic and also perfectly familiar to all human beings, a story of love, love's dreams, love's losses, love's search, and love's triumph. It has reversals and recognitions, violence and death, treachery and deception, terror and suspense. It would make a great movie. It tells the one great and seemingly perpetual story of the quest, its wanderings, trials, and discoveries, its coming out of the darkness and into the light. It is in one way perfectly clear, in another, it is a puzzle calling for solution. It stays in the mind and impels reflection. And it is just much too good, too well-wrought, to have been thought up even by the learned and sophisticated Lucius Apuleius.

But it is not for the sake of converting myself, or anyone else, to the cult of Isis that I would study this tale. This is not to say that I would turn down the chance to learn of those mysteries, for I am certain that they revealed something not so much about what we now call "a religion," but about something that we might think of as true education, the kind that ought to be capitalized.

As far as I can make out from reading around in Plato and other old works, just as there was no equivalent among the Greeks of churches, there was also no equivalent of what we call "religious education," no Sunday School, a process among us which would often seem to provide the opposite of the liberation implied in the word "education." It was probably from the poets, most particularly from the dramas, that the Greeks learned their "piety," and not from the preachings of licensed pietists.

Furthermore, while Socrates often refers to this or that person as "educated," he clearly means nothing like what we mean, that is, schooled or trained in this or that skill or calling. He does, however, always seem to mean something moral, some practice and power in the task of distinguishing the better from the worse. He seems to be thinking of an education not related to or dependent on any time or place or any set of particulars. It was some inward condition in which a Martian might well be found, and from which Aristotle would not be excluded by his ignorance of the capitals of the states. He was, of course, not unfamiliar with the fact that people could learn to be carpenters or pilots of ships, but he obviously did not think of that as education, or even as a part of it. As a matter of fact, he seems not to have imagined, as we do, that such an inward condition had any parts, but rather that it was one thing.

In our age, we find it very hard not only to understand that ancient idea of education, but even to want to understand it. About one thing, Socrates was perfectly clear: Education is not a condition of the mind, but of the soul. We can, apparently, accept the idea of winning hearts and minds, by which we seem to mean really sentiments and notions, but "soul" is a word that embarrasses us. "Psyche" does not embarrass us, even though it is the word for "soul," because it has been sanitized by the psychological "scientists," who were embarrassed by Freud's habitual use of "die Seele" and wanted to sound more up-to-date and technical. But the story of Psyche is quite simply the story of the soul, its birth, its growth, its trials, and its destiny. And that is to say, the story of an education, plain and simple, and without any admixture of the various things we now take for education, the amorphous collection of skills, information, social graces, and indoctrination that we have to mean by the word.

Furthermore, we find the story of the soul enfolded in another story of education, the story of a man who is turned into an ass. This is a familiar tale; we can all tell it, having lived it. But it is also the story of a man who knows that he is an ass, and who doesn't like it, and who would like to work his way back into being a man. This is a less familiar tale, but a far more important one.

Both tales are the stories of all of us. If they can reveal some secrets of education, it must be of a truly universal education that they teach, an education not of any time or place, but of whatever it is that is permanent and universal in persons. So it must be, alas, that an inquiry into such an education must be called "religious," but not in the usual sense of the word. "Religion," by its stems, means a tying together, a reuniting of what was -- or seems -- sundered, the recognition of relationship, perhaps, best of all in these times, a vast and mighty ecological revelation of the kinship of all that is and all that lives. Religion is to "the religions" what education is to the curricular divisings and schemes of the schools. It is too important to be left to the religionists.

 

Richard Mitchell

 

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