Apuleius and The Metamorphoses: the Golden Ass and the mysteries of Isis
Lucius turned into an ass, the tale of Cupid and Psyche and Book XI devoted to Isis: Apuleius's novel as a story of fall and initiation.
The Metamorphoses of Apuleius, also known as The Golden Ass, is the only Latin novel to have survived complete. Its author, born in Madauros, in present-day Algeria, around AD 125, was a renowned orator, Platonic philosopher and lecturer. The book opens with a promise to the reader, «Lector, intende: laetaberis», listen and you will be delighted, but beneath its adventurous surface it hides a path of inner transformation.
A trial for magic
Apuleius also knew the theme of magic from direct experience. Around AD 158-159, at Sabratha in Tripolitania, he was accused by the relatives of the wealthy widow Pudentilla, whom he had married, of having won her through magical arts. He defended himself with a speech that has come down to us, the Apology or De magia, in which he ridicules his accusers and distinguishes the wisdom of philosophers from vulgar sorcery. According to the prevailing view, he was acquitted.
Lucius and curiosity punished
The protagonist, the young Lucius, travels to Thessaly, a land famous in antiquity for its witches. In Hypata he is the guest of Milo, whose wife Pamphile practises magic. Driven by curiosity, Lucius persuades the maid Photis to let him watch a transformation and wants to imitate it, but by mistake he is changed into an ass, while keeping his human intelligence.
So begins a long series of misadventures. Kidnapped by bandits, sold to various masters, mistreated and threatened, Lucius sees the world from below and observes the vices and cruelty of human beings. To become human again he would have to eat roses, but the chance keeps slipping away from him. His animal condition becomes an image of the soul imprisoned by the senses and by a curiosity turned in the wrong direction.
The tale of Cupid and Psyche
At the heart of the novel, in Books IV to VI, an old woman tells a kidnapped girl the tale of Cupid and Psyche. Psyche, bride of an invisible lover who forbids her to look at him, gives in to curiosity, loses him and must face terrible trials imposed by Venus, down to a descent into the underworld. In the end she is welcomed among the gods and marries Cupid.
Some late antique commentators, and later the Neoplatonists of the Renaissance, read the tale as an allegory of the journey of the soul, whose Greek name is precisely psyche, towards union with divine love. The story mirrors that of Lucius: he too sins through curiosity and must pass through suffering before salvation.
The book of Isis
The eleventh and last book changes tone completely. On the beach at Cenchreae, near Corinth, Lucius prays to the moon and receives in a dream the vision of Isis, who promises him deliverance. During a procession in the goddess's honour he eats the roses carried by a priest and becomes a man again. He then decides to be initiated into the mysteries of Isis, and later, in Rome, into those of Osiris.
Apuleius describes the initiation with great reticence, since the mysteries could not be revealed. Lucius says only that he approached the boundary of death, «accessi confinium mortis», passed through all the elements and saw the sun shining at midnight. It is one of the most precious testimonies we possess about the mystery cults of the Roman world.
The Metamorphoses enjoyed a long afterlife. Boccaccio, who owned a copy, reworked some of its tales in the Decameron, and the humanists admired its elaborate language. The novel still fascinates today because it unites the comic and the sacred, presenting transformation as a path to knowledge that passes through a fall.