A young man dabbles in witchcraft, gets turned into a donkey, and ends the book as an initiate of Isis.
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The only Roman novel that survives complete. Lucius, curious about magic, rubs on the wrong ointment and becomes an ass, and in that shape he is stolen, beaten, sold and nearly killed through ten books of bawdy adventures. In the eleventh the goddess Isis rises to him out of the sea; he eats her roses, turns human again, and is initiated into her mysteries. We are pressing Book XI first. It isn't readable yet, and a gift of any size helps.
Apuleius was born around AD 124 at Madauros in Roman North Africa, now M'Daourouch in Algeria, and wrote the novel in Latin in the second half of the second century. His own title was Metamorphoses; the Golden Ass is the name Saint Augustine already knew it by. Apuleius was once put on trial himself, accused of using magic to win a rich widow, and the speech he gave in his defence survives too.
Lucius says he may not tell us what happened at the initiation, and then tells us nearly everything: 'I came to the boundary of death, I trod the threshold of Proserpina, I was carried through all the elements and came back; at midnight I saw the sun shining with a brilliant light.' It is the only first-person account of a mystery initiation that has come down from antiquity. The same book holds the story of Cupid and Psyche, told by an old woman to a kidnapped bride.
Making an interlinear The Golden Ass is real work — freezing a scholarly source text, aligning every word to its dictionary form, glossing what resists translation, and proofing it all to a hard quality bar. Pressing a book is how that work gets funded. When enough readers press it, Book XI · Isis gets made — and then it is free to read forever, for you and for everyone who comes after.
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