The Roman occultist who wrote a novel

Who Apuleius was and why he matters

In this piece, we are going to meet a strange Roman called Apuleius - a witty, learned man who may have had some dark secrets. His career takes us deep into the worlds of magic, witchcraft and fantastical literature.

Who was Apuleius?

Apuleius was Roman by nationality, but he was of North African ethnicity. He was born in or around 125 CE in Madauros in modern Algeria, where his father was a prominent local figure.

There is much about Apuleius that remains obscure - including his full name - but we do know that he travelled around. His education took him to Carthage and Athens, and he later spent time in Rome, where he acquired something of a literary reputation.

In 155 CE, when he was around 30, he decided to travel to Egypt, but due to illness he stopped at Oea in modern Libya. There, he lodged with a former student friend of his named Pontianus.

Pontianus’ mother, Pudentilla, was a rich widow.

You can probably already see where this is going.

Pudentilla’s father had forced her to agree to marry her late husband’s brother, Clarus. But her father was dead by now, and she wasn’t keen on going through with the arrangement. She wanted to find someone else. Pontianus, who was worried about what was going to happen to his inheritance, decided that she should marry his old friend Apuleius. This went down badly with other people associated with Pudentilla, and Apuleius found himself facing a charge of witchcraft. It was claimed that he had used sorcery to win the eligible widow for himself.

Apuleius was accordingly tried for his life in 158/9 CE. A published version of his defence speech – the Apologia – still survives. How convincing his defence was is a matter of opinion. He seems to have known a bit more about the occult than a respectable Roman ought to have known. By his own admission, he was an initiate of a number of mystery cults. You don’t have to believe in magic to suspect that he may have attempted to use supernatural means to help things along with Pudentilla.

Yet Apuleius’ defence seems to have worked. He was acquitted, and in the following years he lived in Carthage as an honoured figure and served as a priest of the imperial cult. His date of death is unknown: it might have been any time after the late 160s.

Intellectually speaking, Apuleius was a member of the philosophical tradition descending from Plato. A number of surviving works are attributed to him (in some cases spuriously), and these include several rhetorical and philosophical texts. But his best-known work was a novel - The Golden Ass, more properly called the Metamorphoses. It is the only complete Latin novel that still survives today.

The Golden Ass is based on an earlier Greek story, but Apuleius inserted autobiographical elements into it, and its two most memorable parts appear to have been largely written by him. The first of these is the tale of Cupid and Psyche, a fantastic story about a beautiful princess who marries the love-god, falls from his presence, and then undergoes several trials before being reunited with him. This is probably a Platonist allegory of the fall of the spiritual soul into matter and its subsequent reunion with the divine. The second especially memorable part of the novel is Book 11, which features a miraculous appearance by the Goddess of the universe.

The Golden Ass

If this makes The Golden Ass sound like a worthy religious tract, it isn’t. The novel serves up a mixture of constant violence, scatology, and taboo-breaking sex. The sex is perhaps the most significant element, encompassing everything from homosexuality to adultery to bestiality.

We may briefly summarise the novel’s plot. The narrator, Lucius, lodges in a house where the wife of the family is a witch, and he begins an affair with a slave-girl called Photis. In an attempt to practise some witchcraft of his own with Photis, he accidentally gets turned into a donkey. In this guise, he passes through the hands of a series of abusive owners, including robbers and effeminate priests of Cybele. He is sold to a baker; the baker anally rapes a man who cuckolds him, and the baker’s wife induces a witch to attack her husband supernaturally. Lucius is subsequently sold to a market gardener whom he gets killed, and he ends up in the possession of a wealthy man who teaches him tricks and allows him to have sex with a human woman. He is scheduled to engage in another copulation with a condemned criminal, but he manages to escape.

In the final part of the novel, Book 11, Lucius receives an epiphany from the goddess Isis. The spell which turned him into a donkey can be reversed if he eats roses. So, at Isis’ direction, he attends a festival of the goddess and eats a bunch of roses carried by a priest. He is subsequently initiated into Isis’ mystery cult. Afterwards, he journeys to Rome at the behest of the goddess, where he undergoes two further initiations into the cult of Osiris. There the novel ends.

Isis

One reason why the novel is so fascinating is that it gives us a glimpse into the mystery religion of Isis.

Isis was one of the principal deities of ancient Egypt. By the last few centuries CE, she had become the focus of a mystical quasi-monotheistic cult which spread through different parts of the Graeco-Roman world. The cult was private: you needed to be specially initiated in order to join.

Our knowledge of the Isis cult before Apuleius’ time is limited, but one source that the initiates left behind consists of aretalogies, or texts in which the goddess proclaims her divine characteristics and deeds. In Book 11 of The Golden Ass, the goddess delivers the most famous aretalogy of all as she manifests herself from out of the sea. This scene - the Visitation of Isis, as it is sometimes called - is a remarkable piece of writing. We may quote from William Adlington’s classic Elizabethan translation:

I am she that is the naturall mother of all things, mistresse and governesse of all the Elements, the initiall progeny of worlds, chiefe of powers divine, Queene of heaven, the principall of the Gods celestiall, the light of the goddesses: at my will the planets of the ayre, the wholesome winds of the Seas, and the silences of hell be disposed… the Phrygians call me the mother of the Gods: the Athenians, Minerva: the Cyprians, Venus: the Candians, Diana: the Sicilians, Proserpina: the Eleusians, Ceres: some Juno, other Bellona, other Hecate….

Elsewhere in The Golden Ass, in the Cupid and Psyche story, Apuleius presents Venus in a similar manner as a universal goddess: ‘the primaeval mother of the universe, the first source of the elements’. Venus perhaps plays an analogous role in that episode to the role of Isis in The Golden Ass as a whole.

It is a little surprising that, after the drama of the Visitation of Isis, Osiris seems to quietly take over as the supreme divine power in the course of Book 11. In several other writings attributed to him, Apuleius appears to indicate that he believes in a quasi-monotheistic male god. Perhaps Osiris was Apuleius’ ultimate supreme deity.

Apuleius in modern times

Apuleius has had a more or less established place in the British cultural tradition since at least the nineteenth century. He struck a chord with the early Romantic poets, including Shelley and Keats, and later in the century he influenced William Morris, Walter Pater, Edward Carpenter and Arthur Machen. Apuleius’ work went down particularly well with Decadent writers and pagan revivalists, with their inclinations towards occultism, ancient mystery religion, and social and sexual transgression. The occultist Francis Barrett included Apuleius in his work The Magus (1801). The pagan revivalist Thomas Taylor published a translation of the Cupid and Psyche story (1795), followed by a further translation of The Golden Ass and other works (1822).

Interestingly, some Masonic writers with an interest in esotericism looked on Apuleius as a revered predecessor, an initiate of the ancient mysteries. Apuleius’ activities in the Isis cult were connected with the modern Masonic movement by several significant figures on the more adventurous wing of Victorian Freemasonry, including Kenneth Mackenzie and John Yarker.

Other figures of the nineteenth-century occult revival who were familiar with Apuleius’ work included Éliphas Lévi, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and William Wynn Westcott. Westcott was the founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn - a magical society which emerged out of Freemasonry and was enormously influential in esoteric circles. Several other people associated with the Golden Dawn were also influenced by Apuleius, including Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, who later founded his own cult of Isis around the turn of the twentieth century in Paris, and the great Irish poet W. B. Yeats. There was also the most notorious Golden Dawn magician of all, Aleister Crowley, who alluded to Book 11 of The Golden Ass in his play Tannhäuser (1902) and put the novel on his reading list for his students.

Oddly enough, the prominent Anglican cleric Dean Inge disapprovingly compared Apuleius to his Anglo-Catholic opponents, the ‘decadent ritualists [of] our own time’.

Goddess worship

There is one doctrine found in modern esotericism and paganism that Apuleius played a particularly significant role in shaping. This is the idea that the divine takes the form of a universal Great Goddess: an idea which is expressed powerfully and memorably in the Visitation of Isis.

The first mentions of the Visitation among nineteenth-century esotericists seem to occur in the works of writers on Freemasonry. By the twentieth century, the Visitation had become the common property of esotericists, Masonic and otherwise. The American occultist Manly P. Hall quoted the Visitation in his famous work The Secret Teachings of All Ages (1928). The influential occult novelist Dion Fortune took the idea that all goddesses are one from Apuleius’ work. Robert Graves quoted the Visitation at length in his eccentric pagan classic The White Goddess (1948).

As well as influencing the ideas of modern pagans and esotericists, the Visitation also passed into modern pagan liturgy.

A clear view of how this happened has been obscured by the myth of the Cambridge coven. It is sometimes said that a group of students at Cambridge University in the nineteenth century used Apuleius as a source-text for pagan rituals. This story is very likely to be false: its ultimate source seems to be the eccentric Catholic demonologist Montague Summers, who probably made it up. The story was subsequently taken up in the 1970s by a witch called Bill Liddell, who claimed that nineteenth-century witch covens used the Visitation of Isis in their rituals (they almost certainly didn’t).

The first documented appearance of Isis as a universal goddess in modern magical ritual came with the Golden Dawn, which incorporated a distinct strand of goddess worship into its system. Isis in particular – the ‘Great goddess of the forces of nature’ – was mentioned repeatedly in the Golden Dawn’s rites. As early as his entry into the second grade of the order, the initiate was told of a female divine figure who was simultaneously Isis, the kabbalistic Queen of the Canticles, the angel Sandalphon and the bride of the Book of Revelation.

Another example of Isis worship in the Golden Dawn tradition comes in a rite called the ‘Ritual for Transformation’. This contains an invocation of Isis which culminates in the following passionate rhetoric:

O mother, O archetype eternal of maternity and love, O mother, the flower of all mothers…. O Isis, great queen of heaven, supernal splendour…. Hail unto thee, O thou mighty mother, Isis, unveil thou, O soul of nature, giving life and energy to the universe.

Some Golden Dawn members even believed that they had been favoured with their own visitation from the goddess. Two initiates had a trance vision on 10 November 1892 in which they saw a figure who said that she was ‘the mighty Mother Isis; most powerful of all the world’, and who talked to them about Jesus.

The best known modern expression of the Visitation of Isis is a piece of liturgy used by Wiccan witches which is known as the ‘Charge of the Goddess’. Gerald Gardner, the founder of Wicca, wrote the Charge in the 1940s. His reading appears to have included Apuleius, as well as Apuleius’ modern admirers Dion Fortune and Robert Graves.

The Charge does not directly quote from the Visitation, but the general resemblance between the two texts is too great to dismiss. Gardner remarked of the Charge that ‘a similar charge was a feature of the ancient mysteries’, and it is difficult to know what he can have meant by this if not the Visitation. In Gardner’s original version of the Charge (entitled ‘Leviter Veslis’), the goddess begins by identifying herself, like Isis in the Visitation, with a series of other pagan goddesses:

Listen to the words of the Great mother, who of old was also called among men Artemis, Astarte, Dione, Melusine, Aphrodite, Cerridwen, Diana, Arianrhod, Bride, and by many other names….

The Visitation was essentially replaced and supplanted by the Charge in Wiccan circles, and perhaps in modern pagan circles more generally. To this extent, we might say that the Visitation of Isis has perished by absorption.

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Apuleius and his work form one of the byways of ancient Roman culture: an eccentric and sometimes shocking alternative to the conventional pieties of Cicero and the poetic cadences of Virgil. His interest in magic, the supernatural and mystery religions have made him an unusually attractive source for modern occultists, who have not hesitated to look to him for inspiration for their own beliefs and practices. So it is that a colourful and perhaps unscrupulous Roman novelist has become a prophet of the Great Goddess.