The Golden Ass is not an explicitly didactic work, though if we look at the way it ends with a religious conversion and an initiation as a priest into the cult of Isis, we could see everything that came before as an allegory of a pilgrim's progress through hellish events in the barbarian outer regions of the empire, chaotic, violent, self-demeaning events until the final safe arrival in the ordered new home of the author, Rome. The work is a celebration of the ordered society, which the capital of the empire offers the traveler. The horrific events, which precede Lucious' religious conversion, offer an extreme contrast to the solace and thrilling ceremony of the religious discipline Lucious devotes himself to. The erotic zest and brio of his dalliance with Photis is not necessarily out of synch with his new religion. Or we might not hope that the requirement of chastity, fasting, and a vegetarian diet are only temporary trials of his initiation, and that he can resume his erotic life. The cult of Isis was essentially a fertility cult, celebrating a cycle of violent death and resurrection. The winter-spring cycle, the death and regeneration of nature. An interpretation of this sort is to be considered an hypothesis.
We can entertain the game of interpretation, looking for clues and guideposts, which might support the argument that such was intended by the author, knowing it could never be proven definately, anymore than a positive or negative judgment of an art work can be proven. It is a matter of backing up our statements with good reasons, which we hope are persuasive, but know that they are not objective truth anymore than our opinions are. We can not be sure that what we infer is actually what the author intended to imply.
If you compare the Golden Ass written in Latin to Daphnis and Chloe written in Greek by Longus, one notes the first major difference is that the former is a first person narrative, and the latter a third person narrative. The difference in this antique way of managing these two kinds of narrative technique is that first person allows the main character to reveal his conscious life, dreams, fears, memories, desires. The third person narrative as it is conducted by Longus describes events and scenes in a pastoral setting from the outside. While it is true that Lucious in the Golden Ass tells us much more about himself, his erotic ecstasy, his feelings of humiliation, and later his religious enthusiasm, what he does not tell us is how to interpret these psychic events or how to interpret the many stories he tells or the novel as a whole or in part.
Earlier I mentioned guideposts or clues which suggest that the author wants us to make certain connections because events were repeated or there is a pattern of similar events which may show that he wants us to pay attention to a particular theme. In other words these events are given prominence in the work, indicating importance. The author does not explicitly state that he wants us to think about these themes. What we are dealing with is implicit discourse, which demands our own participation and may tempt us to develop an interpretation of the meaning of these connections we have made.
The first example is the way events of transformation are explicitly rendered, such as a witch turning a man into a pig as Circe does in Homer's Odessy or in the Golden Ass Photis' mistress turning herself into a bird and flying away or Photis accidentally or on purpose turning Lucious into an ass. These are explicit events told to us. There is another series of metamorphoses which are reversals in the outcome of these stories, which Lucious is conscious of and which are not difficult for us to discern though he does not usually comment explicitly that these transformations have taken place. The first of such transformations is in the story of the witch who kills Socrates with a sword, placing a sponge in the wound. The transformation is a reversal of Lucious' expectation or his own interpretation of what has happened. The dead man gets up and walks with him and the story teller thinks that Socrates is not dead. The wounded man falls, the sponge pops out in the bank of the stream, and it turns out that he is dead. This is an obvious case of a reversal of either expectation or his appraisal of a situation--also emotions felt are opposite of what is appropriate or expected. (Metamorphoses P. 27, vol. 1) Some of these transformations play on the mistaking a dream for reality. (Meta. P. 39-43, vol. 1)--Turns out to be not to a dream. The stories about people who must leave their homes because of shame or guilt. Traveling becomes the allegory of the journey of life.
Only when Lucious becomes an ass does he start living his own story. The fact is is that he is used as the butt of a great joke. And after he comes out of the great scare of being a convicted muderer--his lovemaking continues until he becomes so self-possessed that he wants to be transformed into Eros with wings. As a reward for Lucious' delusions of grandeur Photis picks the wrong potion and Lucious is turned into an ass. The duality is the real Lucious as consciousness within the body of an ass.
When Psyche is married, instead of a marriage it is experienced by her and everyone else in her community as a funeral. And--if you look at the prose there are at least two transformations that take place, in which a normal state of affairs turns to the negative. For example, "Now the light of the wedding torch grew dim with black, sooty ashes." (Meta. p. 247, vol. 1) The music changes from happy to sad, to the Lydian mode which was used for dirges. In the Lydian mode miner keys and dissident intervals are used, creating a mournful or sad mood.
Venus believes she can fulfill her purpose to preserve her superiority by eliminating Psyche who everyone thinks is more beautiful than she is. But Cupid is working behind the scenes unbeknownst to his mother, against her purposes, in his own self-interest. Zephyr, god of the wind, is acting as an agent of Eros to save Psyche from a violent, fatal fall. (Meta. P. 251, vol. 1)
Psyche is saved from death but is imprisoned in a totally isolated life (Meta. P. 261, vol. 1), in which she is alone throughout the day, waiting for night to come and the arrival of her lover. This story is an allegory of the transition from childhood to womanhood, after puberty when a woman is taken into marriage she looses her family and early life. There is a grief as this figure of every woman moves from her parents' household to her husbands', to live under his authority. Psyche's experience has been described by Eric Neumann, a Jungian psychoanalyst, as the allegory of the death of the maiden, which takes place, not only with puberty (sexual maturity) but more especially with the loss of her virginity. The loss of her original home, which she gives up for that of her husband, is what she is grieving for. She has left the place where her mother was the central figure, what Neumann sees as the conflict between the matriarchal, the mother's realm, in conflict with the patriarchal, her husband's realm. In other words Psyche's story is read as every woman's story, in the life cycle. There is no way of knowing that Psyche's story is meant to be read as the story of all women. And that is what the critic is doing when he claims that a story is an allegory. He is taking the leap of relating the particular to the general, which may never have been explicitly stated in the text. This myth serves the psychiatrist well to express issues of women's lives which he wants to speak about, but I would think that such notions would be very far from what people in antiquity would have thought about these myths, which were used in ritual celebrations to evoke catharsis.
There is an interesting kind of tension before Lucious regains his human form, almost superstitious: "I did not, however, dash forward in an unrestrained rush under the influence of my sudden joy, because, obviously, I was afraid lest the peaceful progression of the rites be upset by the sudden rush of a four footed beast." (Meta. P. 315, vol. 2) Lucious is hypersensitive and fearful lest he loose his chance to gain freedom from the de-personifying body of an ass. And again: "Instead, with calm and almost human steps, I slowly edged my body little by little through the crowd...." (Meta. P. 319, vol. 2) As if the ass form Lucious had held was another person.
The irony is that when Lucious is transformed back into his own self with his original body, that the person he was is not the person he is transformed back into, but he becomes a better person, having benefited from this conversion process. The word conversion is in it's denotative, meaning a kind of transformation--specifically spiritual. A kind of transcendence has taken place. We come back to the question, how does this ultimate event in the story narrated to us by Lucious relate to all the stories which came before. Is the personal transformation that Psyche undergoes parallel to the spiritual transformation Lucious undergoes? The answer is no: It is not parallel. How does Lucious' transformation at the end relate to the repetition of suicidal wishes expressed every time the going gets tough for either him or story tellers whom he happens to be listening to, whose bizarre tales he relates to us? One might say that the picture presented to us of life in the colonies of Rome is dire and so threatening that one looses all hope and can no longer cope; rather one looks to death as a comforting release from a terrifying life. Such an embattled relation to life is the perfect opportunity for the solace which religion offers. So making that connection between the way the book ends up and certain salient features of the narrative which preceded it, is a simple interpretation which maybe makes sense out of the book. Nonetheless, we are left with the question, is this interpretation what the author intended us to make. One final question: Is the character of Lucious fictional or autobiographical? Therefore, is the conversion experience offered as a message of hope for us? Or is this story a fictional tale that has a happy ending?
Works Cited:
Apuleius, METAMORPHOSES, edited and translated by J. Arthur Hanson, Harvard University Press 1996.
Erich Neumann, "A Commentary on the Tale by Apuleius," translated from the German by Ralph Manheim, Princeton University Press 1956.
Longus, DAPHNIS AND CHLOE, translated by J.M. Edmonds, Harvard University Press 1996.
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