Peregrinatio Animi : the Metamorphoses of Apuleius and the religious culture of the second century AD
Date
1997
Authors
Moyer, Ian Strachan
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Abstract
This thesis examines Apuleius' Metamorphoses in the cultural context of the High Roman Empire in order to describe its religious content and the notions of pilgrimage present in the text. The first chapter of the dissertation discusses the major themes in recent scholarship on Apuleius' novel. This includes a discussion of the sources and genres on which Apuleius drew in composing the Metamorphoses, the literary and linguistic qualities of his work as it relates to the intellectual climate of the Second Sophistic, and recent attempts at elucidating the "serious" themes of the novel. Among the most prominent cultural aspects of the novel is its religiosity, usually identified with the Isiac conclusion in the eleventh book. The second chapter explores the religious content of the work and demonstrates that religion is a pervasive element of the Metamorphoses and not confined to its final divine resolution. The religiosity represented in the novel is a diverse assemblage of magico-religious practices and beliefs. The third chapter shows that this religious diversity derives from the historical context of the novel: a culture of religious pluralism. By the second century, the Roman peace had caused a mutual interpenetration of numerous cultures and therefore the diffusion of various religious traditions to different parts of the Empire. Under such conditions, religion no longer consisted solely of the embedded religion of local civic communities. With the rise of differentiated religious institutions came the possibility of religious choice for the individual. The third chapter also examines the experiential implications of religious pluralism. Though direct first-person accounts of religious experience are scarce in the ancient evidence, a number of narratives of religious journeying attest the presence of religious curiosity and experimentation in the second century. The final chapter takes up the notion of the religious journey or pilgrimage as an explanatory model for the structure and significance of the Metamorphoses. An examination of the novel in the light of contemporary narratives of the religious journey and cross-cultural descriptions of religiously motivated ravel reveals that Lucius' adventures are in essence a pilgrimage, and that pilgrimage in both its actual and metaphorical forms was a significant element of contemporary religious experience.