Apuleius

The teaching

Taught from his own books, the Apology, On the God of Socrates, On Plato and his Doctrine and the Metamorphoses.

What magic means

Apuleius begins from the word. In the Persian tongue, he says, a magus is what we call a priest. Magic in that sense is the art of worshipping the gods, handed down since Zoroaster and Oromazes, which Plato says the Persians taught their princes as a royal discipline: it is pious, wise in divine things, and no crime at all. In the common sense a magus is someone who, by speaking with the immortal gods, can do whatever he wishes by the strength of his spells; and if that were true of him, he asks, who would dare accuse so powerful a man?

The charge of magic, he teaches, has always fallen on philosophers. Those who look into the causes of things are called godless, as Anaxagoras, Democritus and Epicurus were; those who look into providence and honour the gods are called magicians, as Epimenides, Orpheus, Pythagoras and Ostanes were. The crowd cannot tell the study of nature from sorcery.

A philosopher's curiosity

Every object his accusers held against him becomes a lesson. He bought rare fish to dissect them, as Aristotle and Theophrastus did, to learn how they are made: that is natural philosophy, not a love charm. He owned a mirror, and a philosopher should. Socrates told his pupils to look at themselves often, so that the handsome might not shame their beauty with vice and the plain might make up for their looks with virtue; and the mirror asks the questions of optics, whether images flow off bodies or rays go out from the eyes, and why the right hand appears as the left.

Poverty, he says, has long been the handmaid of philosophy: frugal, content with little, the guardian of a good name. The small figure he carried and prayed to was no skeleton, as they claimed, but a graceful Mercury; and beyond all such images he worships the one Plato calls the king, the cause and origin of all nature, the highest father of the soul, whom no words can reach.

The beings of the air

On the God of Socrates sets out the world in three dwellings. The gods live in the aether: some we see, the Sun, the Moon and the stars, and some we know only with the mind. Human beings live on the earth. Between lies the air, and since every element has its own living creatures, the air has them too: the daimones, who carry between gods and men, taking prayers up and bringing gifts and warnings down.

He defines them in five strokes: in kind they are living beings, in mind rational, in soul open to feeling, in body made of air, in time everlasting. The first three they share with us, the fourth is their own, and the fifth they share with the gods. Because they feel, they can be angered and appeased, and so the rites and gifts that please them differ from place to place; the gods themselves stand far above every passion and touch no human affair directly. Through the daimones come prophecy and dreams, omens and oracles, and the wonders that magicians work.

The guardian of each soul

The human soul itself, while it lives in the body, is a daimon, which the Romans call the genius, born with each person; to be happy, eudaimon, is to have a good daimon, which is a good soul. When it leaves the body it becomes a lemur. A soul that lived well becomes a Lar and guards its house; one that lived ill wanders as a larva, an empty fright to the good and a harm to the wicked; one whose desert is uncertain is counted among the Manes. Higher still are daimones never bound to a body, Sleep and Love among them, and from these, as Plato teaches, a witness and guardian is given to each person, who sees every deed and even every thought, and who at death leads the soul to judgement and testifies there.

So the lecture ends as an exhortation. The guardian of Socrates spoke to him because he kept his soul clean, and anyone may tend their own daimon by philosophy. People spend on horses, houses and fine clothes and leave their own minds untilled; they should spend on what is truly theirs, the soul, as Socrates did.

Plato's teaching in brief

In his handbook of Plato he gives the school's foundations plainly. There are three first principles: God, who is one, without body, beyond telling, the father and maker of all; matter, without form or quality, which receives every shape; and the ideas, the simple and eternal patterns of all that is made. The soul of the world moves it, and the human soul has three parts: reason, set in the head, spirit, in the breast, and desire, below the midriff. Virtue is the right order of the three under reason, and the end of life is to become as like God as a human being can.

Curiosity and the goddess who sees

His novel teaches the same things as a story. Lucius falls through curiosity: he wants to watch magic worked, rubs on the wrong ointment and is made a beast, and through every misfortune he stays a man inside, seeing and hearing what people do in front of an ass. When Isis restores him, her priest tells him that his slippery youth fell into slavish pleasures and that he has paid the price of an unlucky curiosity; blind Fortune tossed him about, and now he has passed into the care of a Fortune who sees.

The tale of Cupid and Psyche, told at the novel's centre, turns on a forbidden look as well, and is told whole on its own page among the stories. The night of his initiation is taught in full on the page of The ancient mysteries, under Orders and mystery schools. After it the goddess calls him twice more, to the night rites of Osiris and to a third, and he ends among her servants at Rome, his head shaven, glad to serve. What he once tried to steal through a witch's box, the gods give in their own time and on their own terms.