(no subject)

[felis_ultharus]

I finished Apuleius's The Golden Ass just now on my lunch break at work -- now increasingly translated as Metamorphosis perhaps to avoid the misconception that it's ancient Roman porn. Of course, with Metamorphosis for a title, it could easily be confused with Franz Kafka, or with Ovid (who actually was writing ancient Roman porn).

So it's an 1800-year-plus-old book about a man who decides it'd be a great idea to dabble in witchcraft and accidentally turns himself into a donkey. Like most pre-modern novels, it's more a serial set of adventures -- like a D&D game -- than a single novel. In the end of it, he's saved by the Goddess, in her guise as Isis.

Some thoughts:

• This novel seems calculated to offend the sensibilities of a modern. Typical Roman misogyny is in full force, the necromancy and extraction of spell components from dead or still-living human bodies is graphic and grisly, and the children's performance of the Judgement of Paris reads like a Christmas pageant staged by NAMBLA.
  
  
• I do get a kick out of the thought of generations of Italian monks painstakingly copying the the finer details of the bestiality scenes into beautiful Gothic lettering to preserve them for posterity -- that is, after all, how this novel survived into modern times.
  
  
• On the other hand, it's a very funny book, and reads a bit like Gulliver's Travels until it becomes deeply serious at the end. It feels uneven to a modern, but if you're just willing to go with it -- and aren't going to pass too many judgements on Roman morals -- it's one of the more enjoyable classics.
  
  
• I should be offended by the very homophobic portrayal of a commune of effeminate and exclusively gay men, except I'm more interested that there's such a portrayal here at all. See, all through my degree -- and especially in my queer theory course -- I kept getting it hammered home that such communities didn't used to exist, but were rather magically conjured into existence only once the word "homosexual" was coined. Needless to say, it's false -- I keep encountering these communities in 18th-century lit and legal records, in medieval lit, and Roman lit, and have heard mentions of them in the literatures from other continents.
  
  
• Similarly on religious matters. If I were to clip most of the first several pages of chapter eleven and post it online without any explanation of the source, it'd be regarded by skeptics as fluffy-Wiccan drivel, rather than any genuine reflection of ancient religions. But this book is getting close to two millennia old, and it's all in there -- all goddesses as facets of a single chief deity in female form, with mother-maiden-crown aspects and a consort god. Isis is explicitly Hecate and Ceres and Aphrodite, and the narrator calls her by all those names or epithets. And this isn't the first time I've encountered this stuff, either, which is refreshing after hearing people who consider themselves enlightened wax historic on the misrepresentations of old religions by modern Pagans.

All in all, I'd recommend this book to everyone who isn't easily offended. It's an easy read, full of high adventure and funny anecdoes, and a neat eye on how Romans saw their world.

I've now moved on to Margaret Atwood's Payback, her lectures about debt as a cultural and religious and moral phenomenon (as opposed to a purely economic one).

Comments

[lux-apollo.livejournal.com]

I've been meaning to read that Atwood. I came to the conclusion a few years ago that debt and interest and loans are perhaps some of the worst ills affecting our societies. They are yet another form of imprisonment.

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

It's interesting -- she's just curious about the cultural place of debt, as opposed to the economic one, but she does have a neat recap of moral aspects of debt through the centuries.

She also contrasts the idea of economic versus ecological debt -- the latter being her conception on borrowing non-renewable and slow-renewable resources against future needs.

[helenseidolon.livejournal.com]

Yup, it's a good example of what I like to call 'goddess collapse'. And as someone who works on female fertility deities, I can say: it's a bitch.

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

I guess from a scholarly perspective. For a Neo-Pagan it's kind of business as usual :)

[rougemacabre.livejournal.com]

Which Margaret Atwood novel do you think I should start with?

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

It rarely gets recommended, but I'd go start with her first, The Edible Woman. It's short, funny, accessible, and I fell in love with a character named Duncan.

Atwood's got three modes: quick and hilarious, richly poetic and quasi-pagan spiritual; and plodding, heavy, and depressing. The third always gets taught in schools, so that's all most people know about her. But I like her comic and spiritual stuff better.

[rougemacabre.livejournal.com]

cool. thanks. ^_^ I will check it out.