Reading this book feels watching the opening scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey. There are apes camped around the fire, huddling against the terrors of the night. These apes are people like Ovid, Virgil, Sophocles, Euripides, Aesculapius, Homer, Cicero, Plato, Socrates.  Each of them is at the end of a long line of natural selection, some at the beginning of long lines of thought after them. As far as apes go they’re some of the best. But then, all of the sudden, here comes Apuleius. Swinging around a jawbone, splitting the skull of some unfortunate genetic deadend ape and sending the whole primate consortium hollering and beating the ground. He’s catapulted them into a completely new age, upended everything and oh now here he goes throwing the jawbone of that ass (yeah that’s right, just be glad I didn’t go for the Ape-uleius angle) straight into the air where it twirls, end over end, camera slowing down its rotation and then…

Wham. Here we are two thousand years later, still living in the radioactive literary runoff.

Change manifests itself in the world constantly. And we have never ceased to be fascinated with the machinery of this change. We never stop building abstractions meant to finally bring Change under our microscope in an agar plate. For the Classical world the random permutations of chance were driven by Fate. In the Newtonian world we had Cause and Effect, Action and Reaction. Now in our modern world after peering deeply into the stochastic soup inside the atom who knows what tangled probabilities of cause and effect we hope to placate and name. Some sort of Quantum Noumenal god or Lovecraftian Old One? Maybe we’re back to a more passive hope for divine intervention just like the Greco-Romans after all.

But through every epoch, regardless of which abstraction we wrap around the random changing nature of the world’s circumstances, we’ve had one ace up our sleeve. One mechanism that, in all its forms, has had the same goal: to subvert the immutable laws that force our world through the filter of constant unpredictable becoming. Magic. For Apuleius, magic was the pure Disney witch enactment of physical change that we’ve become so comfortable with. Presto change-o! For thousands of years before and after Apuleius there’s also been the active pursuit of transmutation, the changing of the banal into the elevated. It’s at our core. That’s why Apuleius devoted almost a third of The Golden Ass to Psyche, the story of the human mind’s pursuit of higher divine love, invisible but for the voices that speak warnings from the rocks and the trees.

But most important for the future of Apuleius’ own medium, he realized the transforming power of literature itself. He discovered every good alchemist’s favorite god: Mercury, the messenger, the divine Word. In this book witches can divine cosmological truths of the universe from a close examination of a toadstool. They can change a man into an ass for his hedonistic pursuits of mindless pleasure. Just so Apuleius himself is able to perform these metaphysical tricks. But the witches in this book aren’t Fate. They can’t shift Fate. That takes a god. That takes prostration at the hands of the absurd and a whisking away to a life of indebted gratitude. Only then can the banal metamorphoses of the everyday transcend to something loftier. To do something like that you have to crack a book open and turn it inside out. The author has to become the narrator. Metaphors have to become assertions of true equality. Tales of mindless pleasures of the flesh have to become literary prose that’s been subjected to analysis for eighteen hundred years. Apes have to shriek in the face of painfully bright knowledge until they become men. Guided, as ever, by the strange beckoning choir of the obelescine novel.