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By Root 5292 0

curiosity about the `occult'. Shocked to the core of his being by finding himself suddenly a hairy, inarticulate ass, and consequently getting an extremely painful, ass's-eye-view of the darker side of human nature, Lucius slowly changes his whole perspective on the world. The degree to which he has inwardly changed is at last brought dramatically into the open when he is threatened with having to make love to a woman. He is profoundly disgusted by the thought of having to do something which would earlier have been his sole desire. He is finally `ready for his transformation back into a human being, but one very different from the Lucius who began the story. He sees his extraordinary vision of the goddess Isis, who calls him to a spiritual life. He is initiated into her mysteries (as Apuleius himself had been) and prepares to devote himself to her service for the rest of his days. We thus see the whole purpose of the work as having been to show a man who begins in a limited, purely sensual state of consciousness being lifted up through a series of ordeals to a much higher state of awareness, where his blind, illusory, self-destructive obsession with material appetites has given way to spiritual illumination.

The crucial episode in Lucius's final initiation is an experience so profound and mysterious that he can only refer to it in the sentences quoted at the head of this chapter. But this clearly hints at some kind of further Voyage and Return episode, a visionary `journey to the underworld', where he has received the last extraordinary illumination which leaves him, by the end of the story, so changed:

`I approached the very gates of death and set foot on Proserpine's threshold ... at midnight I saw the sun shining as if it were noon; I entered the presence of the gods of the underworld and the overworld, and I worshipped them.'

Such journeys to the underworld, or some `land of the dead, are not uncommon in the world's literature (e.g., the episodes where Odysseus and Aeneas make their visits to Hades), and invariably they reflect many of the elements of a Voyage and Return story, such as the difficulty of communicating with the ghostly inhabitants and the topsy-turvy strangeness of everything ('at midnight I saw the sun shining as if it were noon'). A particularly haunting example is the Norse tale recorded by the twelfth-century Dane Saxo Grammaticus, of the journey made by King Gorm and the great hero Thorkill to `the land of the non-dead', presided over by the terrible giant Geirrod, beyond the edge of the world in a land `where the snows never melt and eternal night prevails'. To begin with all goes well with their journey, but gradually threats close in from all sides until they finally come to a huge, ghostly city, seemingly built of vapour and thronged by phantoms and grotesques. After a series of terrifying adventures they make a 'thrilling escape' and, miraculously, reach home, having lost all but 20 of their original 300 companions. At this point King Gorm `sought not further adventures in distant lands beyond the perilous seas', but `lived at peace after his sore travail, engaged in meditations regarding the mysteries of life and death'. Like Lucius, he had been deeply shaken - and transformed.

We can now see more clearly just what the Voyage and Return story is really about.

If we consider those examples where the hero is changed by his experiences in the `other world, we see that, by definition, he has begun the story in a state of limited awareness. It is this which has plunged him into a realm of existence he had never previously imagined, an experience which leads to a nightmare threatening him with annihilation. But as a result he has learned something of fundamental importance. He has moved from ignorance to knowledge. He has reached a new and much deeper understanding of the world, and this has led to a complete change in his attitude to life.

Robinson Crusoe begins as a feckless young man, wandering the world, ignoring his father's sage advice and literally `all at sea'. The shock of finding