The Construction of a Goddess: Isis in Apuleius’s Metamorphoses

Abstract:The Isis book (book 11) of the 2nd century CE Latin novel, Metamorphoses by Apuleius, is one of the richest sources for Isis and her cult from the Hellenistic-Roman period. As such, it is often used as evidence by feminist religious scholars who are trying to restore the divine feminine, a universal, all-powerful Great Mother, who is caring and nurturing, to modern religious sensibilities. However, in doing so, they have also often used this book without context or textual criticism, leading to a distorted picture of the divine feminine in modern scholarship. Such a project is not aided by the fact that there is no feminist reading of the Isis book in Apuleian scholarship. This study intends to fill the gap by making a gendered reading for Isis as a divine, but specifically as a literary construct. This is accomplished by examining the divine elements of Isis’s construction, namely her powers and how her powers interact with others, and making a gendered interpretation of the results of this examination. From this study, it can be seen that, although at first glance Apuleius’s Isis looks like a typical supreme but nurturing Great Mother, she is in fact an incredibly demanding goddess, who is also carefully constrained by maleness. Her all-encompassing powers are only exercised under the purview of a male god and are only acceptable in the service of a male worshipper. Therefore, this reading must be taken into account whenever the Metamorphoses is used for studies of the divine feminine.