Epona Salvatrix?: Isis and the Horse Goddess in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses

Abstract

This essay attempts to add its voice to the handful of scholars who have seen specific clues in Books 1-10 of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses which directly or indirectly point to the “surprise” Isiac ending.  The following pages suggest that we might read (or more specifically, a second century audience would have read) Lucius’ encounter (immediately following his transformation) at the shrine of the horse goddess Epona (3.27)—and other passages in the novel which may recall this goddess—as a direct foreshadowing of and link to the appearance of Isis in Book 11.  Literary and material evidence roughly contemporary with Apuleius (while not exactly abundant) suggest that Isis and Epona were indeed linked in the Roman era—largely because of their shared connections with fortune, abundance, maternity, and liminality—to the point of even being syncretized into facets of the same goddess.  Would the mention of Epona have triggered an association with Isis in the minds of the novel’s original audience? Jeffrey Winkle received his PhD from Northwestern University (Evanston, Illinois, USA) with a dissertation entitled Daemons, Demiurges, and Dualism: Apuleius’ Metamorphoses and the mysticism of late antiquity . Since then he has presented several papers on various religious and philosophical aspects of the Apuleian novel at many conferences around the globe (including ICAN IV in Lisbon, Portugal) and is currently working on articles concerning Gnostic influences on Apuleius as well as the role of the horse goddess Epona in the Metamorphoses . Since 2005 he has been an assistant professor of Classics at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA.