Magie et recherche de sens en période culturelle anomique : le cas de L’Âne d’or d’Apulée
Magic and the Search for Meaning in a Culturally Anomic Period: The Case of The Golden Ass by Apuleius

Summary/Abstract: Apuleius, a Roman author of the late 2nd century, discovered in Lucius or the Ass, where the pseudo Lucian of Samosata mocks the superstitions of his contemporaries regarding magical beliefs, the framework that could serve as a basis for describing the cultural misfortunes that an anomic society leads to. Between the stories of pseudo-Lucian and Apuleius, the story of Lucius transformed into a donkey completely changes meaning. Pseudo-Lucian, because he still belongs to the Greco-Roman civic rationalist culture, does not take magical practices seriously and therefore mocks, in his text, the (mis)adventures that his hero must go through. But Apuleius takes magical practices very seriously. Apuleius’s hero will in fact become a little too interested in the magic by which he seeks to satisfy his thirst for the sacred, a thirst that no established cultural ideal is any longer capable of quenching because the period of Lucius-Apuleius is culturally anomic due to the progressive disappearance of civic rationalist cultural belief in the Greco-Roman world and the fact that this belief has not yet been replaced by another established cultural belief.

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