During his long and sad captivity, he heard the history of Psyche related, that marvellous and symbolical legend which was like the soul and poetry of his own experience. Psyche desired to take by surprise the secrets of love, as Apuleius sought those of Magic; she lost love and he the human form. She was an exiled wanderer, living under the wrath of Venus, and he was the slave of thieves. But after having journeyed through hell, Psyche was to return into heaven, and the gods took pity on Lucius. Isis appeared to him in a dream and promised that her priest, warned by a revelation, would give him roses during the solemnities of her coming festival. That festival arrived, and Apuleius describes at great length the procession of Isis; the account is valuable to science, for it gives the key of Egyptian mysteries. Men in disguise come first, carrying grotesque animals; these are the vulgar fables. Women follow strewing flowers and bearing on their shoulders mirrors which reflect the image of the great divinity. So do men go in front and formulate dogmas which women embellish, reflecting unconsciously the higher truths, owing to their maternal instincts. Men and women came afterwards in company as light-bearers; they represented the alliance of the two terms, the active and passive generators of science and life.[138] After the light came harmony, represented by young musicians, and, in fine, the images of gods, to the number of three, followed by the grand hierophant, carrying, instead of an image, the symbol of great Isis, being a globe of gold surmounted by a Caduceus. Lucius Apuleius beheld a crown of roses in the hands of the high priest; he approached and was not repulsed; he ate the roses and was restored to human shape. All this is learnedly written and intermingled with episodes which are now heroic and again grotesque in character, as befitted the double nature of Lucius and the ass. Apuleius was at once the Rabelais and Swedenborg of the old world at the close of the epoch. The great masters of Christianity either failed or refused to understand the mysticism of the _Golden Ass_. St. Augustine in the _City of God_ asks in the most serious manner whether one is to believe that Apuleius was metamorphosed literally into an ass and seems disposed to admit the possibility, but only as an exceptional phenomenon—from which nothing follows as a consequence. If this be an irony on his part, it must be allowed that it is cruel, but if it be ingenuousness—however, St. Augustine, the acute rhetorician of Madaura, was scarcely given to being ingenuous.