From Mystery to Initiation: A Mytho–Ritual Poetics of Love and Sex in the Ancient Novel even in Apuleius’ Golden Ass?

I contend that both discourses – the religious modes of expression, and the novel, based on orally transmitted traditional wonder-tales – focus upon, rework, circulate around, retract and help to overcome the central crisis of marriage as well as of the discovery of sexuality. This is very often presented from the vantage point of the girl. Novels as well as popular Greek stories deal with these issues in a dream-like manner in positive and negative ways. Fears, nightmares of monsters, and scenarios of blood and sacrifice are mingled with euphoric phantasies. Love, thus, becomes decisive for the genre. Very young adolescents are the protagonists. The objective, or telos, of the fictions is marriage, but between the frame of a beginning and an ending, we find the young lovers during their phase of marginality in a loop of destabilizing thoughts and adventures in liminal spaces.