The De Rebus Occultis of Apuleius of Madauros
A secret tome by the famed author of "The Golden Ass"
There is in the world a little-known tome, in a more or less fragmentary state of preservation, and it is by common convention given the title of De Rebus Occultis, which may be translated (rather loosely) as “The Hidden World.”
The authorship of this strange book is traditionally attributed to that famous North African middle Platonist philosopher, ribald novelist, and all-around infamous archimage Apuleius Madaurensis, that is to say, Apuleius of Madauros (Madaura). Now the partial history of this fascinating figure may be gleaned from the conventional body of work that he has handed down to us, including his most famous work, the picaresque novel that is known by many names—Metamorphoseon Libri (“Books of the Metamorphoses”), the Metamorphoses, and of course, perhaps most commonly, Asinus Aureus (“The Golden Ass”).
Within this fascinating work of fiction there is distilled much of the man’s occult and magical philosophy; if you have not read it, you really ought to, and there are many excellent editions that are readily found. Personally, I recommend the Loeb Classical Library edition, in two volumes, which preserves the original Latin text as well as a serviceable translation.
The story of this itinerant African Platonist is a fascinating one, and such glimpses of his personal life as are gleaned from his famous Apologia, in which he defended himself against charges of witchcraft and sorcery, paint a picture of a man of uncommon occult and esoteric erudition. A concise and interesting biography of this unique figure in Antiquity can be found in Gian Biagio Conte’s Latin Literature.1 But for the purposes of this essay, that is all rather beside the point.
What I wish to discuss is one practically unknown work that forms a part of Apuleius’ literary oeuvre, and this is the aforementioned De Rebus Occultis. The book—which is, as I said, in rather fragmentary form—discusses the celebrated Classical occultist’s thoughts on the unseen world, and includes a great deal of material that is only hinted at in his other works (including the De Deo Socratis) as well as in the works of his contemporaries. For instance, he speaks at great length about the mysterious and frightening deus nefandus briefly mentioned by Lucanus in the sixth book of his De Bello Civili; he also digresses on various matters that have led many to assume that he belonged to the secretive Sodales Chaldaici, the “Chaldean Fellowship.”
These are but the least of the things he has to say in this fascinating and even somewhat terrifying volume, which touches upon some of the greatest and most unfathomable metaphysical mysteries as understood by one who was clearly the metaphysicist and esoterist κατ’ ἐξοχήν of his time. Apuleius was clearly a past master of the traditional sciences, including many that are now entirely forgotten, and it was this that led to suspicions of sorcery, witchcraft, theurgy, and goety; by these arts, the African wizard was undoubtedly enabled to peer into the fundament of the unseen world, and he compiled much of what he learned in the pages of the infamous De Rebus Occultis.
The text is full of many curious linguistic quirks, including the myriad hapax legomena—“unique words”—for which Apuleius’ works are rather famous, as well as many instances of “voces mysticae” and “venefica verba” that are presumably magical in nature, and are often untranslatable. One of the more interesting passages in the text concerns a kind of nighttime ceremony, an occult or magical rite that apparently involved the invocation of some entity or “demon” that evidently belonged to that class of inferior subtle forces of the kind often mentioned by René Guénon.
It is particularly noteworthy since the ceremony described appears to be that which Apuleius was accused of participating in during his trial for witchcraft at Sabrata; this was the celebrated incident in which he was supposedly present at a nighttime ritual, of a mysterious and sinister nature, at the home of his friend Appius Pontianus. Apuleius utterly dismisses the charge in the Apologia, but the text of the De Rebus Occultis suggests otherwise:
“…et ecce, mirabile illud prodigium ante nos apparuit, mirabile illud prodigium quod extrinsecus elicueramus per vetusta verba. quidnam hoc prodigium est? YXYAENILITH nominatur, in illa lingua quae est genere humano vetustior. unde hoc portentum accedit? accedit ex mundis caecis alienisque, quae circumsecus nostrum mundum omnia etiam animantia sua attingunt et perpetuo impendent. veteres dicunt esse nefas visu illud portentum abhorrendum, nefas esse vocatu forium indagatorem ex sphaeris suis propriis. at vero id elicere volui, ut reabse ego peritissimus artibus veneficis. sic incunctanter egi. nihilominus ob metum penitus quassavi, ob immensitatem metuum meorum. atque app. quintianus dixit ‘quid, mi amice, te vexat?’ et sibi respondi ‘id venit.’
“en, vocaveram extrinsecus habitatorem in sphaeris nubilosis, YXYAENILITHIM elicueram ad humanam sphaeram artibus veneficis, et ante nostros oculos apparuit incarnescuitque in materie terrestri. partum est, id partum est in carne humana ex mulieris utero, scilicet quintiani soror. quid hoc immane prodigium est? id YXYAENILITH est. typhone formidolosius est, in specie effigiatum torquentium vermium, et arcana in somniis meis insusurrans cum voce divina…”2
The passage is interesting for many reasons, not the least of which is its dark allusion to the “forium indagator,” the “Seeker of Doors,” which is a mysterious and evidently shuddersome entity that is also mentioned in some of the surviving literature of the Chaldean Fellowship and other ancient secret societies.3 Moreover, Apuleius speaks of “illa lingua quae est genere humano vetustior”—“that language that is more ancient than humankind”—and it is the learned opinion of many scholars of occult history that this can only be a reference to the mysterious Aius Infandus, the so-called “unspeakable speech” that is considered to be a sort of “archiglossa,” an ur-language that predates all other human tongues and (according to members of the College of Seth at least) even antedates mankind itself. To their understanding, it is a language that was originally spoken by the non-human intelligences that once inhabited our planet—and some say still do—in an almost incognizably remote past.
It is a shame, to say the least, that Apuleius apparently reproduced no examples of this language in the De Rebus Occultis.4
As for the book itself, it was almost lost entirely to history. It was only rediscovered in the eighteenth century among the manuscripts of a monastery in the Balkans, where an especially keen scholar recognized it amongst the pages of an eleventh-century Byzantine palimpsest. This latter was in the form of a Greek prayer-book, whose pages had obviously been scavenged from a mutilated Late Antique Latin codex of the De Rebus Occultis, and overwritten in the crabbed Greek uncials of the prayers. The original Latin codex had apparently belonged to that famous school of Latin Grammar that briefly flourished in Constantinople in the sixth century, during the reign of Justinian the Great; evidently, sometime in the Middle Ages, the pious monks of the monastery—almost certainly unaware of what secrets the Latin contained—discovered the book and “recycled” it.
A great deal of damage had been done to the original text, but a few scholars in the early nineteenth century managed to reconstruct what they could, and a copiously annotated recension was published and circulated in 1832. Few copies of this remain, but an English translation was produced by Thomas Henryson in 1867, although there are many recognized deficiencies in this text. Nevertheless, this is what most who have seen the book have read. The College of Seth, however, has both the 1832 recension in the original Latin, as well as the translated Henryson edition, in its library stacks.
It is, at any rate, a fascinating book, as I can well attest, and it forms an intriguing footnote in the biography of a fascinating man. There are some in certain occult circles who repeat legends claiming that Apuleius did not belong to the Punic race at all, but was rather a product of a much more ancient people, perhaps one of those tag-ends that hail from a previous cycle or Manvantara; if that is truly the case, then he may have been heir to a palaeogean wisdom or traditional science that vouchsafed him a glimpse of the very deeps of reality, the fundament of the cosmos—that Abyss Supramundane, ὁ ὑπερκόσμιος βυθός, of the ancient sages.
Even a casual perusal of the De Rebus Occultis, with its recondite secrets and baffling explications of unattested mysteries, is enough to convince the most confirmed skeptic that this must indeed be the case…
Letteratura latina: Manuale storico dalle origini alla fine dell’impero romano (Firenze: Casa Editrice Felice Le Monnier, 1987) [Latin Literature: A History, trans. Joseph B. Solodow (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), pp. 553-69].
This text is abstracted from the 1832 recension (see below), which I was permitted to review and even copy certain passages from (by hand). I have translated the passage below:
“…and behold!, that wonderful prodigy appeared before us, that wonderful monster which we had conjured from beyond through the ancient words. And what is this monster? It is called YXYAENILITH, in the language that is more ancient than humankind. Whence hails this portent? It hails from worlds alien and unseen, which press upon, from every side, and forever loom over, our world and all its living things. The ancients say that it is a sin to witness that fearsome portent, that it is a sin to summon the Seeker of Doors from its proper spheres. But I desired to conjure it, as in fact I am highly skilled in the sorcerous arts. So I did, without hesitation. Nevertheless, I shook within me, by reason of fear, by reason of the greatness of my fears. And Appius Quintianus said: ‘What troubles thee, my friend?’ And to him I answered: ‘It comes.’
“Behold! I had summoned the Dweller in Dark Spheres from beyond, I had conjured YXYAENILITH to the human sphere by sorcerous arts, and it appeared before our eyes and became flesh in Earthly material. It was born, it was born in human flesh, from the womb of a woman, verily the sister of Quintianus. What is this horrible monster? It is YXYAENILITH. It is more frightening than Typhon, formed in the shape of writhing worms, and whispering secrets in my dreams with a god-like voice…”
I should mention that the rites of conjuration and invocation of the being “Yxyaenilith”—which is also variously associated in the passage by Apuleius with the curious epithets of the “Seeker of Doors” or the “Dweller in Dark Spheres”—seem to have some connection as here described with certain rituals recounted to me by a fascinating and deeply knowledgeable acquaintance of mine from South Florida. This character, who is a former (excommunicated) member of the College of Seth, informs me that a similar entity—though known under a different name—is commonly invoked in very similar rituals by a secretive and malefic enclave of what the College denominates “the Elder Race.” I have no way of verifying that, but the ritual is apparently intended to incarnate in human flesh an inferior subtle entity that possesses no such material shell, and this is said to be made possible by offering a suitably prepared human female victim to receive the being’s “seed.”
There are some who claim that the name of the monstrous entity, “Yxyaenilith” (τὸ Ἰξυαίνιλιθ), is in fact a rendition, or an attempted rendition, of a proper noun formed in the language of the Aius Infandus. It is certainly very alien sounding, and cannot be traced to any known human tongue; but in the absence of any further corroborating information, neither this name nor any of the other glossolalia or voces mysticae preserved in the De Rebus Occultis can be said unequivocally to belong to that language.