O merciful Mother, I pray You avert my sorrow, by Your generous and temperate right hand, by the joyful harvest festival, by Your mysteries kept in silent secrecy, by Your winged servants, the dragons who serve Your chariot as You go about, and by the furrows in Sicilian clods of earth, and the plow-wheels that churn them from firm soil, by the marriage of Proserpina that You discovered through diligently seeking after Your daughter, and by the mysteries held in silent secrecy within the Attic temple of Eleusis, halt the misery of Your servant Psyche.
Among this piled wheat let me be concealed, if only for a few days, until the ire of so great a Goddess passes, or at least give me a quiet interval that I might rest from my great labour and travail.
Commentarius · Commentary
Psyche, wandering in search of Cupid, comes upon a shrine of Ceres and begs her for shelter.
The prayer is built as an adjuration by list: "by that fruit-bearing right hand of yours, by the glad ceremonies of harvest, by the silent secrets of the baskets, by the winged chariot-teams of your dragon servants …" Each per is a separate handhold, and all of them are mystery-cult: the baskets, the torches, Proserpina's descent and return. Psyche adjures Ceres by Ceres' own mysteries.
And then a qualification carried to its limit: "and by everything else that the sanctuary of Attic Eleusis covers in silence". The Eleusinian mysteries may not be divulged, and Apuleius gets round the prohibition by invoking the unspeakable wholesale.
What she asks for is small: to hide among the ears of corn for a few days. The greatest mysteries of the Greek world are called on to let a girl sit out the danger.
