O blessed Queen of Heaven, whether you are the Lady Ceres who is the original and motherly source of all fruitful things in earth, who after finding Your daughter Proserpina, through the great joy which You did presently conceive, made barren and unfruitful ground to be plowed and sown — You which nourishes all the fruits of the world by Your vigor and force; with whatsoever name or fashion it is lawful to call upon You, I pray You end my great travail and misery, and deliver me from the wretched fortune, which has for so long a time pursued me. Grant peace and rest if it please You to reply to my entreaties, for I have endured too much labor and peril. Remove from me this misshapen form, and return me to my pristine form, and if I have offended in any way the divine Majesty, let me rather die than live, for I am fully weary of my life.
Commentarius · Commentary
Lucius, turned into an ass, calls at night on the shore to the Queen of Heaven — and does not know what to call her.
Hence the structure of the prayer: a long run through the possibilities — whether you are Ceres, or Venus, or the sister of Phoebus, or Proserpina — and at the end a qualification covering everything: "by whatever name, by whatever rite, in whatever form it is right to invoke you".
The insurance device is the same as in Statius and Ovid (apollo-020, bacchus-007), but carried through into theology. In Apuleius the run of names is no longer a precaution but an assertion: all the goddesses are one. In the next chapter Isis will appear to Lucius and confirm it herself, calling herself the single divinity whom the whole world worships under many forms.
The card gives the stretch corresponding to the English: the opening with Ceres and the common closing plea. The branch addressing Diana is carried in diana-001, which is why the two cards share a tail.
