ABSTRACT
In this paper, we endeavor to show that in the tale of Cupid and Psyche Apuleius used an ancient Berber oral source that can still be discerned when reading North African folktales. 1 It is only natural to consider that Apuleius may have heard the story during his childhood in Madauros, on the borders of Roman Numidia, where the “Libyan” culture was pervasive in the second century CE . 2 As a matter of fact, it can be argued that this Libyan infl uence is not a completely new idea. The relationship between Berber oral tradition and Apuleius’ narrative was fi rst pointed out by the French orientalist Henri Basset in 1920. 3 At that time, the German ethnologist Leo Frobenius had, for his part, an insight into the role that Berber oral narratives had played in forming a certain number of motifs that existed in the Greco-Roman written culture. As far as the Cupid and Psyche narrative is concerned, these fi rst intuitions became a serious hypothesis in the writings of Otto Weinreich and Emile Dermenghem (see below). Yet Apuleius specialists have never considered this option, mainly because they have preferred to look for the origins of the tale in more elevated Greek or Near Eastern texts. 4
Many readers will be surprised to see the issue of folklore raised once again in relation to Cupid and Psyche. In current research, Detlev Fehling’s approach (1977) still dominates. He criticizes what he sees as the romantic methodology of folklorists, who are naively attached to “popular” orality: Apuleius’ narrative, he asserts, has infl uenced folklore, not vice versa. In this vein, the Groningen commentary on Cupid and Psyche begins with the premise that the question of folkloric infl uence has lost its relevance; instead, the tale is fundamentally a literary creation. 5 But the idea that Apuleius completely invented a fantastical narrative might involve as much romanticism as the methods of the folklorists.
