Furthermore, the ‘girl’s tragedy’ coming of age is also debated through the medium of the ass: within the texture of the narrative the sexual nightmare is particularly high- lighted in Charite’s drama, which is again refracted in the inlay tale of Cupid and Psyche. It will be shown that Lucius, the young protagonist, acts out his male obsessions with love and sexuality, while the narration is similar to a dream sequence on the level of a fairy-tale folk structure. However, despite all the differences from the ideal romances, Apuleius, too, deals with the crucial threshold of adolescence. The change of focus will be explored through Apuleius’ Golden Ass, a rather atypical novel that, due to Lucius’ initiation into the secret rites of Isis in Book 11, has served as the model for mystery interpretation until now. On the basis of a new bio-ritual, psycho-anthropolo- gical model, it will be argued that the ancient novels, which are built on tradi- tional wondertales, focus upon, rework, revolve around and help to overcome the central crisis of puberty, very often from the vantage point of the girl. Merkelbach’s allegorizing view of the novel as a mystery text to the paradigm of initiation where young people experience the rite of passage to adulthood. As far as myth and ritual are concerned, we have only recently wit- nessed a hermeneutical shift from R.
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