The story is set in the fictive kingdom of Glome, a primitive city-state whose people have occasional contact with civilized Hellenistic Greece.

In the second part of the book, the narrator undergoes a change of mindset (Lewis would use the term conversion) and understands that her initial accusation was tainted by her own failings and shortcomings, and that the gods are lovingly present in humans' lives.

She has always been ugly, but after her mother dies and her father the King of Glome remarries, she gains a beautiful half-sister Istra, whom she loves as her own daughter, and who is known throughout the novel by the Greek version of her name, Psyche.

Her main love interest throughout the novel, Bardia, the captain of the royal guard, is married and forever faithful to his wife until his death.

While resting on her journey, she leaves her group at their camp and follows sounds from within a wood, which turn out to be coming from a temple to the goddess Istra (Psyche).

She relates that since finishing part one of the book, she has experienced a number of dreams and visions, which at first she doubts the truth of except that they also start happening during daytime when she is fully awake.

She sees herself being required to perform a number of impossible tasks, like sorting a giant mound of different seeds into separate piles, with no allowance for error, or collecting the golden wool from a flock of murderous rams, or fetching a bowl of water from a spring on a mountain which cannot be climbed and furthermore is covered with poisonous beasts.

Orual thinks she has been speaking only a short time, but then when stopped, realizes she has been pouring out the story of all her inner conflict and turmoil for days, repeating herself over and over and over again, as the gods sat silently.

But Orual is content, as she sees that the gods' "answer" was really to hold up the mirror of her lies to herself, and make her understand the truth of her own life and actions.

Then she is led by the ghost of the Fox into a sunlit arena in which she learns the story of what Psyche has been doing: she has herself been assigned the impossible tasks from Orual's dreams, but was able to complete them with supernatural help.

For Lewis, the theme of belief is central to the story and he felt that Apuleius missed the chance to give his version of the story a true mythic quality; that is to invoke what Rudolph Otto terms in his 1923 work The Idea of the Holy the idea of the numinous which is a feeling of awe in the presence of the spiritual or holy, the supernatural.

[4] Orual does not posses the belief system that will allow her to enter into the realm of the numinous as she briefly catches sight of the palace before it vanishes.

[5] Conversely, Psyche, from an early age, exhibits the openness to embrace the numinous; she feels a civic duty to heal the citizenry of Glome, she willingly accepts her role as the Accursed and the conjoined penalty of death/marriage to the Shadowbrute, the god of the Grey Mountain.

[6]: 286  This ideology goes as far back as Homer's era and the subject of the Trojan War which was used to exemplify to Greeks the effects of disordered love on socio-cultural mores (see Helen of Troy).

In response, Lewis said he failed to see why people would be deterred from buying the book if they thought it was a Western, and that the working title was cryptic enough to be intriguing.

Championed by Euhemerus and promulgated circa 300 B.C.E., this embryonic conception posits the notion that many of the gods were historical mortal personalities who became deified.

[citation needed] Robert Gorham Davis in The New York Times wrote that Lewis "still does not have all the equipment of a major novelist" but deemed it "much more convincing" than his religious novels.

He praised it for being "firmly grounded in actual primitive religious practice" and wrote that the novel's "imaginative unity ... exerts ... [a] combination of awfulness, wonder and attraction".