Psyche (‘Soul’) –

A beautiful young woman who becomes the lover of Cupid (Eros), the divine son of Aphrodite, and after many trials and seemingly impossible challenges put in her way by both her family and Aphrodite, wins through to become the happily married wife of Cupid, with whom she also has a child. The story is recorded primarily in one source, the Latin writer Apuleius, who was a native of north Africa and wrote a  picaresque and somewhat allegorical novel in the second century A.D. called the ‘Metamorphoses’ (also known as ‘The Golden Ass’). Apuleius’ story concerns the adventures of a young man who was changed into an ass by a witch and then wandered about looking for the antidote to his metamorphosis; in the course of his wanderings and adventures, and amongst many intriguing and exotic things heard, Apuleius listens to a story – told as an encouragement to a young woman who had been abducted on the day of her wedding by robbers and was being held hostage by them - about the two young lovers, Cupid and Psyche, who, against all the odds, succeed in coming together and living ‘happily ever after’.

The story of Cupid and Psyche may well have been familiar in the Greek-speaking world before Apuleius, but our situation with this mythic tale is almost unique in the field of Greek Myth: the ‘Metamorphoses’ provides the earliest mention we have in literature of Psyche and her union with Cupid, and there exists almost no other independent account, even though the graphic arts suggest that Psyche, with a lover Cupid, was a not unfamiliar figure well before Apuleius’ time.  We do not even find casual references elsewhere in literature before the ‘Metamorphoses’ to Psyche and her encounter with Cupid. The story of Cupid and Psyche may indeed have been current before Apuleius wrote his version (we do have mention of a Greek author who apparently wrote a long account of the story, but this version is completely lost and we have no idea when it was written), but we can only say that the genre of writing seen in Apuleius’ novel was of a well-known type in Greek popular literature, and that elsewhere in his novel Apuleius seems to draw on earlier Greek sources. The only other version that survives is from the hand of a later Christian allegorist, Fulgentius nearly three hundred years after Apuleius.

In the absence of a typical ‘mythic’ context, Apuleius’ Cupid and Psyche has often been defined and analysed by modern critics as a ‘fairy-tale’ or popular legend. The story certainly has many traditional fairy-tale components, and has a number of basic motifs which are familiar from popular stories that can be found in a number of different cultures from all round the world; however the same is true of many of the myths from ancient Greece, and not a few of the motifs to be found in Psyche’s tale also have strong parallels in the mainstream of Greek Mythology.

When we first meet Psyche she is the youngest of three sisters, who are daughters of a royal couple somewhere in the west. All three were very beautiful, but Psyche far exceeded the other two, and she came to be regarded, first by her own people and then throughout the world, as more lovely even than Venus (Aphrodite), goddess of love herself,, and people even traveled on pilgrimages from other parts in order to catch sight of her, and the traditional centres of Aphrodite’s worship started to be ignored. The theme of mortal beauty becoming excessively regarded is a familiar one in Greek Myth, and it almost always results in severe punishment, with some sort of dramatic and even horrific reversal, imposed by Aphrodite. So it was with Psyche, and even though it was neither she nor her parents who claimed that she rivaled Aphrodite (as in most such instances of this theme), the goddess of love acted to put Psyche in her place: she instructed her son Cupid to ensure that Psyche fall in love with the lowest and most wretched of all mortals.

At the same time, Psyche’s extraordinary beauty resulted in her being so venerated that suitors were shy to woo her, and she remained unmarried, unlike her sisters who made good dynastic unions with respectable husbands. Psyche thus found herself unwed and  living in loneliness, and her father in distress consulted the oracle of Apollo in Miletus in search of a remedy. Apollo’s reply was that Psyche was to be married to an inhuman winged serpent figure from the darkness, and should be exposed on a mountain top, and the king duly put out his daughter to experience a funereal wedding. This stage in the story, where a king exposes his daughter as an offering to be taken by a dragon, is a familiar one, the best known example being that of Andromeda, who is exposed to be the victim of a sea-monster but then rescued from her fate by the hero Perseus.

Psyche’s rescuer is Zephyrus, the south-west wind, who wafts the princess off the mountain and into a magical kingdom, to a luxuriant and grand palace set in a wood in the middle of a paradisiacal bower of a landscape. There she is completely provided for, by unseen hands, and she finds herself visited every night by a mysterious and passionate lover, who however uses the darkness to conceal his identity, insisting that Psyche should never try to find out who he is and always leaving before daybreak.

After a while, Psyche arranges for her sisters to visit her in her luxurious and magical palace a couple of times, transported from their world to hers with the help of Zephyrus.  In a manner not dissimilar to the step-sisters in the Cinderella fairy-stories, Psyche’s sisters jealously try to spoil her world and play on her doubts and worries, suggesting that Psyche’s unknown lover and provider must be a terrible monster, such as the one for which she was exposed on the mountain. Psyche eventually allows her doubts to predominate, despite the fact that her lover has divined that her sisters are malevolent and envious, warning Psyche that if she should ever see him and learn his identity she will never set eyes on him again, and that the baby with whom she is now pregnant and whom he intends to make immortal will always remain a mortal. Like the singer Orpheus, who was told he could take his beloved wife Eurydice back from the underworld provided he never looked back to try to see her but was beset with doubts whether she was actually there, while they were returning to the world of the living, Psyche prepares a lamp one night and cannot resist taking a glimpse of her lover while he is sleeping (intending also to cut off his head with a knife she has prepared). What she sees is not a monster, but an extraordinarily beautiful young man: her lover is Cupid himself, who had fallen in love with Psyche while carrying out the mission his mother had given him to destroy her.

Psyche fingers Cupid’s bow and arrows, which lie at the foot of the bed, and accidentally pricks her finger, thus falling head over heels in love with Cupid. But at the moment when she knows she loves her lover, a drop of hot oil falls from the lamp she is holding onto Cupid’s shoulder, and, like Orpheus’ Eurydice when Orpheus looks back at her, Cupid awakes and flees. There is nothing Psyche can do to prevent Cupid from leaving.

Psyche, disconsolate, now wanders the world in search of her lost love, even trying at one point to drown herself but being urged by Pan to be resolute instead. Meanwhile Cupid has returned to his mother, who, furious at what he has done, locks him up in her palace.  Psyche seeks help from Ceres (Demeter) and Juno (Hera) in turn, the patronesses, respectively, of motherhood and marriage, but both refuse her, unwilling to risk offending Venus. Thus Psyche finally decides to go and appeal to Venus herself. Venus, however, rejects her, violently, and instead, in the manner typical of any tyrant in Greek Myth when confronted with a petitioning hero/heroine, sets out to humiliate her by imposing impossible tasks for Psyche to perform. First Venus presents Psyche with a great heap of thousands of mixed seeds, to be sorted out by nightfall, then she demands wool collected from a flock of wild sheep. Psyche succeeds, unexpectedly, in performing both labors, assisted magically by creatures from the world of nature. Venus then demands water, taken from the waterfall that flows into the river Styx itself, the river of the Underworld, and which is guarded by terrible dragons; again Psyche receives miraculous assistance, this time from the very eagle of Jupiter (Zeus). Finally Venus demands that Psyche enter the Underworld and bring back in a box a little of the beauty of Proserpina (Persephone), Queen of the Underworld. Psyche goes to a high tower, intending once again to commit suicide in her despair, but receives instead instructions from the tower itself how she could enter the Underworld and survive, passing by both Charon the ferryman of the Styx and Cerberus the dog that guards the entrance to the land of the dead. The tower warns her also not to look into the box that Proserpina will give her. Of course, like many heroines before her in Greek Myth who are given similar instructions not to open a mysterious chest, Psyche cannot resist peeping into the box, just as before she could not resist taking a glimpse at the sleeping Cupid, and she is immediately overcome by the sleep of death which the box contains.

Cupid, however, has by now found that he is unable to live without his beloved Psyche. He awakens her from her sleep with a prick from one of his arrows, and petitions Jupiter to make Psyche immortal so that she can become Cupid’s bride. Jupiter is enchanted enough by the young Cupid that he grants his request, and reconciles Venus to her son’s love. Cupid and Psyche are at last married, in a grand wedding attended by all the gods, and in due course the pregnant Psyche gives birth to a child, Voluptas (Pleasure). The young couple, we may assume, live happily ever after, reunited after overcoming seemingly impossible challenges and long separation, like many heroes and heroines in the world of the Greek romantic novel. The Soul, to read the story symbolically, as many subsequently did, is ultimately reunited with Love, after suffering many tribulations. (Psyche’s two wicked and envious sisters, it should be added, have meanwhile met their fates while trying unsuccessfully to imitate their sister and insinuate themselves into the world of the magic palace where she lived with Cupid.)

Psyche is a frequent figure in Hellenistic Greek and especially Roman art of all kinds: painting, bronze and terracotta statuettes, gemstones, sarcophagus relief-sculpture etc. Sometimes she appears by herself, but most often paired with Cupid-Eros. Some representations are clearly illustrations of Apuleius’ story, but most are independent of him and depict simply a familiar and meaningful combination of Eros and his female companion. Frequently they appear in the context of Dionysus, another young male divinity who is happily paired with a young mortal, Ariadne, whom he marries after arranging her translation into the divine world.

The story of Psyche and her mysterious divine lover has charmed, delighted and inspired artists of almost every generation since the Renaissance. Painters who depicted Psyche and Cupid – often at the moment when Psyche sees her sleeping lover by lamp-light for the first time – include Raphael, Romano, Vasari, Cavagna and Schiavone in the sixteenth century, Rubens, van Dyck and Giordano in the seventeenth century, and numerous French and English artists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Keats wrote an ‘Ode to Psyche’ and William Morris wrote a long piece on Cupid and Psyche in ‘The Earthly Paradise’. Numerous operas on Psyche, and Cupid and Psyche, were written in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Cesar Franck wrote a symphonic poem Psyche.