The Story of Psyche and Eros
The story of Psyche and Eros.
It was first told as a side tale within The Golden Ass, 2nd century A.D.
Psyche in Greek literally translates as soul as well as butterfly.
And now I shall proceed to tell the story of Psyche and Eros while including respective references to it's symbolism...for your reading pleasure.
Once upon a time....
There was a princess named Psyche. She was the most beautiful of the King's 3 daughters. So beautiful, in fact, that the people began to worship her as a goddess of beauty. Needless to say, this angered Aphrodite, the actual goddess of love and beauty. So she sent her son, the young Eros, to prick Psyche with one of his arrows and make her fall in love with the most repulsive thing he could find. But upon seeing the sleeping Psyche, Eros, taken aback by her beauty, stumbles and manages to prick himself with his own arrow. So here we have the god or personification of love falling in love with Psyche the personification of the mind or soul. This is the archetypal story of how humans experience love, how the mind or soul of an individual comes to reconcile itself with love.
Cupid returns to his mother having, for the first time ever, refused her request. In this we see how the first sparks of love begin the initiation process by which the youth detaches from the parent. Aphrodite was having none of that and places a curse on Psyche that prevents her from finding a suitable husband.
Her father, worried about his daughter's future, seeks the advice of the Oracle of Delphi. When one consults the Oracle, no matter how disagreeable their advice may be, people do what they say for fear of grave consequences.
Unfortunately for Psyche the Oracle tells her father: "Psyche will never marry a mortal. She shall be given to one who waits for her on yonder mountain; he overcomes Gods and men." In other words take your daughter to the top of that mountain and leave her there for whatever beast awaits.
In many versions of this story the father refuses to do this but Psyche insists showing her selfless willingness to be sacrificed for love.
So she is abandoned on the mountain until Zephyr, the kindly West Wind, saw her sorrow and bore her away to the valley below the mountain and into soft grass. And it is here that she finds herself in a lovely garden on the grounds of a grand castle. A voice emanating from an invisible source tells her that this is her new home, that he is her husband and that all she need do is ask and her desires will be granted. She stays there happily, all of her needs fulfilled by invisible servants and every night, in the darkness of their bedchamber, her husband comes to her and they make sweet love in a very Barry White sort of way, with him always leaving before the light of dawn so that she can never see him. And they go on quite blissfully like this for some time. Signifying how easy it is for the young and pure of heart to fall in love with no knowledge of their partner's true nature.
Eros' reluctance to reveal himself to his love stems from his own emotional immaturity and desire to keep their whole setup a secret from his mother.
Eventually Psyche gets pregnant and starts to miss her family so she requests that her sisters may visit her. Eros grants her request but warns, "The child you are carrying will be a god so long as you keep my secret. It will be a mortal if you reveal it."
When her sisters come they raise questions and remind Psyche that she was supposed to be married to an inhuman mutation of some kind. Thinking that she must be married to a hideous monster, they convince her to take a lantern and a knife to bed her so that she may light the lantern while he is sleeping and if he is a monster she can cut his head off.
The sisters are representative of how our family, society and/or the environment in which we've been raised can instill seeds of doubt in the purest of places...but these suspicions seem valid as they are integral to our survival and need for security.
The two symbols of the lamp and the knife are significant in that they are needed by anyone who attempts to examine the relationship that they are in. The first step is the willingness to take a look at the situation, hence the illumination of the lamp. This symbolizes one's ability to examine the nature of the relationships they are in.
But what good is the lamp if you don't have the knife? This is a symbol that can discriminate, cut through the situation, end the relationship by severing its bonds. What good is knowing that you are in a dysfunctional relationship, if you haven't the capacity...that is the symbol of the knife...to draw a boundary, to discriminate, to cut off the relationship should it turn out to be something negative or destructive?
That night, when she raises the lamp and sees her mystery man, he is revealed as the immature god of love, Eros. Psyche has betrayed his admonishment, which was initially to keep the status quo. ("Don't change anything. Stay unconscious about the basic agreement that we have.") When she lifts the lamp it sputters, and a drop of oil falls and hits Eros' shoulder. He awakens, hurt and angry, blaming Psyche for destroying the situation as it was. He's got wings, this god, so he flies away and leaves her.
At this point the story transitions as it is the end of the unconscious relationship. In many ways Psyche and Eros were cast out from the Eden of their love by the same type of curiosity that befell Eve when she partook of the fruit of Knowledge. The pregnant Psyche is now abandoned, left to wander the desolate world alone. She tries to kill herself by jumping into a river which promptly spits her back out as if to say, "You're force is too strong. Your story cannot end here." So she visits the temples of all the goddesses seeking aid and they tell her, all in kind, that her issue is with Aphrodite and that she must confront the goddess of love if she ever hopes to be reunited with Eros. She does this and Aphrodite gives her four tasks.
The story, then, is about her four tasks, the four things one must accomplish to reap the reward of mature love. As she learns each task, she grows beyond what she knew before. The first task is to sort a massive pile of different kinds of seeds that are heaped up in a room. This is a metaphor for all of the possibilities, all of the chaotic and disorganized emotions at the beginning of a transition period. This is where the individual is required to take stock of their personal inventory, to realize their strengths and weaknesses so they may proceed to the next phase with an understanding of their needs and their self-worth.
Psyche's first reaction to each of these tasks is despair. It's more than she's ever done before, she's consciously not up to the challenge, and she wants to give up. Then another symbol, that of the industrious ant, comes to her aid. They sort out her seeds, one at a time, so that by morning the job is done and each of her issues(seeds) is efficiently compartmentalized. Her life simplified by the task.
The second task is to get some golden fleece from the rams of the sun, gather a small amount of it, and bring it to Aphrodite. So our young Psyche finds the rams energetically ranging up and down a field, in this meadow, in that valley. These rams are butting their heads against each other, in the spirit of competition. Psyche realizes that if she tries to intercept them in order to obtain their fleece, she will be trampled. So she goes down to the river where a reed tells her that the rams are energized by the sun and that she should wait until the sun goes down. Then she can pick the fleece they have scraped off against the bushes and trees.
The reed has granted her the wisdom of patience and strategy. It reveals that it is unnecessary to participate in competitive displays of power, and better to listen to your own rhythms as they reveal the proper time for action that will gain one the power they need, without destroying the soul in its acquisition. The voice of the reed is that of adaptation, the reed knows when to bend so as not to break and how to pick it's battles.
For the third task Psyche is told that she must fill a fragile crystal flask with water from a stream that runs in a continual cycle from the River Styx to the highest crag. Again Psyche looks at the task. She sees that this river is precariously carved into the side of the mountain. It goes down to the River Styx and then rises up through a spring to the top again and down the face, etching its way into the mountain. If that isn't bad enough, there are snake-like dragons on either side, warning her to stay away. The water itself is hissing. This water represents the cyclical bubbling up of the uncontrolled currents of imagination that course through the unconscious mind, the current of unrestrained creative impulse that we must draw from to harness the power of creativity and productivity in order to give shape to our dreams.
And again Psyche thinks, "This is too much! I can't do it!" when another symbol comes to her aid. Zeus' eagle is an archetype of the entrepreneurial spirit which is able to take in the big picture with a sense of unemotional objectivity. The eagle takes the flask and, skillfully evading the serpents, it returns it to Psyche filled with the now contained Stygian waters, symbolizing the need to objectively evaluate the raw material of our dreams in order to harness their power.
For her last task, Aphrodite commands that Psyche must go into the underworld, fill an empty box with beauty ointment from Persephone, the goddess of the underworld, and return it to her. The only way Psyche knows to go into the underworld is to die. So she climbs up the highest tower to throw herself off. This time the tower talks to her saying, "Psyche, there is another way to finish this task. Go into the underworld via the Vent of Dis. Take coins with you for the ferryman and two cakes for the three-headed dog, Cerberus; one to let you into the underworld, and one to let you out again. Three times you will be asked for help, Psyche. You must harden your heart to pity, refuse, and go on. And one more thing... once you have the beauty ointment in the box, DON'T OPEN THE BOX!"
So Psyche proceeds on her descent. When she reaches the river Styx, she gives one of the coins to the ferryman who ferries her across. Three times she is beseeched by sad and pathetic people floundering in the river waters. "Just hold my hand and pull me across," one says. "I didn't have a coin," says another. Each time she remembers the advice and denies the drowning souls.
And so Psyche enters the underworld. She gives Cerberus one cake to pass him. This is standard fair. She fills the box with beauty from Persephone and bidding her thanks returns the way she came. She gives the three-headed dog his second cake so that she may leave, and uses her last coin to come back across the river and return to the upper world.
All of the advice that the tower gave her was good. Psyche, having done exactly what the tower told her understands that, if she had stopped to help, she would have had to lend a hand. In each hand she had one cake and one coin. Had she lost what she was holding, she would not have had the means to return from the underworld. This task is symbolic of our need to be able to erect and maintain proper boundaries to protect that which is necessary to our survival. We must love ourselves enough to place the proper value on our personal needs and safety in order to be able to functionally give and receive mature love. We must also not allow ourselves to be crutches for those who have already fallen due to their own mistakes. If we allow the jaded leeches to drain our energy and resources, we will have nothing left to give the future in terms of our own growth and that of our partner.
By now, you can imagine, Psyche's very tired. She's pregnant, and she's been on this journey a long time. She started out the Maiden like Persephone. She became the lover like Aphrodite and now she is becoming the mother like Demeter.
For all that she has learned in mastering these tasks, they are not strengths that she feels deeply connected to as her meaning. What she wants most of all, after accomplishing all these tasks, is to be beautiful in order that Eros might love her and return. So, of course, Psyche opens the box and death-like sleep envelopes her. She falls, like Snow White, also tempted by the apple. And this is the point where we come full circle to the inherent curiosity and temptation that got her here in the first place and where some people find fault with her decision. "Oh Psyche, after all this, why did you have to become unconscious again?" But this symbolizes the cycle of revelation and the elusiveness and transience of epiphany, and how easy it is to succumb to the heart's desire despite all knowledge, logic and wisdom. It is therefore my favorite part of the story, as it points to our inclination as human beings to sometimes throw all caution to the wind. Because knowledge and wisdom are useful tools but they are nothing without hope. So Psyche guilelessly opens the box with no strategy beyond the naive hope that it will give her the beauty to win back her love.
It is this action that calls Eros to her side as, perhaps it was her guileless naivete that attracted him to her in the first place. But Eros has also been transformed as Psyche has grown through her ordeals. He used to be the child who ran home to mother, who hid things from mother. Now we see a very different Eros who comes to her side, wipes the death-like sleep off of her, and takes her to Olympus. There, in front of all the gods and goddesses, Eros announces that this is the conscious relationship that he wants. The Olympians celebrate a grand wedding now, no longer a hidden affair.
We know all along she was pregnant, which is the symbol of the journey. A new child is often present in dreams when you are growing into the next phase of your life. She gives birth to the child that was forecast to be a god if she kept the secret and a mortal if she gave the secret away. The child is born, a girl, and her name is Joy. This is apparently the first mortal in Greek mythology that is made an immortal. The soul (Psyche) is elevated and made divine as well, becoming part of the Olympian landscape which is the archetypal world of the gods and goddesses in our psyches. She goes through this chrysalis phase, the caterpillar becoming the butterfly. Trust emerges when there is a willingness to die, to be vulnerable and to have faith.
The End
It was first told as a side tale within The Golden Ass, 2nd century A.D.
Psyche in Greek literally translates as soul as well as butterfly.
And now I shall proceed to tell the story of Psyche and Eros while including respective references to it's symbolism...for your reading pleasure.
Once upon a time....
There was a princess named Psyche. She was the most beautiful of the King's 3 daughters. So beautiful, in fact, that the people began to worship her as a goddess of beauty. Needless to say, this angered Aphrodite, the actual goddess of love and beauty. So she sent her son, the young Eros, to prick Psyche with one of his arrows and make her fall in love with the most repulsive thing he could find. But upon seeing the sleeping Psyche, Eros, taken aback by her beauty, stumbles and manages to prick himself with his own arrow. So here we have the god or personification of love falling in love with Psyche the personification of the mind or soul. This is the archetypal story of how humans experience love, how the mind or soul of an individual comes to reconcile itself with love.
Cupid returns to his mother having, for the first time ever, refused her request. In this we see how the first sparks of love begin the initiation process by which the youth detaches from the parent. Aphrodite was having none of that and places a curse on Psyche that prevents her from finding a suitable husband.
Her father, worried about his daughter's future, seeks the advice of the Oracle of Delphi. When one consults the Oracle, no matter how disagreeable their advice may be, people do what they say for fear of grave consequences.
Unfortunately for Psyche the Oracle tells her father: "Psyche will never marry a mortal. She shall be given to one who waits for her on yonder mountain; he overcomes Gods and men." In other words take your daughter to the top of that mountain and leave her there for whatever beast awaits.
In many versions of this story the father refuses to do this but Psyche insists showing her selfless willingness to be sacrificed for love.
So she is abandoned on the mountain until Zephyr, the kindly West Wind, saw her sorrow and bore her away to the valley below the mountain and into soft grass. And it is here that she finds herself in a lovely garden on the grounds of a grand castle. A voice emanating from an invisible source tells her that this is her new home, that he is her husband and that all she need do is ask and her desires will be granted. She stays there happily, all of her needs fulfilled by invisible servants and every night, in the darkness of their bedchamber, her husband comes to her and they make sweet love in a very Barry White sort of way, with him always leaving before the light of dawn so that she can never see him. And they go on quite blissfully like this for some time. Signifying how easy it is for the young and pure of heart to fall in love with no knowledge of their partner's true nature.
Eros' reluctance to reveal himself to his love stems from his own emotional immaturity and desire to keep their whole setup a secret from his mother.
Eventually Psyche gets pregnant and starts to miss her family so she requests that her sisters may visit her. Eros grants her request but warns, "The child you are carrying will be a god so long as you keep my secret. It will be a mortal if you reveal it."
When her sisters come they raise questions and remind Psyche that she was supposed to be married to an inhuman mutation of some kind. Thinking that she must be married to a hideous monster, they convince her to take a lantern and a knife to bed her so that she may light the lantern while he is sleeping and if he is a monster she can cut his head off.
The sisters are representative of how our family, society and/or the environment in which we've been raised can instill seeds of doubt in the purest of places...but these suspicions seem valid as they are integral to our survival and need for security.
The two symbols of the lamp and the knife are significant in that they are needed by anyone who attempts to examine the relationship that they are in. The first step is the willingness to take a look at the situation, hence the illumination of the lamp. This symbolizes one's ability to examine the nature of the relationships they are in.
But what good is the lamp if you don't have the knife? This is a symbol that can discriminate, cut through the situation, end the relationship by severing its bonds. What good is knowing that you are in a dysfunctional relationship, if you haven't the capacity...that is the symbol of the knife...to draw a boundary, to discriminate, to cut off the relationship should it turn out to be something negative or destructive?
That night, when she raises the lamp and sees her mystery man, he is revealed as the immature god of love, Eros. Psyche has betrayed his admonishment, which was initially to keep the status quo. ("Don't change anything. Stay unconscious about the basic agreement that we have.") When she lifts the lamp it sputters, and a drop of oil falls and hits Eros' shoulder. He awakens, hurt and angry, blaming Psyche for destroying the situation as it was. He's got wings, this god, so he flies away and leaves her.
At this point the story transitions as it is the end of the unconscious relationship. In many ways Psyche and Eros were cast out from the Eden of their love by the same type of curiosity that befell Eve when she partook of the fruit of Knowledge. The pregnant Psyche is now abandoned, left to wander the desolate world alone. She tries to kill herself by jumping into a river which promptly spits her back out as if to say, "You're force is too strong. Your story cannot end here." So she visits the temples of all the goddesses seeking aid and they tell her, all in kind, that her issue is with Aphrodite and that she must confront the goddess of love if she ever hopes to be reunited with Eros. She does this and Aphrodite gives her four tasks.
The story, then, is about her four tasks, the four things one must accomplish to reap the reward of mature love. As she learns each task, she grows beyond what she knew before. The first task is to sort a massive pile of different kinds of seeds that are heaped up in a room. This is a metaphor for all of the possibilities, all of the chaotic and disorganized emotions at the beginning of a transition period. This is where the individual is required to take stock of their personal inventory, to realize their strengths and weaknesses so they may proceed to the next phase with an understanding of their needs and their self-worth.
Psyche's first reaction to each of these tasks is despair. It's more than she's ever done before, she's consciously not up to the challenge, and she wants to give up. Then another symbol, that of the industrious ant, comes to her aid. They sort out her seeds, one at a time, so that by morning the job is done and each of her issues(seeds) is efficiently compartmentalized. Her life simplified by the task.
The second task is to get some golden fleece from the rams of the sun, gather a small amount of it, and bring it to Aphrodite. So our young Psyche finds the rams energetically ranging up and down a field, in this meadow, in that valley. These rams are butting their heads against each other, in the spirit of competition. Psyche realizes that if she tries to intercept them in order to obtain their fleece, she will be trampled. So she goes down to the river where a reed tells her that the rams are energized by the sun and that she should wait until the sun goes down. Then she can pick the fleece they have scraped off against the bushes and trees.
The reed has granted her the wisdom of patience and strategy. It reveals that it is unnecessary to participate in competitive displays of power, and better to listen to your own rhythms as they reveal the proper time for action that will gain one the power they need, without destroying the soul in its acquisition. The voice of the reed is that of adaptation, the reed knows when to bend so as not to break and how to pick it's battles.
For the third task Psyche is told that she must fill a fragile crystal flask with water from a stream that runs in a continual cycle from the River Styx to the highest crag. Again Psyche looks at the task. She sees that this river is precariously carved into the side of the mountain. It goes down to the River Styx and then rises up through a spring to the top again and down the face, etching its way into the mountain. If that isn't bad enough, there are snake-like dragons on either side, warning her to stay away. The water itself is hissing. This water represents the cyclical bubbling up of the uncontrolled currents of imagination that course through the unconscious mind, the current of unrestrained creative impulse that we must draw from to harness the power of creativity and productivity in order to give shape to our dreams.
And again Psyche thinks, "This is too much! I can't do it!" when another symbol comes to her aid. Zeus' eagle is an archetype of the entrepreneurial spirit which is able to take in the big picture with a sense of unemotional objectivity. The eagle takes the flask and, skillfully evading the serpents, it returns it to Psyche filled with the now contained Stygian waters, symbolizing the need to objectively evaluate the raw material of our dreams in order to harness their power.
For her last task, Aphrodite commands that Psyche must go into the underworld, fill an empty box with beauty ointment from Persephone, the goddess of the underworld, and return it to her. The only way Psyche knows to go into the underworld is to die. So she climbs up the highest tower to throw herself off. This time the tower talks to her saying, "Psyche, there is another way to finish this task. Go into the underworld via the Vent of Dis. Take coins with you for the ferryman and two cakes for the three-headed dog, Cerberus; one to let you into the underworld, and one to let you out again. Three times you will be asked for help, Psyche. You must harden your heart to pity, refuse, and go on. And one more thing... once you have the beauty ointment in the box, DON'T OPEN THE BOX!"
So Psyche proceeds on her descent. When she reaches the river Styx, she gives one of the coins to the ferryman who ferries her across. Three times she is beseeched by sad and pathetic people floundering in the river waters. "Just hold my hand and pull me across," one says. "I didn't have a coin," says another. Each time she remembers the advice and denies the drowning souls.
And so Psyche enters the underworld. She gives Cerberus one cake to pass him. This is standard fair. She fills the box with beauty from Persephone and bidding her thanks returns the way she came. She gives the three-headed dog his second cake so that she may leave, and uses her last coin to come back across the river and return to the upper world.
All of the advice that the tower gave her was good. Psyche, having done exactly what the tower told her understands that, if she had stopped to help, she would have had to lend a hand. In each hand she had one cake and one coin. Had she lost what she was holding, she would not have had the means to return from the underworld. This task is symbolic of our need to be able to erect and maintain proper boundaries to protect that which is necessary to our survival. We must love ourselves enough to place the proper value on our personal needs and safety in order to be able to functionally give and receive mature love. We must also not allow ourselves to be crutches for those who have already fallen due to their own mistakes. If we allow the jaded leeches to drain our energy and resources, we will have nothing left to give the future in terms of our own growth and that of our partner.
By now, you can imagine, Psyche's very tired. She's pregnant, and she's been on this journey a long time. She started out the Maiden like Persephone. She became the lover like Aphrodite and now she is becoming the mother like Demeter.
For all that she has learned in mastering these tasks, they are not strengths that she feels deeply connected to as her meaning. What she wants most of all, after accomplishing all these tasks, is to be beautiful in order that Eros might love her and return. So, of course, Psyche opens the box and death-like sleep envelopes her. She falls, like Snow White, also tempted by the apple. And this is the point where we come full circle to the inherent curiosity and temptation that got her here in the first place and where some people find fault with her decision. "Oh Psyche, after all this, why did you have to become unconscious again?" But this symbolizes the cycle of revelation and the elusiveness and transience of epiphany, and how easy it is to succumb to the heart's desire despite all knowledge, logic and wisdom. It is therefore my favorite part of the story, as it points to our inclination as human beings to sometimes throw all caution to the wind. Because knowledge and wisdom are useful tools but they are nothing without hope. So Psyche guilelessly opens the box with no strategy beyond the naive hope that it will give her the beauty to win back her love.
It is this action that calls Eros to her side as, perhaps it was her guileless naivete that attracted him to her in the first place. But Eros has also been transformed as Psyche has grown through her ordeals. He used to be the child who ran home to mother, who hid things from mother. Now we see a very different Eros who comes to her side, wipes the death-like sleep off of her, and takes her to Olympus. There, in front of all the gods and goddesses, Eros announces that this is the conscious relationship that he wants. The Olympians celebrate a grand wedding now, no longer a hidden affair.
We know all along she was pregnant, which is the symbol of the journey. A new child is often present in dreams when you are growing into the next phase of your life. She gives birth to the child that was forecast to be a god if she kept the secret and a mortal if she gave the secret away. The child is born, a girl, and her name is Joy. This is apparently the first mortal in Greek mythology that is made an immortal. The soul (Psyche) is elevated and made divine as well, becoming part of the Olympian landscape which is the archetypal world of the gods and goddesses in our psyches. She goes through this chrysalis phase, the caterpillar becoming the butterfly. Trust emerges when there is a willingness to die, to be vulnerable and to have faith.
The End
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