The Myth of Psyche and Cupid

At a Glance

• Central figures: Psyche, a mortal princess of extraordinary beauty, and Eros (Cupid), the god of love, who falls for her against his mother’s orders.
• Setting: Ancient Greece and Rome; the story moves from a mountaintop, to an invisible palace, to the underworld, and finally to Olympus. The myth is most fully preserved in Apuleius’s The Golden Ass.
• The turn: Psyche, goaded by her jealous sisters, breaks her husband’s one condition and holds a lamp over his sleeping face - discovering Eros and losing him in the same moment.
• The outcome: Psyche completes four trials set by Aphrodite, is rescued from the sleep of Persephone’s box, and is granted immortality by Zeus, reuniting with Eros on Olympus.
• The legacy: Psyche is made a goddess - goddess of the soul - and she and Eros are wed on Olympus, with Aphrodite herself accepting the union.

Aphrodite did not merely dislike Psyche. She was furious. Temples that should have been hers were going to this mortal girl - this princess whose face stopped men where they stood - and the goddess of love, worshipped for millennia, found her altars going cold while crowds gathered in the streets just to watch Psyche walk past. That was intolerable. Aphrodite sent for her son.

Eros came armed, as he always did, with the two arrows: gold for love, lead for its opposite. His orders were simple. Find Psyche. Make her fall for something wretched. He flew to where the girl slept, looked at her - and the arrow never left the quiver. Whether it was carelessness, or something that resisted being named, Eros turned back without following his mother’s instructions. Psyche, for her part, knew none of this. She only knew that despite her beauty, no man came to ask for her hand. She was admired the way a statue is admired. Untouched. Her parents, frightened, went to the Oracle of Apollo.

What the Oracle Required

The Oracle did not offer comfort. Psyche, it said, was not destined for a mortal husband. She was to be dressed for a funeral and left on a mountain peak, where a creature of terrible power would claim her as his own. Her family wept. They dressed her in bridal white nonetheless - the myth makes no clear distinction between the two - and carried her to the summit and left her there in the dark.

What came was not a monster. Zephyrus, the west wind, lifted her gently from the rock and carried her down into a valley where a palace stood that no mortal hands had built. Its floors were inlaid with precious stone. Its walls held no torches, yet they gave off light. Invisible servants brought her food, poured her wine, played music from instruments that hung in the air. And when night fell, her husband came.

He never came into the light. He never let her see him. He was kind, and his voice was quiet, and she lay beside him in the dark and listened to him breathe, and after some weeks she realized she loved him. She did not know what she loved. That was the condition he gave her: no light, no looking. She accepted it, for a time.

The Sisters

Her two older sisters came to visit - Zephyrus carried them down at Psyche’s request - and they stood in the palace and hated what they saw. Their own marriages were difficult and dull, and here was their youngest sister with rooms full of gold and a husband who treated her well. They asked about him. Psyche, who had no face to describe, only said that he was young and handsome and spent his days hunting. They listened and nodded and when they left they were already planning.

On their second visit they brought the weapon they had prepared. What if he really is a monster? they said. The Oracle called him a beast. What if he hides his face because looking at him would kill you? They pressed until the doubt took root. They told her to take a lamp and a knife to bed, and when he was asleep, to look. If he was a monster, she would know what to do with the knife.

The Lamp

Psyche waited until his breathing slowed and then lit the lamp. She held it over him.

She saw Eros. The god of love, asleep in her bed - his wings folded, his quiver of arrows hanging from the bedpost, the gold and lead arrows nested side by side. He was nothing like a monster. She stood over him, shaking, and as her hand trembled, a drop of hot oil fell from the lamp onto his shoulder.

He woke. He looked at her, and at the lamp, and he said nothing. He rose, caught the wind, and was gone. The palace dissolved around her. Psyche found herself alone on the grass in the empty valley, and then she understood what she had traded away.

Aphrodite’s Four Tasks

She could not reach Eros. He had returned to his mother’s house and lay there nursing his burn, refusing to see Psyche, and Aphrodite - who now knew everything - was ready. When Psyche finally came to her door and asked for help, the goddess smiled and set her to work.

The first task was a heap of grain: millet, barley, poppy seed, lentils, and more, all mixed together in a pile that reached the ceiling of a locked storeroom, to be sorted by nightfall. Psyche sat before it and could not begin. Ants came - a colony of them, moving in the dark under the granary floor - and sorted the heap grain by grain while she sat still. By evening the piles were perfect.

The second task was the golden-fleeced rams: enormous, violent animals that charged anything that entered their field. A reed growing at the river’s edge told Psyche to wait until the heat of the day had passed, when the rams rested in the shade. She waded through the shallows and gathered wool from the thorns and branches along the fence. She came back to Aphrodite with her arms full of fleece.

The third task: fetch water from the River Styx. The Styx ran at the bottom of cliffs that no human foot could descend, guarded by dragons that never slept. Psyche stood at the cliff’s edge and saw no way down. Zeus’s eagle appeared, took the jug from her hands, flew down through the cliffs past the dragons, filled it, and returned it to her. She brought the black water back to Aphrodite.

The fourth task was the worst. Aphrodite wanted a box of beauty fetched from Persephone, queen of the dead - meaning Psyche had to descend into the underworld and return. A tower spoke to her before she could climb it to throw herself off in despair: it gave her the route, the coins for Charon’s toll, the honeyed barley cakes to distract Cerberus on the way in and on the way out, and one instruction she was to hold to absolutely. Do not open the box.

Psyche made the descent. She got past Charon, past Cerberus, stood before Persephone, received the box, and came back up into the light of the world. She was almost through. Then she thought about how she must look after all of this - the trials, the grief, the underworld - and thought that if the box held beauty, surely a small amount applied now, before she saw Eros again, would do no harm. She opened it.

The box held sleep. Not beauty - a dark, heavy sleep that came from nowhere, and Psyche dropped to the road and did not move.

On Olympus

Eros had recovered from the burn. He had stayed in his mother’s house as long as he could bear it, which was not very long. He found Psyche on the road and gathered the sleep back into the box, shut the lid, woke her, sent her on to finish the errand. Then he went to Zeus.

Zeus heard the case. He called the gods together and announced that Eros had chosen his wife, and that the marriage would stand. He sent Hermes to bring Psyche up to Olympus and held a cup of ambrosia to her lips. She drank. Mortality left her. Aphrodite, standing in the assembly with no good argument left, accepted what had been decided.

Psyche - whose name in Greek means both soul and butterfly - took her place among the gods. She and Eros were wed on Olympus, and their daughter, born later, was named Hedone: pleasure, in Greek, the child of love and soul together.