The Tale of Eros and Psyche

At a Glance

• Central figures: Psyche, a mortal princess of extraordinary beauty, and Eros, the god of love, who falls for her against his mother’s wishes.
• Setting: Ancient Greece - a remote divine palace, the mortal world, the Underworld, and Mount Olympus; the story comes to us most fully through Apuleius, though its roots lie in Greek oral tradition.
• The turn: Psyche, convinced by her sisters that her unseen husband may be a monster, lights a lamp over the sleeping Eros and a drop of oil wakes him - ending his secret life with her.
• The outcome: Eros flees; Psyche endures four impossible tasks set by Aphrodite before Eros revives her from a deathlike sleep and brings her to Olympus, where Zeus grants her immortality.
• The legacy: Psyche is made a goddess and married to Eros on Olympus; their union produces a daughter named Voluptas, the personification of pleasure.

Aphrodite had been tolerating the problem for some time before she acted on it. The problem was Psyche - not the goddess, just a mortal girl, a king’s daughter, whose beauty had started drawing the kind of devotion that properly belonged at temples. People left offerings for her. They said she was Aphrodite reborn, or better. Aphrodite found this intolerable, and sent for her son.

The plan was simple: Eros would shoot Psyche with a lead-tipped arrow and make her fall helplessly in love with something wretched - the lowest creature Eros could find. He flew to carry it out. He saw her. He pricked himself on his own arrow instead, and the plan ended there.

The Palace Without a Face

Psyche’s beauty, for all its power over strangers, brought her no husband. Her two sisters married well enough. Men admired Psyche the way they admired a statue - at a distance, in silence, going home afterward to someone else. Her father consulted the oracle at Delphi and received an answer he did not want: dress her for a funeral, leave her on a mountain crag, and let what comes for her come.

Psyche stood on the rock, alone, and the west wind lifted her - gently, as the oracle had implied it would - and carried her down to a valley she had never seen, and a palace she could not account for. The floors were gold. The ceilings were worked ivory. Voices that belonged to no visible body told her she was home.

Her husband came only at night, in the dark. He would not let her see him. He was tender and spoke at length and left before the light changed. Psyche fell in love with a voice, a presence, a warmth in the bed beside her. She asked nothing. For a time, that was enough.

The Sisters’ Visit

Eros had not forbidden her everything. He had permitted her family to visit, though he warned her - more than once, and with some force - that her sisters would do her harm. She asked anyway. He let the west wind carry them to her.

They looked at the palace. They looked at their sister, comfortable and luminous and clearly loved. They asked her what her husband looked like.

She said he was young. She said he was often away on hunting trips. She kept talking, and her answers shifted, and her sisters listened with the particular patience of people gathering ammunition. On the way home they compared notes. Their conclusion was that Psyche’s husband was a monster - a serpent, probably - living in darkness to hide what he was, and fattening her up. They returned, they told her this, and they pressed a knife into her hands: look at him while he sleeps; cut off his head before he can wake.

Psyche did not use the knife. But she took the lamp.

The Drop of Oil

She waited until his breathing was slow and even. Then she uncovered the lamp.

The god of love was lying next to her - young, winged, so perfect that the light itself seemed to gather around him. Two arrows had slipped from his quiver onto the floor. Reaching over to look at them, Psyche nicked her finger on the tip of one, and felt the sting of it go all the way through.

Then the oil dripped. A single drop from the lamp’s edge, landing on his shoulder. Eros woke. He looked at her for one moment - she was still holding the lamp, her face still turned toward him with the expression of someone whose world has just entirely rearranged itself - and then he was gone. Out the window, into the dark, and the palace went silent around her.

She found him briefly, in a cypress tree at the edge of the grounds. He told her that he had defied his mother for her sake. He told her that love cannot survive without trust. Then the tree was empty.

Aphrodite’s Four Tasks

Psyche tried the temples of other gods first. None would shelter her against Aphrodite. So she went to Aphrodite directly, and Aphrodite set her to work.

The first task was a storeroom filled to the ceiling with mixed grain - wheat, barley, millet, lentils, poppyseed, all heaped together - to be sorted by nightfall. Psyche sat down in front of the pile and stared at it. Ants came: a column of them, then thousands, moving with the systematic quiet of creatures who find sorting grain entirely natural. By evening, every heap was separate.

The second task was golden fleece from a flock of rams grazing on the other side of a river. The rams were dangerous - not because rams are especially violent, but because these were, and Aphrodite knew it. A river god, speaking through the reeds at the water’s edge, told Psyche to wait until noon, when the rams slept in the shade, and then gather the wool they had left on the briars and branches along the bank. She came back with her arms full of gold.

The third task was a flask of water from the river Styx, where it ran down from a black rock guarded by serpents that never slept. Zeus’s eagle took the flask from her hands, filled it, and returned it without explanation.

The fourth task was the worst. Aphrodite sent Psyche to the Underworld with an empty box and instructions to bring back some of Persephone’s beauty. A tower - another inexplicable helper - told her the route: carry two coins for Charon, two honey cakes for Cerberus, speak to no one who asks for help along the way, and do not open the box under any circumstances. Psyche did everything correctly until she was almost back. Then she opened the box - wanting, she told herself, to use just a little of whatever was inside before she saw Eros again. The box held nothing that looked like beauty. It held sleep, the kind without dreams, and Psyche collapsed on the road back from the Underworld.

Eros and the Petition to Zeus

Eros had been recovering from his burned shoulder in his mother’s house, and had been - he was honest about this - hiding from Psyche as well. But he had not stopped watching. When he saw her on the road, he flew to her, brushed the sleep from her eyes like brushing dust from a surface, put it back in the box, and closed it.

He told her to finish the errand. Then he went to Zeus.

Zeus heard him out. The king of the gods had his own complicated history with Eros’s arrows, and this request - full immortality for a mortal woman, on the grounds of love proven under trial - was unusual but not without precedent. He agreed. Hermes brought Psyche up to Olympus and Zeus gave her a cup of ambrosia. She drank it and did not die, which is what immortality means.

Aphrodite was present for this. She did not applaud. But she did not object, either - perhaps because Psyche, now a goddess, was no longer stealing worship that belonged to Aphrodite, but had worship of her own.

The wedding feast was held on Olympus, and in time Psyche bore Eros a daughter. They called her Voluptas: joy, pleasure, the feeling that the long work was finally done.