Cupid and Psyche

“What fine rewards my peerless beauty will bring you! All too late you experience the mortal wounds inflicted by impious envy.”

When Apollo delivers his awful pronouncement on Psyche’s fate, she guesses that her beauty, and the acclaim she has received because of it, have angered the gods. Psyche recognizes the impiety in that she, a mortal, has been adored as if she were a goddess. It is a common theme in many mythologies that excessive gifts in humans provoke jealousy from the gods, usually with disastrous results.

“Here she was, confined and enclosed in that blessed prison, unable even to offer consoling relief to her sisters as they grieved for her.”

Psyche, though she is surrounded by riches in Cupid’s palace of love, feels it is no better than a prison if she cannot have human company. Wealth and comfort, and even sexual gratification, are not enough to satisfy her; Psyche craves companionship, someone to share her days with.

“She must not through sacrilegious curiosity tumble headlong from the lofty height of her happy fortune, and forfeit thereafter his embrace.”

Cupid, in warning his wife not to meet her sisters, establishes the taboo on seeing him. As with many fairy tales, what first seems easy to accept gradually becomes a burden. In one sense, Cupid warns that their love can only survive in secret. In another, his use of the word “sacrilegious” to describe Psyche’s curiosity suggests she would indeed be crossing the will of a god.

“For I love and cherish you passionately, whoever you are, as much as my own life, and I value you higher than Cupid himself.”

The irony of this statement is that Psyche is, in fact, married to Cupid. But she also declares her love before she knows her husband’s identity. This passage suggests that Psyche’s love has grown naturally and is the kind of tender, affectionate love—amor—that was considered more lasting than sexual desire, which could change at a whim.

“Here we are, her elder sisters, nothing better than maidservants to foreign husbands, banished from home and even from our native land, living like exiles far from our parents, while Psyche, the youngest and last offspring of our mother’s weary womb, has obtained all this wealth, and a god for a husband! She has not even a notion of how to enjoy such abundant blessings.”

The sisters justify their envy by reasoning that Psyche’s good fortune is undeserved. Their situations reflect a common reality for high-born women in cultures where marriages are made for economic benefit or to ally powerful families. They pretend that part of their displeasure is due to being apart from their parents—a false show of filial piety. When they persuade Psyche to cut off the head of the monster she married, the sisters assure her that they will help her carry her riches away, thus showing their true motives.

“I merely attend at night to the words of a husband to whom I submit with no knowledge of what he is like, for he certainly shuns the light of day.”

A key moment in Psyche’s character development occurs when she begins to question her obedience to her husband. Though the doubts are planted by her sisters, Psyche wonders how good her situation really is. Until this point, she accepted what she was told, but now that she is a wife and soon to be a mother, Psyche is maturing and wonders how trusting she ought to be.

“She drew out an arrow from the quiver, and tested its point on the tip of her thumb. But because her arm was still trembling she pressed too hard, with the result that it pricked too deeply, and tiny drops of rose-red blood bedewed the surface of the skin. So all unknowing and without prompting Psyche fell in love with Love.”

Psyche has already declared her affection, so when she discovers her beautiful husband is a god and examines his weapons, the prick of his arrow seems merely to confirm her love for him. But this moment might also represent the awakening of sexual love, the kind stirred by Cupid’s arrows. Though she is married and has become pregnant, this could be the first time Psyche feels the power of sexual desire. It proves her downfall, for as she bends over her husband to kiss him, the hot oil from her lamp splashes onto his skin.

“I, the famed archer, wounded myself with my own weapon, and made you my wife—and all so that you should regard me as a wild beast, and cut off my head with the steel, and with it the eyes that dote on you!”

When Cupid chides Psyche for not trusting him, he reveals that he disobeyed his mother’s command to make her fall in love with an unworthy man. Though claiming he was pricked with his own arrow may simply be a figure of speech to represent his feelings, some translators make this moment literal and portray Cupid as accidentally pricking himself when he first sees Psyche, thus moving him to love her. In Apuleius, the arrows aren’t needed to make the couple love one another, suggesting theirs is a deeper kind of love.

“They were claiming that Cupid was relaxing with a lady of easy virtue in the mountains, and that Venus herself was idly swimming in the ocean, with the result that pleasure and favour and elegance had departed from the world; all was unkempt, rustic, uncouth. There were no weddings, no camaraderie between friends, none of the love which children inspire; all was a scene of boundless squalor, of unsavoury tedium in sordid alliances.”

When Venus is away swimming, a sea bird comes to report on what is happening to the world in her absence. The picture he paints suggests that Venus is personally responsible for maintaining the qualities of pleasure, charm, and love, and they disintegrate in her absence. The love described here is a force of order, harmony, and affection, more in line with Venus’s “ancient” power, and a contrast to the disruptions caused by sexual desire. As a narrative device, the bird’s speech demonstrates his knowledge that taunting the goddess about her reputation is a certain way to get her to act.

“Why don’t you show a manly spirit? Why don’t you surrender yourself voluntarily to your mistress?”

After Ceres and Juno have rejected her pleas for intercession, Psyche talks herself into approaching Venus herself. Apuleius plays on the conventional distinctions between male and female attributes by suggesting that Psyche’s resolution is a masculine quality. In Roman tradition, women were supposed to be tender and soft, while men were supposed to be hard and bold. Psyche refers to Venus as her “mistress,” and Venus refers to Psyche as her maidservant and even slave, which suggests that Venus exerts a type of legal authority over Psyche that extends beyond the patroness of a goddess over a woman in love.

“Have pity, noble protégées of Earth, our universal mother; have pity, and with eager haste lend your aid to this refined girl, who is Cupid’s wife.”

With this speech the small ant summons his fellows to help Psyche with the task of sorting an enormous pile of tiny seeds. The ants use not magic but their industriousness to separate the seeds into piles, and they do so out of allegiance for a sorrowful girl whom they recognize as wife to the god of love. The help of the ants implies that in the natural order of things—an order Venus is opposing—Psyche belongs with Cupid, the human soul united with love.

“But the privations of this innocent soul did not escape the steady gaze of benevolent Providence.”

This is the second taboo, imposed by the speaking tower that counsels Psyche on how to navigate the underworld. Unlike Pandora, whose curiosity prompted her to open a forbidden box and thus unleash misery on the world, the death-like sleep that Psyche falls into which she opens the box affects only her. The tower may be cautioning Psyche that separation must be maintained between the divine and the mortal, and that mortals must not seek the qualities that gods possess. This might also be a caution against vanity to which Psyche, though she has never been proud of her beauty, finally succumbs.

“Of all these injunctions I urge you particularly to observe this: do not seek to open or to pry into the box that you will carry, nor be in any way inquisitive about the treasure of divine beauty hidden within it.”

This is the second taboo, imposed by the speaking tower that counsels Psyche on how to navigate the underworld. Unlike Pandora, whose curiosity prompted her to open a forbidden box and thus unleash misery on the world, the death-like sleep that Psyche falls into which she opens the box affects only her. The tower may be cautioning Psyche that separation must be maintained between the divine and the mortal, and that mortals must not seek the qualities that gods possess. This might also be a caution against vanity to which Psyche, though she has never been proud of her beauty, finally succumbs.