Psyche and Eros: The Lamp, the Box and Four Impossible Jobs

The most famous fairy tale to survive from antiquity is told in a bandits’ cave. A kidnapped bride named Charite is weeping, and the robbers’ old housekeeper, a little the worse for drink, offers to distract her with some pleasant old wives’ tales. Listening in is a young man called Lucius, who has been accidentally turned into a donkey. That is the setting Apuleius, a second-century CE writer from Madauros in North Africa, chose for the story of Psyche and Cupid, which fills the middle of his Latin novel, the Metamorphoses, better known as The Golden Ass. A tale about the soul and Love, delivered to a hostage by a tipsy servant and overheard by an ass: the frame is part of the joke.

Once upon a time, in a certain city

In a certain city there lived a king and a queen with three daughters, all lovely to look at. The two elder girls could be praised well enough in human words, but the youngest was so rare and so radiant that poor human speech could neither describe nor praise her.

Apuleius, Metamorphoses (our rendering)

That opening sounds like a nursery story, and Apuleius meant it to. The youngest daughter, Psyche, is so lovely that people stop visiting Venus’s temples and worship the girl instead. The goddess, outraged, calls in her winged son and orders him to make Psyche fall for the lowest wretch alive. Meanwhile nobody proposes. Admired by all and courted by none, Psyche sits at home, and her father consults Apollo’s oracle at Miletus. Apuleius cannot resist a wink: Apollo, though a Greek god, answers in Latin verse for the convenience of the author. The oracle orders Psyche placed on a mountain crag, dressed for a funeral wedding, to await a husband who is no mortal but a cruel, winged, viper-like terror whom even Jupiter fears.

The wedding procession is a funeral march. Then the west wind, Zephyr, lifts her gently down into a flowery valley, where she finds a palace of gold and jewels, served by bodiless voices. Each night a husband she cannot see comes to her bed and leaves before dawn. He sets one condition: she must never try to see his face.

The lamp and the drop of oil

Paradise has a weak point, and it is family. Psyche begs to see her sisters, and the husband reluctantly lets Zephyr carry them down. They see the gold and seethe. When they learn that Psyche is pregnant, they tell her that her husband is a monstrous serpent who will devour her when her time comes. She hides a lamp and a razor by the bed.

That night she lifts the lamp and sees not a monster but Cupid himself – golden curls, dewy white wings, bow and quiver at the foot of the bed. Turning one of his arrows in her fingers, she pricks her thumb and falls, as Apuleius puts it, in love with Love. Then a drop of burning oil spills from the lamp onto the god’s right shoulder. He wakes, sees what she has done and flies off, telling her that his absence will be her punishment.

Psyche throws herself into a river, which politely sets her back on the bank. Sitting nearby is the rustic god Pan, holding the nymph Echo and teaching her songs. He reads her trouble at a glance and tells her to win Cupid back with prayers. Her revenge on her sisters is less gentle: she tells each of them that Cupid now wants her instead, and each leaps from the crag calling on a Zephyr who does not come.

Four impossible jobs

Cupid is laid up in his mother’s house nursing his burn, and a gossiping gull dives into the sea to tell Venus. Psyche wanders in search of her husband, tidies a temple of Ceres heaped with tangled sheaves and sickles – the goddess of Eleusis pities her but will not cross Venus – and is turned away by Juno too. At last she gives herself up. Venus’s maid Habit drags her in by the hair, Worry and Sorrow are ordered to torment her, and then come four tasks.

The first is a heap of mixed wheat, barley, millet, poppy seed, chickpeas, lentils and beans, to be sorted by nightfall. An ant takes pity and summons its whole nation, which separates the pile grain by grain. The second is to bring back wool from a flock of golden sheep that turn murderous in the midday sun. A green reed by the river whispers the trick: wait until the heat drops and the sheep settle, then gather the golden tufts snagged on the brambles. The third is to fill a crystal jar from a spring high on a sheer crag, which feeds the rivers of the underworld and is guarded by serpents. Jupiter’s eagle, remembering an old debt to Cupid, swoops down and fills it for her.

The fourth sends her to the underworld itself, to ask Proserpina for a little of her beauty in a box. Psyche climbs a tower to throw herself off, and the tower talks her down with precise instructions. Go down through Taenarus, it says, carrying two barley cakes soaked in honeyed wine and two coins in your mouth. Refuse to help a lame donkey-driver, a dead old man floating in the river or women weaving at a loom: these are traps meant to make you drop the cakes. Give a cake to Cerberus each way, pay Charon each way, and in Proserpina’s hall sit on the ground and eat only plain bread. Above all, do not open the box.

Psyche does everything right until the last step. On the way home she opens the box, hoping to borrow a touch of divine beauty for herself, and an underworld sleep pours out and drops her where she stands. Her helpers are an ant, a reed, an eagle and a tower: the tasks reward patience and restraint, and the small things of the world are on her side.

A wedding on Olympus, and a soul with wings

Cupid, healed, slips out of his room, wipes the sleep from Psyche’s face, shuts it back in the box and wakes her with a harmless prick of an arrow. Then he flies to Jupiter. The king of the gods complains that the boy has wounded him often enough, turning him into snakes, birds and bulls, but agrees to help – on condition that Cupid pay him back with any outstanding beauty who appears on earth. Mercury summons the gods; Psyche is brought up to heaven, handed a cup of ambrosia and told to drink and be immortal. At the wedding feast Vulcan cooks, the Hours scatter roses, the Muses sing, Apollo plays the lyre and Venus, reconciled, dances. A daughter is born, whom, Apuleius tells us, we call Pleasure.

Psyche’s name means ‘soul’ in Greek, and also ‘butterfly’, and Apuleius, who presented himself as a Platonist philosopher, knew what he was doing. Plato had pictured the soul as winged, losing and regrowing its feathers under the pull of love. Here is a soul that loses Love through a failure of trust, suffers, descends to the dead and is raised to heaven. Around the turn of the sixth century, the mythographer Fulgentius made the allegory explicit, reading the tale as the journey of the soul. Hesiod’s ancient Eros, a primal power at the making of the world, has meanwhile become a sulky boy with a burnt shoulder – and has been made to grow up.

Folklorists class the tale with stories of a bride searching for a lost, mysterious husband, cousins of ‘East of the Sun and West of the Moon’ and ‘Beauty and the Beast’. Antonio Canova carved Psyche revived by Cupid’s kiss in marble, and C. S. Lewis retold the story from a grieving sister’s point of view in Till We Have Faces. What keeps it alive is the double edge of Psyche’s flaw. Twice she cannot resist looking – with the lamp and at the box – and twice her curiosity almost ruins her. Yet without the lamp she would have stayed a comfortable prisoner in the dark. Apuleius lets her look, pay and rise. For the other side of Cupid’s archery, where wanting ends in bark instead of a wedding, read Apollo and Daphne.