The story of Cupid and Psyche is best known through its derivatives: Antonio Canova’s famous sculpture, Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss (1793); C. S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces (1954), which he considered his best and most accomplished novel; the myriad paintings of the power-couple used as a staple of high-fashion or as clever censorship bypasses; the loose analogies drawn by psychologists to illustrate the relationship between Love and the Soul. Whatever your first encounter with the story may have been, the original version, written by Lucius Apuleius Madaurensisin in the 2nd century AD is, in my opinion, its least interesting portrayal.
To contextualize Apuleius, The Golden Ass (c.150 AD) ―the story about an amateur magician-turned-donkey in which the tale of Cupid and Psyche is embedded― is as far apart in history from Hesiod’s Theogony as Dan Brown’s atrocious The Da Vinci Code is from the actual foundation of the Knights Templar. Written almost a thousand years after the Homeric hymns that inspired it, his take on Cupid and Psyche comes across as a dubious case of fanfiction. I’ll double-down on this claim and make it worse: Cupid and Psyche is like erotic fanfiction, which together with thanatic fanfic (of which Tarantino is a master) is the only type of fanfiction worth indulging in. After all, what is the point of reimagining popular characters if not to picture them having sex or getting killed?
Cupid and Psyche is the Fifty Shades of Grey of Roman mythology: tacky, kinky and desultory. With unsettling detail, Apuleius describes how very skilled the goddess Venus is at kissing everyone ―including her son, Cupid― with her tongue, and how Cupid, in turn, has repeated intercourse with a woman who is the spitting image of his mother. Ugh.
If any man can recapture […] Psyche, by the way of reward for his information he shall receive from Venus herself seven sweet kisses and an extra one deeply honeyed with the sweetness of her thrusting tongue.
―Apuleius’ Venus, whoring herself (again) to get petty revenge on Psyche.
Psyche’s Personality Roulette
The plot of the story is best articulated through the wild mood swings and personality transformations that the titular Psyche erratically flashes through:
She starts as an empty vessel, an embodiment of #CursedBeauty ―like Helen of Troy― which sparks the ire of a jealous Venus.
She then becomes a wise and stoic #VirginSacrifice who readily renounces her status as a princess to appease Venus’ wrath.
Spirited away to Cupid’s realm, she turns into a #SmittenTeenager. It takes just a little pillow talk to make her immediately fall for her anonymous #DemonLover, whom she has never actually seen since he only visits at night.
Given the opportunity to see her family again, Psyche devolves into an #ImpulsiveChild, who gambles and loses everything she has by letting herself be influenced by her two nasty sisters.
Banished from Cupid’s grace, she goes full #VengefulFury and coaxes her sisters to kill themselves as punishment.
Psyche ―who by the way, is now also pregnant― then phases into a #WoefulMess as she is turned away by other goddesses and eventually becomes a servant of Venus, where she becomes the goddess’ punching bag.
Tasked with impossible quests, Psyche now turns into a #DamselInDistress, getting magical helpers to do all the work for her on every occasion.
In her last quest, she reverts to a known form ―the #ImpulsiveChild― as she breaks the one rule she’s supposed to keep, opening a chest that she thinks contains Beauty but instead holds deathly Sleep. (See “You Had One Job”).
It’s only after she’s KO’d into a #SleepingBeauty that the story can reach its resolution: Cupid ―who had been recovering from the arrow wound that made him fall in love with Psyche in the first place― finally finds her, wakes her up, they get married and live happily ever after. The End.
All of that happens in the course of three brief chapters.
Jungian psychologists, feminist authors and hippies have all produced countless interpretations of the significance of Psyche’s evolution: she starts as a pristine object of beauty, isolated in a palace and bound to a hidden lover, and ends as a goddess after enduring a journey riddled with suffering and pain. And yet, the fact that she needs to knock herself out for Cupid to set aright the world around her ―restoring her health, bartering diplomacy with her rival (and MIL) Venus, obtaining Jupiter’s blessing― is incredibly disempowering. The moral of the story may well be that despite a woman’s inner growth, she will act foolishly until the very end; and her man will be the one who fixes everything while she’s asleep.
Also: a woman’s worst enemy is the woman she resembles most.
So. Many. Tropes.
Cupid and Psyche is not without its virtues. The sheer number of themes it covers make it a great repository of storylines which are easily recognizable, when seen from the right angle. Can you spot the similarities with:
Beauty and the Beast. An allegedly horrible creature kidnaps a beautiful girl ostracized by society and keeps her in a rich palace, attended by magical servants.
Expulsion from Eden. A woman lives in isolation, enclosed in a palace of unlimited delights with the condition of not doing one specific thing. She does just that.
Tristan and Isolde. A couple that is not supposed to fall in love falls in love accidentally by means of a magical device. An elder, powerful family member opposes their union, and all hell breaks loose.
The Arabian Nights. A girl shags her powerful captor every night, seeking to earn his trust.
Any Grimm fairy tale. An innocent girl with divine protection is bullied by her two wicked sisters. They die horribly.
Any RPG. A heroine must retrieve a series of items with ascending difficulty levels. Carefully placed NPCs allow her to succeed.
As you can see, I have very mixed feelings about Cupid and Psyche. On the one hand, it’s a wonderful kaleidoscope of mythic tropes that has spawned so much better art. On the other, there’s the cognitive dissonance between its elevated symbolism and its anticlimactic, unflattering ―though not entirely unrealistic― portrayal of women, which is further underscored by Psyche’s flirtation with the hot-crazy line, Cupid’s sad simping for Psyche, and Apuleius’ fixation with Venus’ thrusting tongue.
Coming up next. As we wrap up the first year of Applied Mythology, I’ll cover the only story I dislike more that Cupid and Psyche: Philemon and Baucis.
And a fun fact. The Gnostics believed that the first red rose was created from a drop of Psyche’s blood touching the ground after losing her virginity to Cupid.