Cupid and Psyche is a story originally from Metamorphoses (also called The Golden Ass), written in the 2nd century AD by Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis (or Platonicus). The tale concerns the overcoming of obstacles to the love between Psyche (; Ancient Greek: Ψυχή, lit. 'Soul' or 'Breath of Life', Ancient Greek pronunciation: [psyːkʰɛ̌ː]) and Cupid (Latin: Cupido, lit. 'Desire', Latin pronunciation: [kʊˈpiːd̪oː]) or Amor (lit. 'Love', Greek Eros, Ἔρως), and their ultimate union in a sacred marriage. Although the only extended narrative from antiquity is that of Apuleius from the 2nd century AD, Eros and Psyche appear in Greek art as early as the 4th century BC. The story's Neoplatonic elements and allusions to mystery religions accommodate multiple interpretations, and it has been analyzed as an allegory and in light of folktale, Märchen or fairy tale, and myth.
The story of Cupid and Psyche was known to Boccaccio in c. 1370. The first printed version dates to 1469. Ever since, the reception of Cupid and Psyche in the classical tradition has been extensive. The story has been retold in poetry, drama, and opera, and depicted widely in painting, sculpture, and even wallpaper.
Contents
In Apuleius
The tale of Cupid and Psyche (or "Eros and Psyche") is placed at the midpoint of Apuleius's novel, and occupies about a fifth of its total length. The novel itself is a first-person narrative by the protagonist Lucius. Transformed into a donkey by magic gone wrong, Lucius undergoes various trials and adventures, and finally regains human form by eating roses sacred to Isis. Psyche's story has some similarities, including the theme of dangerous curiosity, punishments and tests, and redemption through divine favor.
As a structural mirror of the overarching plot, the tale is an example of mise en abyme. It occurs within a complex narrative frame, with Lucius recounting the tale as it in turn was told by an old woman to Charite, a bride kidnapped by bandits on her wedding day and held captive in a cave. The happy ending for Psyche is supposed to assuage Charite's fear of rape, in one of several instances of Apuleius's irony.
Although the tale resists explication as a strict allegory of a particular Platonic argument, Apuleius drew generally on imagery such as the laborious ascent of the winged soul (Phaedrus 248) and the union with the divine achieved by Soul through the agency of the daemon Love (Symposium 212b).
Story
There were once a king and queen, rulers of an unnamed city, who had three daughters of conspicuous beauty. The youngest and most beautiful was Psyche, whose admirers, neglecting the proper worship of Aphrodite (love goddess Venus), instead prayed and made offerings to her. It was rumored that she was the second coming of Venus, or the daughter of Venus from an unseemly union between the goddess and a mortal. Venus is offended, and commissions Cupid to work her revenge. Cupid is sent to shoot Psyche with an arrow so that she may fall in love with something hideous. He instead scratches himself with his own dart, which makes any living thing fall in love with the first thing it sees. Consequently, he falls deeply in love with Psyche and disobeys his mother's order.
Although her two humanly beautiful sisters have married, the idolized Psyche has yet to find love. Her father suspects that they have incurred the wrath of the gods, and consults the oracle of Apollo. The response is unsettling: the king is to expect not a human son-in-law, but rather a dragon-like creature who harasses the world with fire and iron and is feared by even Jupiter and the inhabitants of the underworld.
Psyche is arrayed in funeral attire, conveyed by a procession to the peak of a rocky crag, and exposed. Marriage and death are merged into a single rite of passage, a "transition to the unknown". Zephyrus the West Wind bears her up to meet her fated match, and deposits her in a lovely meadow (locus amoenus), where she promptly falls asleep.
The transported girl awakes to find herself at the edge of a cultivated grove (lucus). Exploring, she finds a marvelous house with golden columns, a carved ceiling of citrus wood and ivory, silver walls embossed with wild and domesticated animals, and jeweled mosaic floors. A disembodied voice tells her to make herself comfortable, and she is entertained at a feast that serves itself and by singing to an invisible lyre.
Although fearful and without the proper experience, she allows herself to be guided to a bedroom where, in the darkness, a being she cannot see has sex with her. She gradually learns to look forward to his visits, though he always departs before sunrise and forbids her to look upon him. Soon, she becomes pregnant.
Psyche's family longs for news of her, and after much cajoling, Cupid, still unknown to his bride, permits Zephyr to carry her sisters up for a visit. When they see the splendor in which Psyche lives, they become envious, and undermine her happiness by prodding her to uncover her husband's true identity, since surely as foretold by the oracle she was lying with the vile winged serpent, who would devour her and her child.
As allegory
The story of Cupid and Psyche was readily allegorized. In late antiquity, Martianus Capella (5th century) refashions it as an allegory about the fall of the human soul. For Apuleius, immortality is granted to the soul of Psyche as a reward for commitment to sexual love. In the version of Martianus, sexual love draws Psyche into the material world that is subject to death: "Cupid takes Psyche from Virtue and shackles her in adamantine chains".
The tale thus lent itself to adaptation in a Christian or mystical context, often as symbolic of the soul. In the Gnostic text On the Origin of the World, the first rose is created from the blood of Psyche when she loses her virginity to Cupid. To the Christian mythographer Fulgentius (6th century), Psyche was an Adam figure, driven by sinful curiosity and lust from the paradise of Love's domain. Psyche's sisters are Flesh and Free Will, and her parents are God and Matter. To Boccaccio (14th century), the marriage of Cupid and Psyche symbolized the union of soul and God.
The allure to interpret the story as a religious or philosophical allegory can still be found in modern scholarship. Psyche by her very name represents the aspirations of the human soul—towards a divine love personified in Cupid. This simplistic interpretation overlooks the original characterisation of Cupid as a corrupter who delights in disrupting marriages (The Golden Ass IV. 30) and was "notorious for his adulteries" (VI. 23), as well as the descriptions of his sensual unions with Psyche (V. 13), the aid Jupiter offers to Cupid in return for a new girl that Jupiter may seduce (VI. 22), and the name given to Cupid and Psyche's child (Voluptas/Pleasure). However, when he admits that "I [Cupid], the famed archer, wounded myself with my own weapon, and made you [Psyche] my wife" (V. 24), having cut himself on his own magic arrow (which induces passionate love for the first person the victim lays eyes on), the temptation for an allegorical interpretation of the story becomes somewhat complexified but not inherently contradictory or unsubstantiated. The arrows of desire make it so that the victim cannot be satisfied with anyone except the sole target of their newfound affections; thus, Cupid's former predilections no longer occupy the same prominence they once held in his character, so that he changes from a wanton homewrecker to a devoted husband by the end of the narrative.
Classical tradition
Apuleius's novel was among the ancient texts that made the crucial transition from roll to codex form when it was edited at the end of the 4th century. It was known to Latin writers such as Augustine of Hippo, Macrobius, Sidonius Apollinaris, Martianus Capella, and Fulgentius, but toward the end of the 6th century lapsed into obscurity and survived what was formerly known as the "Dark Ages" through perhaps a single manuscript. The Metamorphoses remained unknown in the 13th century, but copies began to circulate in the mid-1300s among the early humanists of Florence. Boccaccio's text and interpretation of Cupid and Psyche in his Genealogia deorum gentilium (written in the 1370s and published 1472) was a major impetus to the reception of the tale in the Italian Renaissance and to its dissemination throughout Europe.
One of the most popular images from the tale was Psyche's discovery of a naked Cupid sleeping, found in ceramics, stained glass, and frescos. Mannerist painters were intensely drawn to the scene. In England, the Cupid and Psyche theme had its "most lustrous period" from 1566 to 1635, beginning with the first English translation by William Adlington. A fresco cycle for Hill Hall, Essex, was modeled indirectly after that of the Villa Farnesina around 1570, and Thomas Heywood's masque Love's Mistress dramatized the tale to celebrate the wedding of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, who later had her withdrawing chamber decorated with a 22-painting Cupid and Psyche cycle by Jacob Jordaens. The cycle took the divinization of Psyche as the centerpiece of the ceiling, and was a vehicle for the Neoplatonism the queen brought with her from France. The Cupid and Psyche produced by Orazio Gentileschi for the royal couple shows a fully robed Psyche whose compelling interest is psychological, while Cupid is mostly nude.
Another peak of interest in Cupid and Psyche occurred in the Paris of the late 1790s and early 1800s, reflected in a proliferation of opera, ballet, Salon art, deluxe book editions, interior decoration such as clocks and wall paneling, and even hairstyles. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, the myth became a vehicle for the refashioning of the self. In English intellectual and artistic circles around the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, the fashion for Cupid and Psyche accompanied a fascination for the ancient mystery religions. In writing about the Portland Vase, which was obtained by the British Museum around 1810, Erasmus Darwin speculated that the myth of Cupid and Psyche was part of the Eleusinian cycle. With his interest in natural philosophy, Darwin saw the butterfly as an apt emblem of the soul because it began as an earthbound caterpillar, "died" into the pupal stage, and was then resurrected as a beautiful winged creature.
Literature
In 1491, the poet Niccolò da Correggio retold the story with Cupid as the narrator. John Milton alludes to the story at the conclusion of Comus (1634), attributing not one but two children to the couple: Youth and Joy. Shackerley Marmion wrote a verse version called Cupid and Psyche (1637), and La Fontaine adapted the story into a mixed prose and verse romance named Les Amours de Psiché et de Cupidon (The Loves of Cupid and Psyche; 1669).
William Blake's mythology draws on elements of the tale particularly in the figures of Luvah and Vala. Luvah takes on the various guises of Apuleius's Cupid: beautiful and winged; disembodied voice; and serpent. Blake, who mentions his admiration for Apuleius in his notes, combines the myth with the spiritual quest expressed through the eroticism of the Song of Solomon, with Solomon and the Shulamite as a parallel couple.
Mary Tighe published her poem Psyche in 1805. She added some details to the story, such as placing two springs in Venus' garden, one with sweet water and one with bitter. When Cupid starts to obey his mother's command, he brings some of both to a sleeping Psyche, but places only the bitter water on Psyche's lips. Tighe's Venus only asks one task of Psyche, to bring her the forbidden water, but in performing this task Psyche wanders into a country bordering on Spenser's Fairie Queene as Psyche is aided by a mysterious visored knight and his squire Constance, and must escape various traps set by Vanity, Flattery, Ambition, Credulity, Disfida (who lives in a "Gothic castle"), Varia and Geloso. Spenser's Blatant Beast also makes an appearance. Tighe's work influenced English lyric poetry on the theme, such as the Ode to Psyche (1820) by John Keats. Letitia Elizabeth Landon's poem Cupid and Psyche (1826) illustrates an engraving of a painting by W. E. West.
William Morris retold the Cupid and Psyche story in verse in The Earthly Paradise (1868–70), and a chapter in Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean (1885) was a prose translation. About the same time, Robert Bridges wrote Eros and Psyche: A Narrative Poem in Twelve Measures (1885; 1894).
Sylvia Townsend Warner transferred the story to Victorian England in her novel The True Heart (1929), though few readers made the connection till she pointed it out herself. Other literary adaptations include The Robber Bridegroom (1942), a novella by Eudora Welty; Till We Have Faces (1956), a version by C. S. Lewis narrated by a sister of Psyche; and the poem "Psyche: 'Love drove her to Hell'" by H.D. (Hilda Doolittle). Robert A. Johnson made use of the story in his book She: Understanding Feminine Psychology, published in 1976 by HarperCollinsPublishers. The 2023 novel Psyche and Eros by Luna McNamara is based on the story.
Performing arts
In 1634, Thomas Heywood turned the tale of Cupid and Psyche into a masque for the court of Charles I. Lully's Psyché (1678) is a Baroque French opera (a "tragédie lyrique") based on the 1671 play by Molière, which had musical intermèdes by Lully. Matthew Locke's semi-opera Psyche (1675) is a loose reworking from the 1671 production. In 1800, Ludwig Abeille premièred his four-act German opera (singspiel) Amor und Psyche, with a libretto by Franz Carl Hiemer based on Apuleius.
In the 19th century, Cupid and Psyche was a source for "transformations", visual interludes involving tableaux vivants, transparencies and stage machinery that were presented between the scenes of a pantomime but extraneous to the plot. During the 1890s, when tableaux vivants or "living pictures" were in vogue as a part of vaudeville, the 1889 Psyché et l'Amour of Bouguereau was among the artworks staged. To create these tableaux, costumed performers "froze" in poses before a background copied meticulously from the original and enlarged within a giant picture frame. Nudity was feigned by flesh-colored bodystockings that negotiated standards of realism, good taste, and morality. Claims of educational and artistic value allowed female nudes—a popular attraction—to evade censorship. Psyché et l'Amour was reproduced by the scenic painter Edouard von Kilanyi, who made a tour of Europe and the United States beginning in 1892, and by George Gordon in an Australian production that began its run in December 1894. The illusion of flight was so difficult to sustain that this tableau was necessarily brief. The performer billed as "The Modern Milo" during this period specialized in recreating female sculptures, a Psyche in addition to her namesake Venus de Milo.
Frederick Ashton choreographed a ballet Cupid and Psyche with music by Lord Berners and decor by Sir Francis Rose, first performed on 27 April 1939 by the Sadler's Wells Ballet (now Royal Ballet). Frank Staff danced as Cupid, Julia Farron as Psyche, Michael Somes as Pan, and June Brae as Venus.
Cupid and Psyche continues to be a source of inspiration for modern playwrights and composers. Notable adaptations include:
Psyche (symphonic poem) by César Franck (1888)
Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold by C. S. Lewis
Psychology
Viewed in terms of psychology rather than allegory, the tale of Cupid and Psyche shows how "a mutable person … matures within the social constructs of family and marriage". In the Jungian allegory of Erich Neumann (1956), the story of Psyche was interpreted as "the psychic development of the feminine".
Cupid and Psyche has been analyzed from a feminist perspective as a paradigm of how the gender unity of women is disintegrated through rivalry and envy, replacing the bonds of sisterhood with an ideal of heterosexual love. This theme was explored in Psyche's Sisters: Reimagining the Meaning of Sisterhood (1988) by Christine Downing, who uses myth as a medium for psychology.
James Hillman made the story the basis for his critique of scientific psychology, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology (1983). Carol Gilligan uses the story as the basis for much of her analysis of love and relationships in The Birth of Pleasure (Knopf, 2002).
Fine and decorative arts
The story of Cupid and Psyche is depicted in a wide range of visual media. Psyche is often represented with butterfly wings, and the butterfly is her frequent attribute and a symbol of the soul, though the literary Cupid and Psyche never says that she has or acquires wings. In antiquity, an iconographical tradition existed independently of Apuleius's tale and influenced later depictions.
Some extant examples suggest that in antiquity Cupid and Psyche could have a religious or mystical meaning. Rings bearing their likeness, several of which come from Roman Britain, may have served an amuletic purpose. Engraved gems from Britain represent spiritual torment with the image of Cupid torching a butterfly. The two are also depicted in high relief in mass-produced Roman domestic plaster wares from the 1st to 2nd centuries AD found in excavations at Greco-Bactrian merchant settlements on the ancient Silk Road at Begram in Afghanistan (see gallery below). The allegorical pairing depicts perfection of human love in integrated embrace of body and soul ('psyche' Greek for butterfly symbol for transcendent immortal life after death). On sarcophagi, the couple often seem to represent an allegory of love overcoming death.
A relief of Cupid and Psyche was displayed at the mithraeum of Capua, but it is unclear whether it expresses a Mithraic quest for salvation, or was simply a subject that appealed to an individual for other reasons. Psyche is invoked with "Providence" (Pronoia) at the beginning of the so-called Mithras Liturgy.
In late antiquity, the couple are often shown in a "chin-chuck" embrace, a gesture of "erotic communion" with a long history. The rediscovery of freestanding sculptures of the couple influenced several significant works of the modern era.
Other depictions surviving from antiquity include a 2nd-century papyrus illustration possibly of the tale, and a ceiling fresco at Trier executed during the reign of Constantine I.
Works of art proliferated after the rediscovery of Apuleius's text, in conjunction with the influence of classical sculpture. In the mid-15th century, Cupid and Psyche became a popular subject for Italian wedding chests (cassoni), particularly those of the Medici. The choice was most likely prompted by Boccaccio's Christianized allegory. The earliest of these cassoni, dated variously to the years 1444–1470, pictures the narrative in two parts: from Psyche's conception to her abandonment by Cupid; and her wanderings and the happy ending. With the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, the subject was the most common choice for specifying paintings of the Feast of the Gods, which were popular from the Renaissance to Northern Mannerism.