The Story of Eros and Psyche

At a Glance

• Central figures: Eros, the god of love, and Psyche, a mortal princess whose beauty rivaled Aphrodite’s; also Aphrodite, who sets the trials, and Zeus, who intervenes at the end.
• Setting: Ancient Greece - mortal kingdoms, a hidden divine palace, the banks of the river Styx, and the Underworld; the story comes from the Greek mythological tradition.
• The turn: Psyche breaks her promise and lights a lamp to look upon her sleeping husband, revealing Eros; a drop of oil burns him, and he flees.
• The outcome: Psyche is abandoned and forced to complete four brutal tasks set by Aphrodite; Zeus ultimately grants her immortality, and she and Eros are reunited on Olympus.
• The legacy: Psyche is raised from mortal to goddess and accepted into Olympus as Eros’s divine wife, a transformation earned through her endurance of Aphrodite’s trials.

Aphrodite had altars going cold across Greece. Sailors who once brought her garlands of myrtle brought them now to a mortal girl who had done nothing except be born beautiful. Psyche had not asked for it. The temples still stood, but the worshippers had drifted away, and Aphrodite - grey-eyed, radiant, furious - noticed. She summoned her son and gave him his instructions: find the girl, and drive her into love with the worst creature alive.

Eros flew to Psyche’s chamber that night with his quiver. He looked at her. And in looking, he pricked himself with his own arrow.

The Oracle’s Answer

All of Psyche’s beauty had bought her nothing in the world of marriage. Men admired her the way they admired a statue - with awe that curdled into distance. Her sisters married. She did not. Her father, the king, went to the oracle of Apollo at last, hoping for news of a suitable husband, and received instead a funeral verdict: his daughter was fated for no mortal man. She should be dressed for death, brought to a high mountain, and left. Whatever claimed her would be her husband.

They dressed her in mourning white. The procession climbed the mountain. Her family wept and left her there, standing at the edge of an empty sky.

The Palace in the Wind

Zephyrus found her on the rock - the west wind, soft and unhurried - and lifted her as if she weighed nothing, carrying her down into a valley where a palace stood that seemed built from the light itself. Gold columns, floors of inlaid stone, rooms full of everything she had ever wanted. Voices without bodies offered her food, music, a bath. She slept, and in the dark, her husband came to her.

He was gentle. He was kind. He asked only one thing: she must never look upon his face.

This continued. She loved him. The palace offered no explanations, only comforts, and Eros came to her each night and was gone before dawn. She had no name for him, no face, nothing but his voice and his hands and the warmth he left behind. She was content, and then her sisters came.

They arrived on the mountain, calling her name, and Eros warned her against them - warned her with enough specificity that it should have meant something. She brought them to the palace anyway. The sisters walked through the rooms and counted what she had and went home with the seeds of her undoing already planted: her husband was hiding something monstrous. The oracle had said monster. What if it was true?

The Lamp

One night Psyche waited until Eros slept. She had hidden a lamp and a knife - the knife in case the sisters were right, the lamp to see by. She uncovered the flame and held it over the bed.

Not a monster. The god of love himself lay there, his wings folded, his face the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. She forgot the knife. She leaned closer. A drop of oil from the lamp landed on his shoulder, and Eros woke.

He looked at her. She looked at him. He said nothing - what was there to say? He rose, and the palace vanished around her, and she stood in an empty field in the dark. She was alone. She was also, somewhere in Greece, pregnant with a god’s child.

The Four Tasks

Psyche walked to Aphrodite. It was the only thing left to do. Aphrodite received her with the cold pleasure of a goddess who has been waiting, and gave her work.

Sort a heap of mixed grains - barley, millet, lentils, poppy seed, all jumbled together - by morning. Psyche sat down among the pile and despaired, and then a colony of ants moved through the room and sorted every grain into its proper mound before the lamp burned low. She woke to find it done.

Collect the golden wool from the rams that grazed in the meadow beyond the river. The rams were famous for savagery, and Psyche stood at the riverbank and thought about walking in among them. A reed spoke to her - low and practical - and told her to wait until noon when the rams slept in the shade, then gather the wool they had left snagged on the thornbushes. She waited. She gathered it.

Fill a flask from the river Styx where it fell in black cascades from a high cliff, past rocks guarded by dragon-headed serpents. An eagle flew down out of the empty sky, took the flask from her hands, and brought it back full. Zeus’s eagle - sent by Zeus himself, who had been watching with interest.

The last task was the one meant to kill her. Go down to the Underworld. Find Persephone. Ask her for a measure of her beauty in a sealed box, and bring it back. Psyche found the way. She had been given instructions - a tower spoke to her, a tower she had climbed to throw herself from in despair, which instead explained the road to Hades in exact detail. She brought coins for Charon, barley cakes for Cerberus, refused the hands reaching out from the grey water because helping them would mean staying. Persephone received her, gave her the box, and sent her back up toward the light.

She carried the box up into the living world, and opened it.

She had thought only to take a little. A fraction of Persephone’s beauty for herself, to return to Eros less worn by suffering. What came out of the box was not beauty. It was a sleep like death, and it took her where she stood.

Eros and Olympus

Eros had been healing in his mother’s house - a burn on the shoulder, a wound in something less easily named - and had reached the end of staying away. He found Psyche unconscious on the road. He gathered up the sleep that clung to her and folded it back into the box. She woke on the ground with his hands around her.

He took the box to Aphrodite himself and then went to Zeus. Zeus called an assembly of the gods. He had already formed his opinion. He gave Psyche a cup of ambrosia and watched her drink it, her mortality burning off like morning fog. Aphrodite, surrounded by gods, found it unwise to maintain her objection.

The wedding on Olympus was celebrated with proper ceremony. Eros and Psyche were married among the gods, and she took her place among the immortals - no longer the mortal girl whose beauty had emptied Aphrodite’s temples, but a goddess in her own right, the soul’s own figure made divine, living on Olympus with the god who had pricked himself looking at her and never quite recovered.