This is part of a Wednesday series on Goddess spirituality and political activism.
Since the Prop. 8 disaster-in-slow-motion started, I've been somewhat obsessed with Goddesses who were forced apart from their spouses. In my ninitial rage after the election, I wrote the first Goddess diary, about Pattini . Today, trying to focus my grief into action, I turned to Psyche .
Psyche is the Greek Goddess of the soul. She is often symbolized by a butterfly, a creature that starts out earthbound and then grows wings. Her story first appears as an odd digression in Apulieus’s The Golden Ass .
The ever-jealous Aphrodite became envious of Psyche’s beauty, and sent her son Eros to take care of the problem. She told him to shoot Psyche with one of his magical arrows, and cause her to fall in love with some hideous monster. But when Eros crept up behind Psyche, he inadvertently scratched himself with his own arrow, and fell instantly in love.
This left Eros with a dilemma: if Aphrodite found out, she would be angry, and hell hath no fury like the love Goddess scorned. So Eros sent an oracle to Psyche’s family and told them that she was to be brought to a remote cliff and left there for the God who would marry her. The family obeyed, and a frightened Psyche was left there alone on the cliff, with the winds swirling around her. Zephyr, the West Wind, picked her up and gently carried her to Eros’s palace.
There Psyche spent her days in luxury: sumptuous food was brought by unseen servants, and music played whenever she wished. At night, her husband would come to her and they would make love – but only in total darkness. He would neither tell her his name, nor show his face.
In time Psyche became lonely, and she asked that her sisters be allowed to visit. Eros agreed, and Zephyr brought the sisters to the palace. Psyche showed them her grand home, with its many magical wonders, and she told them about her invisible husband. The sisters envied Psyche’s good fortune – or perhaps they simply let their imaginations run away with them. They filled Psyche’s head with worries: why could she not see her husband? Was he disfigured? Or was he some sort of monster, not human at all? Perhaps he was a giant serpent, plotting to devour her.
After the sisters left, Psyche tried to free her mind of these fears. But the anxiety would not release her. Once again that night, she asked her husband to let her see him in the light. Once agian he told her it was forbidden. As he slept, she touched his face, trying to construct his features in her mind’s eye. She couldn’t find anything monstrous. And yet her sisters’ voices echoed in her ears, warning her of some horrible, dangerous creature sleeping next to her.
Finally Psyche could stand it no longer. She slipped from the bed and lit a lamp, holding its dim light above him. For the first time, she looked into the face of Eros, of Love himself. Her heart burst with love like a butterfly breaking free of its cocoon, taking wing for the first time.
A drop of oil fell from the lamp onto his face.
Eros jerked awake, and saw what Psyche had done. "Stay," she begged, but he was already flying away from her. Psyche was left in the palace, as alone as the day she’d stood on the cliff.
As Eros had feared, Aphrodite was furious. She felt that Psyche’s beauty diminished her own, and she demanded that Eros and Psyche be kept apart. But Eros spoke endlessly of his love for Psyche, and Psyche brought offerings to Aphrodite's temple, begging to be joined with her husband again. Finally, Aphrodite relented: they could be together – as soon as Psyche finished four impossible tasks.
First, Psyche had to separate the many kinds of grain in a large basket. Psyche accomplished this with the help of a colony of ants, each one carrying a grain. Second, she had to gather wool from the golden sheep, which were vicious and dangerous. (Yes, killer sheep – several millennia before Monty Python.) On the advice of a river god, Psyche waited until noon when the sheep fell asleep, then picked the wool that had rubbed off on the trees in their meadow. Then she had to draw water from a chasm that was guarded by giant serpents. An eagle aided her in this task.
Finally, Aphrodite demanded that Psyche fetch her a box of beauty from the underworld. Out of ideas, Psyche decided to reach the realm of Hades by the quickest means possible: throwing herself off a high tower. But before she could jump, the tower itself spoke to her, and told her where the secret entrance to the underworld was hidden, and what kind of food to bring for the guard dog Cerberus. Psyche followed the tower’s instructions, journeyed to the underworld, and emerged with the box. But with the hope of seeing her husband soon, Psyche wanted to make herself more beautiful as well, erasing the dark circles that exhaustion and grief had put around her eyes. And so – mythological characters should all know by now not to do this – she opened the box.
But Aphrodite had played a final trick. Instead of beauty, the box contained an overpowering sleep. Psyche fell into a coma.
Eros had had enough. He flew down to earth and wiped the sleep from his wife’s face, putting it all back in the box. He then called a council of the deities, and pled his case. They ruled – over Aphrodite’s objections – that Psyche should be given the nectar of immortality. the woman became a Goddess, and Psyche and Eros spent eternity together, heart joined to soul. And Aphrodite found, to her surprise, that their love and Psyche’s beauty did not diminish her at all.
I know a bit about jealous people who believe that their marriages are somehow diminished by mine. Who demand that my love be kept invisible. Who compare my love to marrying an animal or a monster, and seek to destroy what we have together.
They may as well know right now: I will do as many impossible tasks as it takes, until all of us have the freedom to marry. I will gather allies, be they as small as ants or as powerful as eagles. I will separate innumerable grains of fiction from fact, gather as much gold as we need, fly across a chasm of ignorance, and fight my way back from the underworld if I have to. I will find the resources within myself that I never knew were there. My love deserves no less.