Perspectives

[zee]

Perspectives - Vol. 6, No. 1 - Cupid and Psyche: A Story of Love

Brenda Kofford

 

Once upon a time when the world was young, mortals believed that all of the elements in the heavens and on the earth were connected. Humans saw that while a breeze -- silently and gently -- guided a leaf in it's autumn journey, their dance -- silently and gently -also altered the sojourn of the breeze. They saw gods and goddess in the heavens, the passing of the seasons, the sounds and life of the forests, and the thunderous seas. They understood these supreme beings as powerful presences, each defined by unique attributes and limited by human-like characteristics. Therefore, stories arose to tell of how life's challenges and triumphs were affected by and affecting the moods of, squabbles between, and relationships among the gods and goddess.

 

It is during this time that we first hear the love story of Cupid and Psyche, a young god and a mortal female. This story begins when Venus, the goddess of love, learned that her temples were in a state of neglect, the fires in her altars had turned to cold ashes; and her favorite towns had been abandoned. She saw that mortal men everywhere were journeying to the childhood home of Psyche, a mere maiden, to gaze upon and adore her beauty and grace. In a jealous rage, Venus ordered her son, Cupid, to use his powers to make Psyche fall madly in love with the vilest and most despicable creature in the world.

 

Thus it came to be that when Cupid looked upon the all-beautiful Psyche, he fell passionately in love. It was as though he had pierced his own heart with one of his arrows. The intensity of the infatuation he felt when he saw her left him so stunned he was unable to comply with his mother's request. He instead sought the advice and comfort of Apollo, the god of truth, for his heart was heavy with the knowledge that his love for Psyche was an act of silent disobedience and disloyalty to his mother.

 

Over the years mortal men continued to pay homage to the exquisite beauty and grace of Psyche. Yet, she did not fall in love and was not loved by any mortal man. Her father's unease about Psyche's unmarried status and questionable future had him seek an audience with Apollo's oracle. With great despair, he heard that his daughter was destined to marry a fearful winged serpent. With feelings of sadness and helplessness, the family arranged for Psyche to be dressed in deep mourning, took her to the summit of a rocky hill, and ordered her to wait for the being that was to make her his wife.

 

Psyche alone on the hilltop, unable to do other than what her family had bidden, was frozen with terror and convinced that her death was imminent. Sobs of anguish and despair echoed into the silence throughout the valley as a gentle and sweet wind wrapped it's self around her and lifted her into the heavens. It has been told that she regained consciousness in a magical place of abundance and beauty.

 

As the sun roused the morning pastels of dawn, Psyche awakened alone. Her smile drew from her feelings of enchantment and knowing that this day too would endow her with all of her material desires. Yet, if you were to enter her dressing room unseen by her, you would soon see her smile tighten with resignation and self-reproach. Feelings of loneliness filled the emptiness within her with a knowing that throughout this forthcoming day her companions were to be, not family or friends, but unseen voices.

 

Psyche set out each day with the commitment to be grateful that her family was no longer embarrassed that no man had ask for her hand in marriage. As she was only a mortal woman, she saw no other choice other than what had been preordained by Apollo's oracle. She came to realize that when the sun's light no longer touched the western sky, her feelings of unrest and loneliness would be soothed. For it was during the darkness of the night when an unseen presence that she believed to be her husband would lay alongside her, only to be gone in the morn.

 

Foreseeing the power of Psyche's loneliness, her invisible husband knew the day would come when Psyche would wish to have contact with her family. He described his gift to her of their home and his entitlement to her easement all questions and doubts about him and their marriage. He spoke of his fear that her family would persuade her to go against his request and implored she be content even though she could not set her eyes upon him. He warned her that their relationship would be destroyed if she were to be unfaithful to his requests and see his being.

 

When Psyche saw her two sisters, with tears of grief, stand at the summit where she had been carried away by the wind, she went to them with joy in her heart. To comfort their sorrow and uncertainty, she described her beautiful home and told them of her marriage. Yet, feelings of anxiety and mistrust arose within her as she heard her sisters tell of how the oracle described her husband as a winged serpent whose appearance was appalling to the human eye. Doubts began to overshadow her husband's proclamations as her sisters questioned why she had never seen her husband and asked why she had only been with him in the dark of night. Eventually, terror filled her heart with the belief that she was to be devoured by her husband in the dark of night. Psyche was then persuaded by her sisters that she had to see her husband for the monster he was and to kill him in order for her to live.

 

Soon afterwards within the darkness of her home, Psyche stood beside her sleeping husband with a lighted candle in one hand and a knife in another. As she held a lighted candle high above him, rapture filled her heart as she saw that her husband was Cupid. As she bent to be closer, a drop of hot wax fell upon Cupid's shoulder and wakened him. When he saw his wife standing above him, his belief of her unfaithfulness had him flee their home with the cry, "Love cannot live where there is no trust."

 

Psyche, torn that she had failed to trust the "God of Love", set out alone on a journey to find him. She was determined that she could make herself so lovely that he would again fall in love with her. After a long futile search she, with seeds of hope that Cupid had gone to his mother's home, met with Venus. She stood before the supreme being of Venus and pleaded with her to help her reunite with her husband. Venus with feelings of disconcertment stipulated that four separate tasks, tasks no mortal alone could accomplish, had to first be completed. Only when these tasks were completed, would there be validation of Psyche's worth to be in the presence of her son, an immortal being.

 

Psyche, with the assistance of ants, a reed, and an eagle, completed three of the four tasks: sorting out a huge pile of seeds, obtaining the Golden Fleece, and filling a flask from the river Styx. The last task, to return from the land of the dead with a box filled with some of Proserpine's beauty, was accomplished with the help of Cupid after he left his mother's home. And thus this love story ends with Cupid and Psyche being formally married, living happily ever after in Olympus.

 

Venus, the goddess of love, with her feminine form symbolizes the romantic attributes of love. Mortal men worship her at a distance through their creation of family, homes, and communities. She tells us that to love is to feel and her presence is as that which affects the ebb and flow of the earth's tides. She messages within this story that love believes she is entitled to admiration, commitment, and nourishment. Therefore, love is both vulnerable to and powerless over her perceptions of disloyalty, loneliness, and abandonment. Love is not immune to feelings of jealousy and rage. Love empowered by anger strives to correct a wrong; love intensified by jealousy seeks to reestablish her honored position. She alone is unable to control, define, or foresee the destiny of mortals. Thus, Venus' powerlessness to change Psyche and mortal men within the first love triangle within this story gave birth to another, Venus, Cupid, and Psyche.

 

Cupid, the symbol of love, is often depicted as a beautiful winged and blindfolded adolescent. Mortals know there is no defense, either in heaven or on earth, against the ecstatic feeling of falling in love. Falling in love releases one from the haunting emptiness of being alone. Cupid's arrow releases the expression of one's deepest feelings and secret thoughts while suspending any concern about the less than perfect qualities of the beloved. There is an illusion that the newness of love and the desired attributes of the other will remain the same forever and ever.

 

When Cupid's arrow pierces an adolescent heart, it also punctures the bindings of the childhood family. The arrow within this story tell us that young love is awareness of and focus upon a life outside the household with a concurrent emotional void within the home. Parental reactivity to this familial emptiness delineates love as attacks upon and rebellion against family unity and togetherness. Thus, as Apollo's oracle foretold, emerges a fearless creature defined by Venus as the "vilest and most despicable creature in the world."

 

Psyche, the symbol of soul, gives form to idealized love. Idealized love awakens the human awareness of a life that is other than self or the family. She messages the hope that somewhere on Mother Earth walks each person's destined soul mate. Therefore, idealized love only needs to sit in wait for fate to deliver the experience of being passionately admired. She creates the myth that without any effort at all one will have a life of perfect harmony. Idealized love messages the birth of a union which will have both live for and meet the other's deepest desires. She illustrates how humans seek knowledge that serves to answer life's meaning, purpose, and direction. She tells us that this awakening often times is as a death when there is opposition to a family's spoken and unspoken myths, themes, and beliefs.

 

Cupid's desire to remain unseen by his beloved messages to the reader that while romantic love eases separateness and loneliness; it concurrently aggravates thoughts of exposure, rejection, and vulnerability. To limit the expression of love through physical passion messages the knowledge that romantic love cannot exist in the light that exposes the true, less than perfect self to the other. The wish to shield or keep the true self invisible eventually brings forth an awareness of a loss of self and a relationship tainted with mistrust and anxiety. Hence the feeling of ecstatic love fades and there is either a sudden or gradual awakening to the reality of two separate selves.

 

That is, he wants to have sex; she doesn't. She wants to spend Christmas with her family, he doesn't. He wants a new car; she wants a home. She wants to talk about her feelings; he wants to watch the football game. She doesn't like his friends; he doesn't like hers. So both of them in the privacy of their hearts, realize that the beloved has and will continue to have his or her own opinions, tastes, prejudices and shortcomings. Gradually or suddenly, they fall out of love and either find a way to end the relationship, remain with the other with a secret hope that ecstatic love will return, or begin taking steps to build a new relationship defined by mature love.

 

It is within the interactions between Venus and Psyche that we find the tasks that are needed to cultivate mature love. Venus knew that Psyche began her search for Cupid because she was in love, not with Cupid, but with idealized romantic love. Growth for Psyche was the awakening to all of life - from the gods and goddess of the heavens to the smallest creatures on earth -- and the consciousness of the interdependence within all these elements. Maturity requires the ability and will to sort through the seeds of family beliefs, values, and principles so that childhood myths and illusions about relationships can be discarded. To love is to extend ourselves beyond our fear of being vulnerable in order to seek the good we each desire within ourselves and in the other. To have our love endure, there is a need to develop the strength and resources to survive times of famine. To love another is to relinquish the hope that the other will be our idealized beloved; therefore, mature love rises as the Phoenix from the ashes of lost illusions.

 

Mature love began for Cupid when he resolved his ambivalence about leaving his childhood home. Therefore, love that lasts requires an acknowledgement that adult relationships are independent of those we have with parents, children, and friends. Mature love does not grow from a posture of dependency and physical appearances; it builds upon the growing autonomy of each so that one will survive the death of the other. To love another is to relinquish the intention to change the beloved. Mature love arises from the death of belief in one's own god-like powers as it flies towards the future, through the use of autonomous wings.

 

What is the underlying story that tells us how Cupid and Psyche lived happily ever after? It is the message that romantic love does begin with idealized passions and physical attraction. Yet, it is the commitment and will for each, separately, to integrate their own internal awareness of love and soul. From these individual efforts emerge a mature union. It is mature love that provides children with a model by which to develop future relationships. Therefore, it is mature love that lives happily ever after in the generations yet to come.

 

Reference

Kofford, Brenda (2000). Cupid and Psyche: A Story Of Love. [Online]. Perspectives. [2001, January 1].

 

 

Updated: Jan 1st 2001

[Ganeisha]

- "Love cannot live where there is no trust."

 

 

- Love is not immune to feelings of jealousy and rage.

 

 

- Love empowered by anger strives to correct a wrong; love intensified by jealousy seeks to reestablish her honored position.

 

 

- She messages the hope that somewhere on Mother Earth walks each person's destined soul mate. Therefore, idealized love only needs to sit in wait for fate to deliver the experience of being passionately admired. She creates the myth that without any effort at all one will have a life of perfect harmony.

 

She illustrates how humans seek knowledge that serves to answer life's meaning, purpose, and direction.

 

 

 

- To love is to extend ourselves beyond our fear of being vulnerable in order to seek the good we each desire within ourselves and in the other. To have our love endure, there is a need to develop the strength and resources to survive times of famine. To love another is to relinquish the hope that the other will be our idealized beloved

 

 

- To love another is to relinquish the intention to change the beloved.

 

 

- What is the underlying story that tells us how Cupid and Psyche lived happily ever after? It is the message that romantic love does begin with idealized passions and physical attraction. Yet, it is the commitment and will for each, separately, to integrate their own internal awareness of love and soul. From these individual efforts emerge a mature union.

Para mim aqui está tudo dito.

É impressionante como todas as lendas têem um significado tão verdadeiro.

E esta sem dúvida que é daquelas que nos faz pensar ... e muito.

Muitas pessoas que têem ideias erradas do que REALMENTE poderá ser "amar", poderiam ler este texto. Pode ser que comecem a ter umas ideias.

 

Cada um ama à sua maneira, mas hà aquelas que existem sempre, em qualquer relacionamento, porque se elas não existirem, é como diz ali..."Love can not live"

 

[Cookie]

Mature love does not grow from a posture of dependency and physical appearances; it builds upon the growing autonomy of each so that one will survive the death of the other. To love another is to relinquish the intention to change the beloved.

Não podia estar mais de acordo.

 

Obrigada Zee, por partilhares este texto.

[mike]

... eu também tenho uma linda história de amor! e continuo a vive.la, e posso dizer que também é lindissima...

 

ps- muito por tua causa ana... :><P:

[Piteira]

... eu também tenho uma linda história de amor! e continuo a vive.la, e posso dizer que também é lindissima...

 

ps- muito por tua causa ana... :><P:

sortudoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo