Without hesitating Cupid rushed to the cloud. Careful not to enter it himself, he used his wings to push the cloud back into the box. However, a thin layer of the cloud covered Psyche like a veil. Slowly, carefully, Cupid brushed it off and into the box.
Then he kissed Psyche softly on the lips. Her eyes fluttered open and when she saw Cupid's face above hers, she put her arms around his neck and the two held each other as if they would never again let go.
After the Four Winds had disentangled themselves from each other, they picked up Cupid and Psyche. Slowly and majestically, they carried the two across the heavens and through to the other side, where all Olympus waited, the gods and goddesses having witnessed for themselves Cupid's rescue of Psyche from death.
The deities walked in procession behind the two lovers as they made their way to Jupiter's palace, where he waited with Apollo and Venus.
"Welcome!" Jupiter greeted them. "It is a good thing this has happened," he addressed the assembled deities. "We all know of what mischief our Cupid is capable. Indeed, even I have not been exempt from the power of his arrows. Now that he knows for himself what it is to love and to lose that love, perhaps he will use his arrows with more consideration."
Cupid blushed and bowed his head. "Indeed, I will."
"Good! We are all relieved to hear that." Then Jupiter turned to Venus. "You, in your wrath, have disappointed me."
"I am sorry," Venus said softly, her head bowed. "Having loved a mortal and lost him to death, I would ask that my son be spared the same eternal anguish."
"So be it. Bring me the nectar of immortality!"
Mercury appeared with a crystal goblet filled with a shining red liquid.
"Come and drink!" Jupiter said to Psyche.
Psyche drank the nectar. Never had she tasted anything so delicately sweet. Her being glowed with warmth as the drink coursed through her body.
"From this day forward, you are immortal," Jupiter told her. "You and Cupid will have eternity for your love. And now, to the feast prepared in your honors!"
Everyone hurried into the Great Hall of Jupiter's palace and sat at the long table filled with dishes of food. But being deities, they did not eat what mortals ate. They dined on salad of pine breath with starshine dressing, ray-of-sunset soup, filet of dawn in a sauce made from the smells of spring, and for dessert, winter custard with cloudberries. Bacchus saw to it that everyone's glasses were always filled with his latest wine made from the flavors of summer.
Then it was time for the formal wedding of Cupid and Psyche. The muses read poetry and played instruments and sang. Apollo played on the lyre a composition of his own making.
Then Jupiter stood before Cupid and Psyche. "I now pronounce you to be married, body to body, and soul to soul, forever and ever."
Cupid took Psyche, not to his palace hidden in the mountains, but to the palace of her mother and father, so she would not be alone during the times he went out to create love among mortals.
Eight months after they were wed, Psyche gave birth to their daughter, whom they named Pleasure.
And so it is when Love and Soul become one.
So it is.
A Final Word
And that's the story of Cupid and Psyche. Of course, if you were listening closely, and I know you were, I bet you heard a lot of your own story, didn't you? That's the tricky thing about stories. You think you're hearing a story about somebody else, and then something clicks and you start to feel that the story is about you.
The interesting thing about this particular story is that it taught me that sometimes I act like Cupid and sometimes I act like Psyche. Stories don't much care who's male and who's female, because everybody has a little of both inside them.
That's why this story and my story and your story, well, they're all the same story. You know what I mean? If this story which was first told way back in the year one hundred fits you and me today like it was ours to begin with, then just because we have different names and different faces, it doesn't mean we're not living the same story. Because we are.
We certainly are.
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Author's Note
The story of Cupid and Psyche is found in a book called The Transformation of Lucius Apuleius of Madaura, a book we know today as The Golden Ass.
Lucius Apuleius lived between 123 and 180 CE. Born in what is now Algeria as the son of a wealthy provincial magistrate, Apuleius was educated in Carthage, Greece, and Rome. He married Pudentila, a wealthy woman, but was accused by her family of using magic to seduce her. In 158, Apuleius was put on trial, defended himself, and was acquitted.
The Golden Ass is the only novel in Latin to have survived antiquity. The most famous story in it is "Cupid and Psyche," which is one of the enduring tales of Western civilization. It is a story I first encountered through my interest in the psychology of Carl Jung. In Jungian psychology the tale is considered an important metaphorical delineation of the archetypal psychology of women. (See Robert Johnson's She: Understanding Feminine Psychology and Marie-Luise von Franz's Golden Ass of Apuleius: The Liberation of the Feminine in Man.)
My original idea for retelling the story of Cupid and Psyche was to do a book of seventy-five or so pages in which I would basically retell the story, but in the voice of a Southern black storyteller. However, as so often happens, when I started writing, I found myself bothered by what I considered to be gaps in the story, especially the large one in which Cupid simply vanishes from most of the story only to miraculously reappear to save Psyche. So I began researching Greek and Roman mythology and found all kinds of wonderful lesser deities, like Oizys the goddess of pain, Favonius the West Wind, Aeolus the keeper of the winds, and others. Because it was not my intent to faithfully retell Aupelius's story, I have taken deities and figures from both Greek and Roman mythology. I have also brought together all the stories about Cupid (or Eros).
What began as a projected seventy-five-page book became what you have here. I had much fun researching and writing this book, as it became a book I wished I had had during the frightening and difficult years of my own adolescence when I first encountered the mysteries of girls, love, and myself.
The experience of love is the most central and profound of our lives. Yet we are given no instruction in the ways of love. Popular music and movies are our primary sources for what we think love is and should be, and as entertaining as these media are, the views of love they present are more often expressions of sentimentality instead of representations of the very hard realities of what it means to be human and what the act of loving presents us with.
I ended up writing a book in which I shared something of what I've learned over these seven decades through marriages and many wonderful love affairs. Which is not to say that everything the narrator says is autobiographical. The narrator's voice is mine, and then again, it isn't. Some of the opinions he expresses are mine, and some are very definitely his.
I am deeply grateful to Michael Joseph, the moderator of the Child_Lit Internet group of critical theory in children's literature. Michael is a librarian at Rutgers University. As a visiting instructor there, he has taught the tale of Cupid and Psyche—and he knows it and the critical literature surrounding it far better than I. The e-mail conversations we shared were extremely helpful, and he was gracious enough to agree to read the manuscript. His careful reading and insights were invaluable.
I also want to thank Betsy Hearne, professor of library and information services at the University of Illinois, for helping me think through an important element of the story. I came across a reference (I don't recall where now) that said in some versions of the Cupid and Psyche story, the smoke from the box she receives from Proserpine turns her black. I toyed with the idea of making this part of my retelling. Though neither Betsy nor Michael expressed an opinion on my doing this, after exchanging e-mails with them, I decided that doing so would change the focus of the story. But I am still tantalized by the notion of the god of love marrying a black Psy
che.
Finally, and as always, I am grateful to the one with whom I have shared so much love for a decade and a half now, my wife, Milan Sabatini. Since 1991 she has been the first person to read my manuscripts, and all of them, including this one, have been improved enormously by her attention to details.
Julius Lester
Belchertown, Massachusetts
August 30, 2005
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Works Consulted
Books
Apuleius. The Marriage of Cupid and Psyche. Translated by Walter Paler. New York: Heritage Press, 1951.
———. The Transformations of Lucius; Otherwise Known as The Golden Ass. Translated by Robert Graves. New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1951.
Birberick, Anne L. Reading Undercover: Audience and Authority in Jean de la Fontaine. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1998.
Cavicchioli, Sonia. The Tale of Cupid and Psyche: An Illustrated History. New York: George Braziller, 2002.
Craft, Charlotte M. Cupid and Psyche. New York: HarperCollins, 1996.
Edwards, Lee R. Psyche as Hero: Female Heroism and Fictional Form. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1984.
Eliot, Alexander, ed. Myths. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976.
Encyclopedia of World Mythology. Foreword by Rex Warner. New York: Galahad Books, 1975.
Ficino, Marsilio. Commentary on Plato's Symposium. Translated by Sears Reynolds Jayne. Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Studies, vol. XIX, no. 1, 1944.
Guirand, Félix, ed. New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology. Translated by Richard Aldington and Delano Ames. New York: Prometheus Press, 1974.
Grant, Michael, and John Hazel. Who's Who in Classical Mythology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Graves, Robert, trans. The Greek Myths. New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1957.
Hamilton, Edith. Mythology. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1942.
Hearne, Betsy Gould. Beauty and the Beast: Visions and Revisions of an Old Tale. Chicago, Ill.: The University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Herzberg, Max J. Myths and Their Meaning. Boston, Mass.: Allyn and Bacon, 1962.
Ovid. The Metamorphoses of Ovid. Translated by David Mandelbaum. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1993.
Walker, Barbara G. The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets. New York: Harper & Row, 1983.
Warner, Marina. From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995.
Articles
Armstrong, Jennifer. "The Writer's Page: Greeting Beauty." The Horn Book (January/February 2005) 81, no. 1: 57–9.
Ross, Lena B. "'Cupid and Psyche': Birth of a New Consciousness." Psyche's Stories: Modern Jungian Interpretations of Fairy Tales, vol. 1. Edited by Murray Stein and Lionel Corbett. Wilmette, Ill.: Chiron Publications, 1991.
Internet Resources
Encyclopedia Mythica: http://www.pantheon.org/
Forum Romanum: http://www.forumromanum.org/
Greek Mythology Link: http://homepage.mac.com/cparada/GML/
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