Love and beauty: the lesson of Eros and Psyche

Since in the 2nd century, the Roman writer Lucius Apuleius wrote the tale of eros and psyche few myths have had so much influence on philosophy and the arts.

Psyche means “butterfly” in Greek and also “soul”, and Princess Psyche is the very embodiment of the human mind or soul and of pure beauty.

The story of Eros and Psyche

Apuleius tells that she was so beautiful that people came from all over to see her and honor her, to the point that her fame began to eclipse Venus itself. Outraged that a mere mortal should receive such honors, the goddess she commissioned her son Eros (Cupid) to make her fall in love with the most miserable man she found.

For his part, Psyche secretly loathed her beauty. While her sisters had married, she didn’t even have suitors. The father worried he consulted the oracle and the answer could not be more devastating: he had to leave the girl, decked out for the wedding, on top of a mountain and there the one who would marry her would pick her up: a cruel monster, with wings and snake venom and so powerful that the gods themselves feared him.

With great pain he left the girl on top, but when she was lonely and desperate, the zephyr wind picked her up, placing her on a bed of grass in a deep valley. She fell asleep and when she woke up she saw that she was next to a forest of large and leafy trees, in the middle of which was a prodigious palace. She there she went and a voice invited him to enjoy the pleasures that the mysterious place housed.

At nightfall, Psyche felt by her side the presence of the husband predicted by the oracle and, although she could not see him, she did not find it repulsive at all, so they loved each other sweetly in the dark. Before dawn, that presence disappeared, and from then on each night of love was followed by a day of loneliness without the wife ever seeing the face of the beloved.

The weight of mistrust

After a few weeks, Psyche felt the desire to see her family and insisted so much on her husband that she managed to get her sisters to come visit her. When they arrived, they saw the opulence in which she lived and they were envious, and upon learning that she was pregnant, they planted doubts in his heart about the nature of the child that would have with a beast as horrible as the one announced by the oracle.

When going to bed, Psyche followed the advice of her sisters, waited for her husband to fall asleep and approached with a lighted lamp and armed with a knife. But In bed he saw the gentlest and sweetest of beasts: the young god of love, the beautiful Eros. She gazed at his body entranced and inadvertently dropped a drop of the boiling oil from the lamp on him.

Eros woke up in pain and before leaving her, he reproached her angrily.: “For you I have disobeyed my mother and instead of giving you an unworthy man, I have hurt myself by falling in love with you.” She psyche her, afflicted, she wandered the world looking for her lover, but he was prostrated by the sore that caused the burn, in such a way that love disappeared from the world.

There was no longer pleasure, no grace, no beauty, the charm of life had been lost and nature darkened, turning everything rude and dirty. Venus, angry, subjected Psyche to all kinds of work and humiliation, but finally Amor, who could not live without Psyche either, ascended to Olympus to ask Jupiter to bless their marriage. Jupiter interceded with Venus, achieved reconciliation and granted immortality to the girl, before celebrating the wedding that united Eros and Psyche forever.

The lesson behind the myth of Eros and Psyche

The story of Eros and Psyche places pure, naked beauty in the path of the spirit. We can thus understand it as a state of being, rather than as a face or a physical appearance. That’s why, when Psyche denies her own nature or gives in to fear and distrust, the disagreement begins and the disease that only love can cure.

The stories make continuous reference to this conflict. As soon as we begin, we are told that the prince was handsome; the princess, beautiful; the toad or the beast, ugly and repulsive. But conflict forms the essential part of a universal history whose outcome must be the restoration of justice and beauty so that the kingdom can recover its harmony. The caterpillar turns into a butterfly and the ugly duckling into a swan, lovers get married and live happily…

In the real world, as in the story, there are so many resonances between outside and inside, the one who contemplates and the contemplated, that we can affirm that we create the world that creates and sustains us.

There is no beauty without love in the gaze of the beholder, and when Eros and Psyche stop looking into each other’s eyes, the entire universe becomes cold and sterile, life loses its meaning and a new order must be established.

The allegorical and poetic dimension of the story reveals that sublime relationship that determines the balance of the soul, but also of society and our world. Because Eros is the god that amalgamates life, unites creatures and forges the links that allow us to relate to the soul of each being, but also with the “psyche” that possesses everything that has any entity: a room, a house. , a street, a landscape, a country, a planet…

Psyche’s conflict outside the story

Walking through the streets of some of the cities of the Basque Country in the eighties, it was perceived that the end of culture and the traditional landscape, the death of the forest and the river and the triumph of a polluting, sordid and gray industry, without ethics or aesthetics, the loss of identity and memory, in short, were the germ of the political, social and ecological conflict.

Much of the ills that afflict human beings and the planet we live on are due to this lack of empathy, understanding and affection towards us and what surrounds us, and rarely will we find remedy in the epic and heroic acts to which humanity indulges so easily under the pretext of saving the world.

As Miguel de Cervantes said: “the beauty that is accompanied by honesty is beauty and the one that is not, is nothing more than a good appearance”. It is the key to rebuild everything that is corrupted and degenerates.

We have seen too many times Psyche die of pain and rise from her asheslike when the tide of the Prestige reached our shores and we became an anthill, forming a white tide of dignity and solidarity. It takes a lot of white tides to eliminate the tar, the ugliness and decadence that devastate social and political life; to defend the public thing, the water, the tree, the land. To solve the conflicts that occur inside and outside ourselves.

fill the world with poetry

Poetry always helps us rise again. It is the last redoubt of humanity and conscience. It does not know, it does not produce, it does not bend, it does not have doctrine nor does it flow through established channels, it is not conquered or accumulated and it always, always opposes mediocrity and injustice. In all versions of her, love is the north, a means and an end, and Psyche attracts him as he calls the butterfly. The game of life is that mysterious and exciting. Love and Beauty feed each other and grow, or they stop looking at each other and the world stops.

Permeate us, surround us and clothe us with beauty, enjoy it and cultivate it from small gestures, it has an inspiring effect and a restorative capacity for our spirit that we are rarely aware of. However, the influence it exerts on our mood is enormous a piece of music, a poem, a face, a garden or a landscape…

The universe that surrounds and encourages us and looks at us. In one of the most beautiful songs to Beauty, the ode to psyche, john keats venerates the mythical maiden as a goddess: “I will be your priest and I will raise a temple in some virgin region of my mind. (…) and there will be an open window for you at night so that warm love can enter”. The English poet’s recipe is infallible: “cultivate beauty and follow all its paths,” he seems to tell us.

Eros has once again noticed us when we allow poetics to come to our rescue through the verses of Eugenio Montejo:

Poetry crosses the earth alone,

support your voice in the pain of the world

and nothing asks

not even words.

He arrives from afar and without time, he never warns;

He has the key to the door.

Entering always stop to watch us.

Then he opens his hand and gives us

a flower or a pebble, something secret,

but so intense that the heart flutters

too fast. and we woke up