"Uh, well, apparently,
I am mind-bendingly lonely
basically anywhere."
-- Dr. Agnes Jurati
Dr. Agnes Jurati :
Right. Okay. Okay. Okay,
let's run the alternatives here :
Uh, "I'm crazy.", although I feel like
I could come up with a better delusion.
"I'm Dead.", although see last supposition
and replace "Me" with "God".
"I'm in a crazy mirror universe."
where it turns out I'm EXACTLY the same,
only with slightly more sophisticated
pet-programming skills.
The Youth of Psyche
Having seen something of The Nature of Aphrodite, the older, more primitive level of femininity, let us look at the new expression of the feminine.
Unlike Aphrodite, who was born from the sea, Psyche was born when a dewdrop fell on The Land.
This change from the ocean of Aphrodite to the land of Psyche is a progression from the early oceanic Feminine quality to a new form which is more human-like.
From oceanic proportions we move to a smaller more comprehensible scale. Psyche's nature is so magnificent, so innocent, so unworldly, so virginal that she is worshipped; but she is not courted.
This is an utterly lonely experience and poor Psyche can find no husband.
In this sense, there is a Psyche in every woman, and it is an intensely lonely experience for her.
Every woman is, in part, A King's Daughter, too lovely, too perfect, too deep for The Ordinary World.
When A Woman finds herself lonely and not understood, when she finds that people are good to her but stay just a little distance away, she has found The Psyche Nature in her own person.
This is a painful experience and women are often aware of it without knowing its origin. To be caught in this aspect of The Feminine Character is to remain untouched and unrelated.
All manner of nonsense goes on when a woman tries to bring her Psyche nature into the everyday give-and-take of relationship. If the Psyche nature is a large part of a woman, she has a painful task on her hands. She bursts into tears and says, "But nobody understands me."
And it is True!
Every woman has this quality within her; it makes no difference what her station in life may be. If you see this quality and can touch it in a woman, the great beauty and divinity of a Psyche can be made conscious in her and a noble evolution begins.
If a woman is very beautiful, the problem is compounded. Marilyn Monroe is a touching example; she was worshipped far and wide and yet had great difficulty relating closely to any one person.
Finally she found life intolerable.
Such a woman is the carrier of a goddess-like quality, an almost un- approachable perfection that finds no place in the ordinary human realm of relationship. You can set in motion the evolution required of Psyche if you understand this dynamic.
I once saw a film in which two horribly disfigured people in an institution fell in love with each other. Through the magic of fantasy each became infinitely beautiful to the other and a love affair went on between these two handsome, beautiful people. At the end of the movie, the camera blurred back to show the two originally disfigured faces; but the audience knew where they had been; they had seen the god and goddess within, which were stronger than the outer reality of disfigurement.
This shows the breach between the interior goddess and the exterior everydayness that is the heart of our story.
THE MARRIAGE
Psyche is the despair of her parents because, while her two older sisters have happily married neighboring kings, no one asks for Psyche's hand.
Men only worship her.
The King goes to An Oracle, who happens to be dominated by Aphrodite, and she, irate and jealous of Psyche, has the oracle give a terrible prophesy!
Psyche is to be married to Death, the ugliest, the most horrible, the most awful creature possible. Psyche is to be taken to the top of a mountain, chained to a rock, and left to be ravished by this dreadful creature, Death.
Oracles were unquestioned in Greek Society; they were taken as Absolute truth. Psyche's parents, believing, made a wedding procession, which was a funeral cortege, took Psyche as instructed, and chained her to the rock at the top of the mountain. Mixed together were floods of tears, wedding finery, and funeral darkness.
Then the parents extinguished the torches and left Psyche Alone in The Dark.
What can we make of this? Psyche is to be married--but to Death!
In truth the maiden does die on her wedding day; an era of her life is over and she dies to many of the feminine elements she has lived thus far in her life.
Her wedding is her funeral in this sense. Many of our wedding customs are actually funeral ceremonies carried over from primitive times. The Groom comes with his best man and friends to abduct The Bride; the bridesmaids are the protectors of the virginity of The Bride. A Battle, in ritual form, is carried out and The Bride cries as is befitting the death of a section of her life. A new life opens for her and the festivities are to celebrate the new power as Bride and Matriarch.
We are not sufficiently aware of the dual aspect of marriage and try to see it only as white and joyous; the dying to an old part of life should be honored or the emotions will surface later in a less appropriate form.
For example, some women may experience a fierce resentment toward marriage months or even years later. I have seen pictures of a Turkish wedding party in which boys of eight or nine each had one foot bound to their thigh and were hopping on one leg. This was to remind everyone that Pain was present at the wedding as well as Joy.
In African weddings, unless The Bride arrives with scars and wounds, it is not a valid wedding. Unless she has been abducted there is no true wedding.
If the sacrificial element of a wedding is given its due, The Joy of The Marriage is possible.
Aphrodite does not like Maidens to die at the hands of Men. It is not Her Nature to be carried off by A Man. So the Aphrodite in A Woman weeps at the ending of her maidenhood.
Aphrodite plays her paradoxical role of demanding the wedding but resenting the loss of The Maiden.
These echoes from long ago still lie deep in us and are best honored by conscious ceremony.
Here again we observe The Paradox of Evolution.
It is Aphrodite who condemns Psyche to Death but who is also the match-maker who brings about the very wedding she is opposing.
The forward evolution toward marriage is accompanied by a regressive tug of longing for the autonomy and the freedom of things as they were before.
I once saw an insightful cartoon that summed up the archetypal power of a wedding. It showed the thoughts of each of the parents during the wedding.
The Father of The Bride is angry at that fellow who is audacious enough to snatch His Darling away from him;
The Father of The Groom is triumphant at the supremacy of the males of the community;
The Mother of The Bride is horrified at The Beast who is carrying away Her Child;
The Mother of The Groom is angry at the vixen who has seduced her son away from her.
Many of the ancient archetypes, those embedded patterns of thought and behavior laid down in the unconscious of the human psyche through countless years of evolution, were depicted in the cartoon. If we do not observe them at appropriate times they will intrude later and cause much trouble.
In order to destroy Psyche, as she wished to do, Aphrodite engages the assistance of her son, Eros, the god of love. Eros, Amor, and Cupid are various names that have been given to the god of love.
Since Cupid has been degraded to the level of valentine cards, and Amor has been shorn of his dignity, let us use The Name Eros for this noble god.
Eros carries his quiver of arrows and is the bane of everyone on Olympus; not even the gods escape his power.
Yet Eros is under the thumb of his mother who instructs him to enflame Psyche with love for the loathsome beast who will come to claim her, thus ending Psyche's challenge to Aphrodite.
One of Aphrodite's characteristics is that She is constantly regressive.
She wants things to go back where they were; she wants Evolution to go backward.
She is The Voice of Tradition, and ironically, it is this very tendency that carries our story forward in its evolution.
There are many levels from which to view Eros. He may be seen as The Outer Man, The Husband, or The Male in every relationship; or He may be seen as The Principle of Union and The Harmony that is the culmination of our story.
Eros is not only sexuality: remember that he aims his arrows at The Heart, not at The Genitals.
We will speak of these aspects of Eros as our myth continues.
THE WEDDING OF DEATH
Eros goes to do his mother's bidding, but just as he glimpses Psyche, he accidentally pricks his finger on one of his own arrows and falls in love with her.
He decides instantly to take Psyche as his own bride and asks his friend, the West Wind, to lift her very gently down from the top of the mountain into the Valley of Paradise.
The West Wind does this, and Psyche, who was expecting Death, finds herself in a heaven-on-earth instead. She does not ask Eros any questions but luxuriates in her unexpected good fortune.
Eros comes to Psyche, and even beautiful as he is, he is Death to her.
All husbands are death to their wives in that they destroy them as maidens and force them into an evolution toward mature womanhood. It is paradoxical, but you can feel both gratitude and resentment to. ward the person who forces you to begin down your own path of growth. The oracle was right; a man is death to a woman in an archetypal sense.
When A Man sees an anguished look on his partner's face, this is a time to be gentle and cautious; it may be that she is just waking up to the fact that she is dying a little as maiden. He can make it easier for her at this moment if he will be gentle and understanding. A Man rarely understands that marriage is death and resurrection both for a woman, since he has no exact parallel in his own life.
Marriage is not a sacrificial matter to A Man, but there is much of that element in A Woman's experience. She may look at her husband in horror one day because she realizes she is bound in her marriage as he is not. She is even more profoundly bound if there are children. She may resent this, but not to be caught in this way by life is an even worse death.
There are women of fifty who have never been to The Death Mountain, though they may be Grandmothers. The dewy quality is not off The World for them even in middle age. There are also young girls of sixteen who know that experience, have been through it and survived it and have a terrifying wisdom in their eves.
These things do not happen automatically at any particular age. I knew a girl of sixteen who had a baby. She went off to have it privately and quietly and gave the baby away in adoption so that she never saw it. She came back and nothing had happened to her; she had not learned anything of The Death Mountain. Several years later she married, and if anybody could be called virginal, she had that quality. Psychologically she had not been touched, even though she had been through the experience of childbirth.
The Eros in each woman terminates her naivety and childlike innocence at vastly different times in Life; it is not just when she marries. Many girls are through it very early in life, which is a cruel experience; others never experience it at all.
Marriage is a very different experience for A Man than for A Woman. The man is adding to his stature; his world is getting stronger, and he has risen in stature and position. He generally does not understand that he is Killing The Psyche in his new wife, and that he must do this. If she behaves strangely, or if something goes dreadfully wrong, or there are many tears, he usually doesn't understand that marriage is a totally different experience for her than for him. A Woman takes on a new stature in her marriage but not until she has been through The Death Mountain experience.
Psyche finds herself in A Magnificent Paradise. She has everything one could wish.
Her god-husband, Eros, is with her every night and puts only one restriction on her; he extracts from her the promise that she will not look at him and will not inquire into any of his ways.
She may have anything she wishes, she may live in her paradise, but she must not ask to know or see Him.
Psyche agrees to this.
Nearly every Man wants this of His Wife. If she will not ask for Consciousness and do things His Way, there is perfect peace in The House.
He wants the old patriarchal marriage where The Man decides all the important issues, The Woman agrees, and there is peace.
Most men harbor the hope that things will go in this manner and for a little while there is the possibility that marriage will be like this. This is likely an echo of some primitive patriarchal structure in which The Woman is subject to The Man.
There are still remnants of this patriarchal world in our modern customs, for example, when A Woman bears The Man’s Name.
Eros insists that she not ask any questions, never see him; these are the conditions of the patriarchal marriage.
Every immature Eros is a Paradise-maker. It is adolescent to carry a girl off and promise her that she will live happily ever after.
That is Eros in a secretive stage; he wants His Paradise, but no responsibility, no conscious relationship.
There is a bit of this in every Man.
The feminine demand for Evolution and Growth — and most growth comes from the feminine element in the myths — is a terrifying experience to a man. He wants just to remain in paradise.
Listen to lovers build A Paradise!
The talk and vocabulary is of another world, the paradise world. It is a brief preview of a true paradise that will be attained much later by very hard work. One can not criticize such a preview, but an onlooker knows the first glimpse of paradise will not be stable or longlasting.
There is something in the unconscious of a man that wishes to make an agreement with his wife that she shall ask no questions of him. Often his attitude toward marriage is that it should be there for him at home but it should not be an encumbrance.
He wants to be free to forget about it when he wants to focus elsewhere. This is a great shock to a woman when she discovers this attitude in her man. Marriage is a total commitment for A Woman; it is not so all encompassing for A Man. I remember A Woman who told me she cried for days when she discovered that their marriage was only one aspect of her husband’s life though it was the primary fact of hers.
She had discovered her husband in his Eros, paradise-making nature.
PARADISE LOST
All paradises fail.
Each one has A Serpent in it that demands The Opposite of The Peace and Tranquility of the Garden of Eden.
The Serpent quickly appears for Psyche’s paradise in the form of her two sisters, who have been mourning her loss — though not with deep sincerity.
They hear that Psyche is living in a garden paradise and that she has A God as a husband. Their jealousy knows no bounds! They come to the crag where Psyche had been chained and call down to her in the garden, send their best wishes, and inquire about her health.
Psyche naively reports all this to Eros. He warns her over and over that she is in great danger. He tells her that if she pays attention to her inquiring sisters, there will be a disaster.
And if Psyche continues unquestioning, her child will be a god and immortal; but if she breaks her vow of not questioning, the child will be born a girl and a mortal.
Worse than this, Eros will leave her if she ever begins questioning him. Psyche listens and again agrees to ask no questions.
The sisters call again and finally Psyche extracts permission from Eros to let them come for a visit. Soon after, the sisters are wafted down from the high crag by the West Wind, and are deposited safely in the lovely garden.
They admire everything and are entertained lavishly. Of course they are consumed with envy and jealousy at what has happened to their young sister.
They ask many questions and Psyche, in her naivete, describes her husband through her own fantasy though she has never seen him.
She heaps extravagant presents upon her sisters and sends them home.
Eros warns again and again, but the sisters come back.
This time Psyche, forgetting what she had told them before, tells a different fantasy about her husband. When the sisters return home they discuss this and brew up a venomous plan.
On a third visit they will tell her that her husband is actually a serpent, a loathsome creature, and that when her baby is born, he plans to devour both mother and child!
The sisters also have a plan to save Psyche from this horrible end. They advise Psyche to get a lamp, put it in a covered vessel, and have it ready in the bedchamber.
She is to take the sharpest knife available and have it beside her on the couch.
In the middle of the night, when her husband is fast asleep, she must expose the lamp, see her loathsome husband for the first time, and sever his head with her knife.
Psyche quickly falls under the spell of this advice and prepares herself to unmask her terrible husband.
Eros comes to the couch after dark and falls asleep beside Psyche.
In the night she takes the cover off the lamp, grasps the knife, stands over her husband, and looks at him for the first time.
To her utter amazement and bewilderment, and now overwhelmed with guilt, she sees that he is a god, the god of love, the most beautiful creature in all of Olympus!
She is so shaken and terrified by this that she thinks of killing herself at her terrible mistake. She fumbles with the knife and drops it. She then accidentally pricks herself on one of Eros’ arrows and falls in love with The Husband she has seen for the first time.
She jostles The Lamp and a drop of oil from it falls on Eros’ right shoulder. He wakes in pain from the hot oil, sees what has happened and, being a winged creature, takes flight. Poor Psyche clings to him and is carried a little way just far enough to be taken from the paradise garden. She soon falls to the earth exhausted and desolate.
Eros lights nearby and says that she has disobeyed, broken her covenant, and destroyed the paradise garden. He tells her, as he had warned, her child will be born a mortal and a girl.
He will go away, punishing her by his absence.
Then he flies away to His Mother, Aphrodite.
