Psyche’s Tasks: A Country Tale of Seed, Golden Wool and a Sealed Box

The story of Psyche and Eros, or Cupid as he is called in the Latin, is not sung by a poet at a festival. It is told by a tipsy old woman in a robbers’ cave. In the Metamorphoses of Apuleius, the comic novel better known as The Golden Ass, bandits have kidnapped a young bride and left her in the care of their housekeeper. To stop the girl’s crying, the old woman offers to distract her with ‘pretty stories and old wives’ tales’, and begins the way such tales always begin: once, in a certain city, there lived a king and a queen with three daughters. The most famous love story of antiquity enters literature as a tale told by the hearth, and its trials are farmhouse chores made impossible.

The bride on the mountain

The youngest daughter, Psyche, is so beautiful that people stop worshipping Venus and pray to the girl instead. The goddess, furious, orders her son to make Psyche fall for the lowest of men. Meanwhile Psyche’s father consults Apollo’s oracle and is told to leave her on a mountain crag, dressed as if for a funeral, as the bride of a winged monster feared by the gods themselves. The west wind lifts her gently down into a valley and a palace where invisible servants wait on her and a husband she must never see comes to her only in the dark.

Her jealous sisters convince her that he is a huge serpent who will devour her. One night she lights an oil lamp and raises a razor, and sees instead the loveliest of the gods asleep. Fumbling with his quiver, she pricks her thumb on an arrow and falls in love with Love himself. A drop of hot oil spills on his shoulder. He wakes, and flies away.

This Cupid is a spoiled boy, a long way from the Eros of Hesiod, who is one of the first powers of the world, older than the Olympians. Apuleius brings him down to the scale of a family quarrel, and that is part of the charm.

In despair Psyche throws herself into a river, but the stream sets her gently on the bank. There sits Pan, the country god, with the nymph Echo in his arms and his goats browsing nearby. He talks to her like an old herdsman who has learned a great deal from long life, and tells her to stop crying and win her husband back with prayer. (Pan’s own story is told in Pan of Arcadia.) Wandering on, she finds a temple of Ceres, the Roman Demeter, strewn with ears of wheat and barley, garlands of grain and sickles, as if harvesters had dropped their tools in the heat and left. Psyche does what any farm girl would do: she sorts and tidies it all. Ceres is touched but will not shelter her from Venus.

Three chores and a journey

At last Psyche gives herself up to Venus, who has her beaten by her servants Worry and Sadness and then sets her to work. Each task is a piece of rural labour stretched beyond human strength.

First, Venus pours out a great heap of wheat, barley, millet, poppy seed, chickpeas, lentils and beans, all mixed together, and orders Psyche to sort them before evening. Anyone who has picked over a sack of lentils at a kitchen table for stones and stray grains knows the job. Psyche does not even begin. A little country ant, pitying her, calls up the whole nation of ants, and they separate every kind of seed into its own pile.

Second, Psyche must bring back a tuft of golden fleece from wild sheep grazing beyond a river. Here the help comes from a green reed at the water’s edge, which speaks like a wise old farm hand.

Do not go near those terrible sheep while they draw fire from the blazing sun and rage in their fury. Wait until the noon heat has eased and the flock has settled in the river breeze; then shake the branches of the grove nearby, and you will find golden wool clinging all over the twigs.

Apuleius, Metamorphoses (our rendering)

Every shepherd knows that animals are dangerous in the heat of the day and that wool snags on thorn and bramble wherever a flock has passed. The reed is simply giving herding advice.

Third, Psyche must fill a crystal jar from the spring that feeds the Styx, high on a cliff guarded by serpents. This time the eagle of Jupiter swoops down and fills it for her. The last task sends her to the underworld itself, to ask Proserpina for a little of her beauty in a box. A tower from which she means to throw herself gives her precise directions, the kind a village grandmother might give for a dangerous road. Go down at Taenarus, the cape at the tip of the Mani where Greeks placed a mouth of Hades. Carry two barley cakes soaked in honeyed wine, one for Cerberus on the way in and one on the way out, and two coins in your mouth for the ferryman. Refuse to help a lame donkey driver, a dead man floating in the river and old women at a loom, however they beg. In Proserpina’s house sit on the ground and eat only coarse bread. And do not open the box.

The box, the sleep and the wedding

She follows every instruction but the last. On her way back to the light she cannot resist borrowing a little divine beauty for herself, opens the box and finds inside not beauty but a deathly sleep that covers her like a cloud. Cupid, healed of his burn and missing her, flies to her, wipes the sleep back into the box and wakes her with a harmless prick of an arrow. Then he appeals to Jupiter, who summons the gods, makes Psyche immortal with a cup of ambrosia and holds a wedding feast on Olympus. In time she bears a daughter called Pleasure.

Apuleius wrote in the second century CE, and later readers turned the tale into an allegory of the soul, since psychē is the Greek word for soul. Fulgentius, writing in Latin near the end of antiquity, read it that way, and many followed him. But the shape of the story is older than any allegory, and it is the shape of a folk tale.

A tale the villages also tell

Folklorists who sort stories by type file this one under the search for the lost husband: a girl marries a mysterious bridegroom, breaks a prohibition, loses him and wins him back through impossible tasks and long wandering, in many versions wearing out a pair of iron shoes on the road. Tales of this family have been recorded across Europe and the Near East, Greece included, and Greek examples appear in the collections of folklorists such as R. M. Dawkins.

Scholars disagree about which came first. Many have treated Apuleius as writing down a tale already told aloud by women like his old housekeeper. The German classicist Detlev Fehling argued the reverse: that Apuleius invented the story, and the folk versions descend from his book. The debate is not settled and perhaps cannot be. What is clear is that Apuleius knew what he was doing when he put the tale in an old woman’s mouth: seed to sort, sheep to avoid at noon, a dangerous road to walk with bread in your hands and a coin in your mouth. Those are the instructions of the countryside. Like the Fates who visit a newborn in village belief, described in the Mires at the cradle, they belong to a world in which a person’s lot is set by powers older than any king, and can sometimes be won back by patience.