Cupid & Psyche

Left alone with the sleeping ‘monster’ she means to kill, Psyche is torn between resolve and terror — hating the beast yet loving the husband — until night falls and she readies the implements of the crime.

Nerved by Fate, Psyche lifts the lamp and the razor — and the light reveals not a monster but Cupid himself, the gentlest of creatures. In terror she turns the blade on herself, but it slips from her hands and flies away.

Apuleius lingers over the sleeping god: his golden hair, his white wings with their glittering down, and the bow and arrows lying at the foot of the bed.

Gazing on her husband, Psyche is undone with love; eager and curious, she handles one of his arrows and pricks herself — falling, all unknowing, in love with Love.

Burning more and more with desire, Psyche kisses the sleeping god — and the lamp spills a drop of scalding oil onto his shoulder.

Scalded awake, Cupid leaps up and takes flight; Psyche seizes his right leg and is carried aloft, until at last she falls back to earth.

From the top of a cypress the god reproaches her: against his mother’s command he had made her his wife, and this is how she repays his love.

Cupid flies off; Psyche watches her husband vanish into the sky and, in despair, throws herself into the nearest river — which gently sets her down on the bank.

Wandering, Psyche comes upon one of her sisters and pours out the whole story of her ruin.

She tells how the lamp betrayed her and how Cupid, revealing himself, cast her off — and lets slip that he means to marry one of the sisters instead.

The jealous sister rushes to the crag where the West Wind once carried Psyche, and leaps — calling on Cupid to receive her.

But no wind bears her up: she is dashed on the rocks below and torn apart, a fitting meal for the birds and beasts. The second sister soon meets the same fate.