When we left Psyche (please read the first essay here), she had just been cast out of the garden of paradise, so to speak. The perfect lover and husband brought her contentment, but had remained invisible to her, bidding her never try to see him. But Psyche had fallen prey to gnawing suspicions and disobeyed his wish that she never see him (or be conscious of his true nature). Her doubts about him drove her to defy his directive. She gazed, he fled, and she learned his name, Eros, the God of Love himself.
Even though she defies him, she ultimately chooses a conscious rather than an unconscious “idealized life” of perfection. Naming is critical in conscious living. Note that Psyche was unconscious and didn’t have a name for her lover/husband. Rather she took him to be her projections of perfection until the inevitable doubts came in. Awakening to his name and her loss may have deepened her despair and suffering, but the new awareness also presented an opportunity to grow and move forward to wholeness.
As Psyche wanders in search of union, the holy Ceres advises her to surrender to Venus who might restore the lost lover. Venus receives Psyche in anger and proceeds to give her one difficult task after the other, four in all. I describe them here in much abridged fashion: First she orders Psyche to separate a great quantity of wheat, barley, millet, beans, and lentils by nightfall. Psyche knows the task to be impossible. The little ant, a native of the fields, takes compassion on her and sorts the seeds for her. Venus next orders her to fetch some golden fleece from “the formidable rams that burn with a cruel rage to destroy mortals with their sharp horns or rude teeth.” This time, the river speaks to Psyche through the reeds and tells her how to bypass the dangerous sheep and find the golden fleece sticking to the bushes and the trunks of the trees. Venus, still not satisfied, gives Psyche yet another task, to fill a flask with the black water that is the source of the terrible River Styx. Only a winged creature could reach it, so steep and slimy are the rocks. This time an eagle seizes the flask in his beak and brings it back to Psyche full of the black water.
Venus persists with yet another demand. Take this box to Proserpine and tell her Venus desires a little of her beauty. This time a tower speaks to Psyche, telling how by a certain cave she might avoid all the dangers of the road, pass by Cerberus, the three-headed dog, and prevail on the ferryman, to take her across the black river and bring her back again. The voice warns, “When Proserpine has given you the box filled with her beauty, of all things this is chiefly to be observed by you, that you never once open or look into the box nor allow your curiosity to pry into the treasure of the beauty of the goddesses.” Psyche, obtains the beauty in the box. But then a desire seizes her to examine its contents, “to put the least bit on my cheeks.” For the second time in this tale, Psyche fails to heed a god’s command. She opens the box, but finds it empty. A deep sleep takes possession of her, and “she fell down in the midst of the road, a sleepy corpse without sense or motion.” Let’s stop and analyze these four tasks.
Through the solar-lunar lens lightly
Venus is the archetypal Self and Psyche (Soul) is the Ego. Jungian analyst Edward Edinger says, “The individual ego is destined to be born a twin.” The archetypal Self and Twin Ego Soul share an axis. The four tasks allow the higher Self, and the twin Soul/ Ego to be aligned rather than opposed. In the story they are challenging one another until the completion of the tasks brings their integration.
The first task that Venus gives Psyche, the sorting (of seeds), represents the sorting out of binary (or gender) consciousness and learning about quantum (or whole) consciousness. Taking off gender, we have the complementarity, not an either/or situation, the lost key to happy relationship. Without living life in its dynamic complementarity, the “logic of nature,” we are constantly antsy, or “splitting” into binary consciousness—right/wrong, good/bad, male/female.
The ants symbolize our primal instincts of unconscious, (an even lower level than the reptilian brain). They also point to animal wisdom, the animistic layer of the mind that we don’t respect. Their dronish work represents the need for humbleness of the inflated ego. The ants teach. The Ego doesn’t think it can do something—Psyche is split and neurotic with grief. The archetype/unconscious knows it can do the task. Archetypes are autonomous. If you try to work something out without their guidance it doesn’t work. You must do it with them (in alliance), acting according to nature.
Alchemy, the art of transformation, tells us there are three warning signs: Impatience, despair (losing hope), and not having idealized fantasies. The ants (initiation) are the resolution to hopelessness. The ant’s earthly task is lunar, getting back to hope to have a chance for love and soul. In alchemy, solar-lunar complementarity can produces Joy.
The second task fetching the golden fleece is about obtaining the authentic solar as opposed to Western culture’s masculine projection of the solar and the animus for women. Western culture in its foundational myth, Romelus and Remus, tells how Romelus kills Remus. This is maybe the only recorded myth where the solar male twin kills the lunar. (Note how Western and other world cultures overemphasize the solar hero and materialism, rather than the twin hero/heroine nature of both the masculine and feminine.) To rebirth the authentic solar Venus orders the heroic Psyche, to fetch some golden fleece. Psyche’s completion of this task rebirths this powerful solar archetype, hopefully in the service of relatedness rather than ego-centeredness. And notice how this task requires the help from the reeds (lunar energy) to accomplish its solar task.
The third task, fetching water from the river Styx, represents learning about the authentic lunar. Imbalanced solar people won’t surrender their ego attachment to their beliefs and go into the unknown (lunar) to understand what is guiding them to see and understand life and reality. Crossing the River Styx or going into the dark phase, we realize what lunar means. It is not the cultural gender spin. Men or women, we have to strip off our belief in the anima/animus (the shadow side of Jungian culture). The anima—getting in touch with my so-called “feminine” side of men—did not work for me. I had to go down the River Styx, the underworld. Just as women need to revision what Jung called the animus, the masculine side of women.
Jungian therapist Barbara Stevens has understood this liberating shift from sexual stereotypes: “Instead of passive-receptive females and aggressive-dominant males, Teich brings us the lunar and solar sides of each of us, interacting in a delicate dance that is unique to each particular individual,” she writes in endorsing my book, Solar Light, Lunar Light. The authentic lunar for both men and women is less structured than logic , more emotional, more pictorial, and thinks in stories. The lunar is the “spirit of the depths” the unconscious archetypal mind as Jung calls it in the Red Book,” while the solar is the “spirit of the time.” Again notice how the solar and lunar collaborate, they cannot be split apart on the archetypal level as the solar eagle is a necessary complementary helping animal guide to Psyche obtain the lunar water.
Psyche’s fourth initiation, the beauty task, speaks to the idealized (solar-imbalanced) ego that has to surrender and meet the lunar to re-emerge and live in reality. Psyche has to go down to the underworld to get the authentic energy of beauty, that of nature, not that of beauty as object. Nor the idealized fantasy of beauty. We all suffer from the fragmentation of self in relationships because of the cultural addiction to objectified beauty – the unreal, the unnatural. This idealization is the number one cause of unhappiness and loneliness in our relationships. Idealizations are mental boxes—dogmatic as opposed to energetic—that keep us from experiencing nature and put us to sleep. When we see beauty in its real authentic form we awaken and have a chance to get Joy. As Plato says, “A fellow must be a perfect fool who knows nothing of beauty.”
In the third and final essay, we’ll look at how Psyche and Eros ultimately produce joy.