Conscious Choice: Psyche's Tasks and The Initiation of Love

January 1997

Psyche's Tasks and The Initiation of Love

Psyche’s Tasks

by Megan Wells

My story: shall I tell you the long or the short of it? You have little time so I’ll tell you at once of Aphrodite. Yes, Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love and Beauty. Come and visit me sometime and I will weave for you the whole tapestry.

You see, I came to love the son of Aphrodite. Oh foolish mortal, to love Eros, the son of a goddess. Eros, the God of Love! Having come to love him I lost him. And she, in her fierceness and her wisdom, bade me win the right to love him true. She tried me. She tried me hard. I shall tell you the tasks she commanded me to complete.

The first task found me in a storage chamber. Aphrodite tore open sacks of tiny seeds, flung the seeds wildly around the room and commanded, “You think beauty grants the powers of a goddess? Let’s see what beauty will do for you now! All these seeds must be retrieved and sorted by the morning.” She locked the door behind.

I stared at the sea of seeds. Memories appeared — pieces of my life unfolded in front of me, all a jumble like the seeds! Slowly, the seeds began to move. And my memories, too, parted and spread, magically sorting themselves. I saw the events of my life as I never had before, all the decisions I had passively given away. As the dawn light crept through the chamber window, both I and the seeds were newly sorted.

The second task was this; “You know nothing of the wild and violent side of love. Across that brook live the fierce rams of the sun.” Handing me a dagger Aphrodite commanded, “Bring me their golden fleece.”

When I reached the brook the swaying reeds lulled me into a kind of sleep, whispering to me of the mysteries. “There is a twilight, when a respite befits all matters. In that gentle moment, even the mouse may walk into the mouth of the lion.” When I opened my eyes the sun had fallen. All the rams were resting, like drowsy babies, along the brook... their bellies bared! I tied my skirts high, crossed over, and shaved 12 shining curls.

I found Aphrodite in her bed chamber. At the shock of seeing me alive she let fall a perfume vial, spilling luscious essence upon the marble floor. “You endure well Psyche. But without true insight you can never love. Take this empty vial and fill it with water from the mouth of the River Styx. If you can pass the sentinel dragons and withstand the cruel currents at the cave, I might be tempted to forgive you.”

Fierce serpents guard the mouth of the cavern where the dark waters emerge. “Only one jump,” I thought when I reached the River, “a leap into that cauldron and I am free.” I leaned toward the edge, the treacherous whirlpools tugging at my regret, “Oh such a small life I have lived. I thought myself innocent, but now I see the treachery in my unexamined life.”

At that an enormous eagle swooped down from above. “I am the eyes for almighty Zeus. He is moved by your demise and commands me to complete the task for you.” With that, the royal bird spread his wings, seized the crystal vial in his razor talons and flew toward the dark cave. The dragons bowed their heads in obedience as the eagle filled the tiny vessel and delivered it to me.

Aphrodite awaited me on the palace steps. “Ah, Psyche, you’ve enchanted even Zeus?” She led me up a spiral stairway to a secret tower chamber. Moonlight traced a design on the marble floor. Aphrodite reached to the center of the pattern, shifted a round tile, and retrieved a precious little box inlaid with shells and stones. “In the morning, Psyche, you will face your life’s most dangerous journey. I must send you to Persephone, Queen of the Underworld.”

I protested, “Goddess, you said if I completed the former task you would forgive me!” And she replied, “Ah, little Psyche, it is because I have forgiven you that there is yet another duty. Hear me now. At the entrance to the Underworld, open this box and listen well to all its instruction. Then close the lid and do not open it again!“

At the entrance to Pluto’s shadowy realm, I opened the box and listened, then removed four small objects, placing two gold coins in my mouth and a honey-barley cake in either hand. I took a deep breath, closed the box and entered the dreary opening.

Deep in the tunnel, I came upon an old shepherd, lost and begging me for directions. Parting my lips to speak, I nearly spat the coins from my mouth. My heart pounded out a message, “Do not cripple him with your pity. He must find his own way.” I closed my eyes to his pain and walked on in silence.

When I reached the banks of the River Styx, Charon the ferryman growled for his coin. My fumbling hand nearly yielded a barley cake. Instead, I suffered that the ghastly boatman retrieve the coin himself. Rotting corpses clawed our craft, moaning and imploring. My heart spoke again, “They wish to suck out your life force. Touch them and you will never escape to see your love again.”

At the gate to Pluto’s palace, Cerberus, the vicious dog-demon stood snarling. I threw one cake and the ravenous beast gave chase. Persephone opened the box and exchanged her gift for mine, saying, “Only death knows the secret to eternal beauty, and the elixir I have placed in this box carries that mystery. Say to Aphrodite how honored I am to return my art for hers.

Seizing the box I retraced my steps, surrendering my last barley cake and coin. With ebbing strength, I exited the cave, then fell exhausted against the trunk of an ancient oak.

A voice seemed to whisper from the jeweled case still clutched in my hand, “What must be done, shall be done... Psyche, open the box!”

And I did. I... Psyche... opened the box.

A thick foul vapor fell upon me, shutting out the sun. Paralyzed as in an icy shroud, I mouthed a soundless scream. All was lost and in the last flicker of light my mind grasped at a fleeting image — beloved Eros shining at my side, the author of a mighty cry, “O Zeus, help us now!” At which I fell into a dark dream from which no mortal had ever awakened.

And yet... and yet... after a time of endless insensibility, a sensation. My entire being in a warm droplet upon my left eye, then dawning awareness of a trickle upon my cheek, my brow. My lover’s tears! And his words, too, “Psyche. I love you!” And a slow melting away as I open my eyes... to his! Eros! At last I had completed all tasks and earned his love.

The rest you must know. Honors from gods and creatures all — Aphrodite’s gift the shimmering gossamer wings of a butterfly to adorn my shoulders — and the words of Zeus: “Though you are not a god yet shall you be no longer mortal. Psyche, forevermore you shall be the one who flies between the gods and humankind.” There remained the draught of sweet ambrosia and the toast to my new name. Hear it now as I shout it to the Heavens — I am Psyche!

The Initiation of Love

by Barbara Schermer

The lives we live depend on the stories we tell,” poet Joan Didion has said. If so, then it has become apparent that we need new stories about loving — new myths — for both men and women. Or perhaps we need to rediscover the old stories. “Psyche and Eros” is just such an old, true, and beautiful story, as pertinent now as it was in the time of its best-known version — in Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, c. 170 AD. I believe that it is a story that can teach us what we urgently need to know and that it provides a path of initiation.

The tasks that Aphrodite poses for Psyche are the universal ones we all face the moment that love sweeps into our lives. The success of any relationship has a direct bearing on how successfully we take up and accomplish these tasks. They are: Sorting the Seeds, Gathering the Ram’s Fleece, Collecting the Waters, and Retrieving Beauty’s Potion. The diagram below explains the tasks in relationship to the seasonal cycle of the Sun around the astrological zodiac.

Understanding Psyche’s Tasks
Task	Function	Season	Sign	Element (Process)
I. Sorting the Seeds	Discrimination and Grounding	Winter	Capricorn	Earth (Sensing)
II. Gathering the Fleece	Courage and Passion	Spring	Aries	Fire (Initiating)
III. Collecting the Waters	Healing and Intimacy	Summer	Cancer	Water (Restoring)
IV. Retrieving Beauty’s Potion	Detachment and Hope	Fall	Libra	Air (Imagining)

Psyche’s First Task — Sorting the Seeds
As Robert Graves points out, Ovid’s presentation of the creation myth places Earth very nearly first in appearance: Nature emerged from Chaos and “separated earth from the heavens, the water from the earth, and the upper air from the lower. Having unraveled the elements, he set them in due order, as they are now found.” Earth, then, is present at the very origins of separation and order, and thus guides Psyche’s first task: the sorting, the separating, the ordering of seeds. Seeds, as a component of the psyche, are best seen here as memories. We are our memories, our history, and “whoever does not know his own history is condemned to repeat it.”

Seed-sorting, as an act of Psyche, the Soul, consists of re-collection, re-structuring, and re-visioning of our past, our memories — the images which are the repositories of our experiences of life. It is, of course, possible to lead an unexamined life — Psyche in our story has apparently done so — but not with impunity. The earthy task of sorting our memories (especially our sensual, erotic memories) is a requirement for achievement of full consciousness. Its reward is discernment, the heightened capacity to determine qualitative differences and to choose wisely among different options. In the earthly realm we are engaged in the process of sensing, of the basic encounter between Soul and matter (a process that comes to symbolic completion at zero degrees Capricorn), the time for contemplative re-evaluation.

The active engagement of our senses — tastes, sounds, smells, and images — are the pleasures that are the gift of the Earth to the Soul. And if we do not receive the gift of Pleasure from the world, we do not know Beauty. And if we do not know Beauty, we cannot encounter Love. Psyche, as Soul, must sort out the gifts of the Earth.

Psyche’s Second Task — Gathering the Fleece
The gathering of the golden fleece is Psyche’s initiation by elemental Fire. Fire has many levels of expression but we will occupy ourselves with the most basic one: passion. The ram in Psyche’s tale is of particular interest as one of nature’s most obviously sexual creatures. The Spring equinox (zero degrees Aries, of course, named for the ram) is the time when the ewes bear their lambs, a time that harkens back to Fall, when the mountains resounded with the clang of horn-on-horn as the male mountain sheep competed for the right of access to as many females as each could manage. Fire is about passion — sexual passion. The Fire task requires Psyche to come into her full power, especially her sexual power, possessing the Ram’s fleece, the most dangerous part of solar consciousness, her raw instincts, and her own animal nature. Psyche learns to relate to the hot, solar, masculine energy (of Eros) in herself.

As the ancient alchemists knew, timing is important to the accomplishment of this work. The prime time to initiate Fire tasks, then, is at the Spring equinox. We all have Fire in our makeup — it’s the basic life energy that fires the neurons, drives the limbs, and pulses the blood through the body — but our charts, our personalities, and our life experiences all shape the time and the way in which we seek passionate expression.

Psyche’s Third Task — Collecting the Waters
“Water is the First Medicine,” a Lakota medicine man once told me, “It heals everything.” But Water as Healer, as our dreams so often inform us, requires that we plunge down into its cool depths in the unconscious. Water has moods, is wet and secret — it dissolves into nothingness and shimmers into vision. As an elemental task, gathering water draws us down a river to the edge of the Underworld. We can get lost there in the realm of feeling and illusion. We can fall in and “die,” overpowered by the instincts. But without visiting that domain and accomplishing the Water task, we too are lost — we remain “shallow.”

Water heals, restores, in part through demanding that we feel what we would rather not. Tears are the Soul’s first medicine. Water as unconscious mind is always splashing up something in dreams, in memories, in symptoms to invite us into the painful depths beyond ego and personal history. If we accept the invitation, as Psyche did (under protest), we will find monsters there and will need to develop both discrimination and courage. As an aid to the task, we may do well to consider a depth psychotherapy, an experiential growth group, and intensive body-work or spiritual discipline if our Work is to be found in the realm of Water. The journey leads through, not across, the water, toward a deeper capacity for compassion and intimacy.

In the cycle of the seasons, Water begins the Summer as the Sun crosses zero degrees Cancer at the Summer solstice. Our bones begin to warm after Winter’s chill. Our bodies unwind, our muscles become fluid, and our feelings flow outward to embrace an inviting world.

Psyche’s Fourth Task — Retrieving Beauty’s Potion
Beauty is our most equivocal endowment. Too little beauty and we suffer self-hatred and are disadvantaged in the politics and economics of patriarchal culture; too much beauty — especially too soon — and we often attract so much pursuit we scarce have room to breathe and to grow, and we may be blinded to our other potentials. Beauty will serve but she must be mastered and her essentially mysterious nature penetrated.

It is beauty that gets Psyche in trouble in the first place, revealing the truth that Beauty assaults us if we dwell too much on her, or too little. Women spend billions of dollars a year on beauty care and fashion — a case can be made for dwelling too much. Yet so often we fail to appreciate, to understand, to master the natural beauty that is our birthright.

Psyche’s fourth task demands a momentous confrontation. “Only Death knows the secret to eternal beauty.” An awful truth resounds in Persephone’s words. Her message is as simple as it is devastating: Some portion of beauty belongs, irrevocably, to youth. That form of beauty will at last leave us, and we will experience the leavetaking as a kind of death. Some of you readers are so young as still to experience your youthful beauty as eternal. Some are more like me, at the threshold where the skin is changing in ways creams won’t conquer, and gravity shows signs of winning over grace.

I have shed enough tears over the loss that Psyche’s final lesson has become clear to me: beauty must die, so that beauty may be born! In youth, the love of one’s own beauty may be no more than narcissism, where love indeed becomes a potion, an intoxicant with fateful side-effects. But a mature, cultivated self-admiration — self love — leads to love of others and then to love of the divine. The task of developing self love incorporates skills from the previous tasks. To separate false beauty from the true requires discrimination, to bring out beauty’s full potential demands passion, and to find the truth in “Beauty is only skin-deep” requires a knowledge of the heart and soul that lie deep beneath the surface.

As to the season, we are in the Fall, the paradoxical time when Nature shouts to us of the abundance of her harvest — and speaks in a dry, leafy whisper that prefigures the howl of Winter winds. The Fall equinox (launched at zero degrees of Libra, the cardinal Air sign) marks the exact moment that Psyche’s final task begins with her own descent. And let’s not mince words; what peace we achieve in transcending the loss of mere beauty is preparation for that final privation, death itself.

Even with all warnings to the contrary, Psyche still yearned for beauty — and she opened the box. Death was the inevitable consequence. I suggest that we must all continue to strive for beauty; no matter what the consequences, we must all open the mysterious box and free what lies hidden inside. As James Hillman has said, “Our soul is born in beauty and feeds on beauty, requires beauty for its life.”

Open the box, let out the beauty you hold hidden, trust in the chance of divine intercession and rebirth. Perhaps you, like Psyche, will come full circle, landing higher upon the path than you were before. To be sure, this is a path of initiation. A sacred way, for as Psyche grows, so do we. By accepting these tasks consciously, we can join with other women and men who are re-visioning love as Apuleius recorded for us so many centuries ago.

Barbara Schermer is an educator, speaker, consultant, and the author of Astrology Alive! (Harper/Collins). This article is an excerpt from her forthcoming chapbook, Women in Astrology (Llewellyn, 1997). Please visit her website.

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