PSYCHE AND APHRODITE

MARION WOODMAN

The goddess Aphrodite, in the story of Psyche and Eros, is an excellent example of what many would consider an archetype of the negative mother. The archetype is the white hot or smouldering core at the center of the experience of the personal mother. It may be a voice that ceaselessly judges, ceaselessly sets impossible tasks, cease- lessly sets up death marriages. She leaves her child failed, guilty, and full of shame. Hers is not a friendly womb.

In this story within the story of Apuleius, Aphrodite is jealous because her followers are neglecting her altars and worshiping the exquisite human being, Psyche. She calls upon her son, Eros, to use his wiles to make Psyche fall in love with some odious creature. Apollo, meanwhile, tells Psyche’s father that she must clothe herself in mourning dress and set herself upon a rock from which she will be carried away by a fierce serpent. At the appointed time she is left to die, and that night she is carried off by the wind to the castle of her “serpent” husband. He comes to her by night and tells her she must never set eyes upon him. Together, they delight in the ecstasy of love. It all happens in the dark. As in most relationships, the bliss of conjugal embrace, heightened by incestuous attraction, happens in total unconsciousness.

Then Psyche’s shadow sisters, jealous of her good fortune, tell her she is sleeping with a monster, perhaps a serpent that does not want his secret discovered. With that seed of doubt planted in her mind, she eventually lights her lamp while her husband is asleep, goes up to him and sees the divine Eros. In her rapture at beholding her husband, she allows a drop of burning oil from the lamp to fall on his shoulder. Instantly, he wakes and flees, and with him, the castle disappears.4

Eros returns to his mother’s castle. Psyche is left to wander alone and weep. In an attempt to find her husband again—that is, to experience that divine relationship in consciousness—Psyche goes to her mother-in-law. Aphrodite is furious that her son Eros has taken Psyche as his wife. She is angry on two counts: first, she had hoped that he would rid her of her rival; second, she is afraid that he might have learned something of love from Psyche. Despite his failure, she lets him remain in her castle. Meanwhile, she chides Psyche for her faithlessness and rebukes her with the words “So you finally remem- bered you have a goddess!”

As punishment, Aphrodite sets Psyche three tasks—all seem- ingly impossible and each carrying a death sentence. If Psyche fails to accomplish them, she dies either physically or psychically. Aphro- dite’s severe and unfeeling demeanor may seem cruel, but in fact she, as dark goddess, is the catalyst that brings out all the strength and defiance and individuality that sleeping Psyche never had.

The first task is to sort out bushels of different kinds of seeds. Consciously, the task is impossible. But the ants, those helpful, well- organized, tiny energies of the instincts, live in their natural state and are able to spontaneously discriminate. Discrimination—the ability to separate one’s own values from those of other people, or true ones from false ones—is essential to Psyche’s survival. It was lack of discrimination—that is, failure to separate her own values from those of the shadow voices inside (her sisters)—that brought about her terrible loss. Mother Aphrodite gives her a lesson in surrender to her own deepest instincts, so that she may experience the self-discipline necessary to find her own Virgin within.

The second task is to gather wool from the great sheep, shining like gold. Psyche knows the animals are too wild for her to pick the wool. Totally discouraged, she goes to the river to drown herself. A reed by the riverside tells her to wait until the sheep are resting in the evening; then she can pick the wool off the briars and take it to Aphrodite. This Psyche succeeds in doing. What has Aphrodite taught Psyche here? To listen to the voice of instinct; to cultivate patience, which can prevent her from acting too quickly, thereby bringing about her own destruction. Psyche learns courage, assertive- ness, a certain wiliness—all attributes the Virgin needs, even in rela- tionship to the Mother.

Psyche’s third task is to take a crystal bottle to the top of a nearby mountain to bring back some of the black water that courses in a river down its slope. As she proceeds up the mountain, she is surrounded by dragons and cliffs, and again contemplates suicide. This time, an eagle, a sun bird, comes to her aid. He tells her that it is impossible for her to go past the dragons. She must recognize her own limitations. He offers to take the crystal bottle and fill it for her. In this way, she completes her third task, and learns, at the same time, the valuable lesson of allowing spirit to take her where instinct cannot. As in the Christian myth, the Virgin surrenders her chalice to spirit and learns her individual strength in relation to the divine.

Having accomplished all three tasks successfully, Psyche returns to Aphrodite. Again, the Mother is furious. Not one to be deterred

so easily, Aphrodite presents Psyche with the ultimate task: to go down to Hades and bring back from the goddess Persephone a drop of her beauty ointment. From her adventures in Hades, Psyche learns that she dare not separate her body from her spirit, that she must appease the guard dog at the gates of the underworld, that she does not have enough energy to help everyone she meets, and that she does need specific energy for specific tasks. Above all, she learns that she cannot rescue other people from their destiny and that trying to do so can undermine their strength.

In all of these tasks, Psyche is building her own creative mascu- line energy as she strengthens her inner virgin. (The two go together). As she nears home, she asks herself, “If this beauty ointment is so precious to Aphrodite, why can’t I use it myself?” She opens the jar that contains the drop. Immediately, a vapor rises from the container, causing Psyche to fall into a deathlike sleep. Disobedience toward the mother is often essential to full virginity. This may or may not be the personal mother. It can also be the collective mother—the corporation, the alma mater, Mother Church.

The appropriation of beauty, the “putting on” of the Goddess, is quite deliberate. Up to this point in the story, Psyche had held her beauty unconsciously; she had unconsciously challenged Aphrodite by not acknowledging her gift or what it really meant. Now, she has acknowledged the Goddess, she has suffered through her tutelage. Now, she dares to become like her, not only in her beauty but also in her divine wholeness. For the final integration of the masculine to take place, one has to go into the “land of the dead” (Psyche’s fourth task). For a time, one becomes detached from outer reality and sur- renders to the inner workings of the soul. This process is echoed in the New Testament’s exhortations to put on the “mantle of Christ”—an image of death to the old self. Psyche’s deathlike sleep is precisely this experience. Many conscious women who have come far in their journey suddenly fall gravely ill for no apparent reason. This near-death experience is a final surrender, a final initiation into a new level of consciousness, a consciousness that must be “stolen” from the Goddess herself.

Greek author Arianna Stassinopoulos tells us that Psyche’s mar- riage to Eros, the divine son of the Goddess, is the only wedding to take place in the presence of all the gods and goddesses on Olympus. This union brings together all aspects of the divine energy. This is the sacred union of soul with love. Zeus held a great feast to celebrate this union and we are told that Aphrodite danced. 5

Although Aphrodite may seem stern and demanding, her real purpose throughout the story has been to bring Psyche to the place where she can blossom forth in her full womanhood. Through the tasks the mother assigns, she releases the attributes in the young feminine that are necessary to the maturing. Psyche gives birth to a daughter, whom she calls Pleasure, or Joy. Pleasure is the child of the divine marriage on Mount Olympus. The feminine as Beauty and Love can be the revelation of the Goddess in every human being. This is not the beauty found in cosmetic jars, or facelifts, or beauty parlors. It is a beauty that shines forth when the soul is no longer in exile, but radiates in every living cell. The exiled Russian writer Alex- ander Solzhenitsyn paid tribute to this beauty in his acceptance speech on winning the Nobel Prize.

If the all too obvious and the overly straight sprouts of Truth and Goodness have been crushed, cut down, or not permitted to grow, then perhaps the whimsical, unpredictable and ever-surprising shoots of Beauty will force their way through and soar up to that very spot, thereby fulfilling the task of all three. 6

his is the beauty that radiates from the soul whenever it ex- presses itself, whether in art, or music, or in the eyes of an old crone. Her eyes may be fierce, or gentle, full of laughter, or full of tears. They always instruct us, guide us, and become a mirror in which we can see ourselves, if we dare to look closely.

So repressed has the Goddess been in our culture that it is very difficult to find a story that illustrates her in her loving transcendent power. Yet she is present—so present that we take her for granted. We do not see her.

Many poets know her. Milton, for example, knew his Urania, his muse, who dictated Paradise Lost to him night after night through- out twelve books. Shelley, likewise, communed with his muse and, at her dictation, his winged pen created some of the finest lyrics in our language. The intimacy with an inner Beloved creates the fire that kindles great art. The unconscious is released, the human being is aflame with transcendent energy. The love that is enkindled manifests in the creation.

For most of us, the fire of her love manifests most delicately and most fiercely in springtime. Out of the icy clutches of winter, buds begin to become plump. Each day they are plumper and more colorful. We notice green sprouts, perhaps a snowdrop or a bluebell. Gradually, the whole world begins to vibrate in shades of green, and our own heart swells with the mystery of creation. The Goddess manifests in countless births from her womb. A crocus—purple in white snow—speaks louder than any sermon about the sacredness of birth.

Or perhaps we have been present at the birth of a child. For nine months we have watched the belly become plump, and plumper. And then, we have heard the anguished cries of labor. We have watched the head beginning to crown, beginning to push its way into this world. Finally, the last shriek of the mother, somewhere between death and life. Then a new life with ten fingers, ten toes, nose and ears, moves in, as life has moved in for millennia. Yet every life comes from a silence so profound, we stand in awe, wondering.

As we stand wondering in the presence of death. The life that one day moved through a birth canal with one tiny hand appearing and then another, and two tiny feet, a body that blossomed through all its potential, now withers, breath ceases, and all is silence. The soul shimmers for an instant. Again, we stand before the mystery.

We stand in the presence of the Goddess—God unveiled on Earth. The timeless intersecting time. The Goddess of birth, trans- formation, and death. Within the container of her power, life hap- pens. She is Immanent within the bud, within the baby, within the soul that moves through yet another birth canal into its next abode. She, likewise fierce and full of love, brings us face to face with the transcendent that speaks to us of mysteries we cannot fathom.

For most people, it takes a lifetime for the psyche to find its relationship to the Goddess. She appears in the psyche in her three- fold nature, sometimes Virgin, sometimes Mother, sometimes Crone. However, it is the Crone that our culture has so brutally repressed. The wise woman, the healer, the transformer has been one of the greatest threats to the patriarchal world. Ironically, with the founding of universities (centers of oneness) in the eleventh century, women’s natural talents for counseling, healing, and being a source of wisdom were curtailed; women were barred from attending. Public services could be rendered only by someone with the proper credentials and, since women were not allowed to acquire these credentials, they were effectively removed from the intellectual life of the community. Many who were burned as witches were among the most gifted women of the time.

Our culture’s official rejection of the Crone figure was related to rejection of women, particularly elder women. The gray-haired high priestesses, once respected tribal matriarchs of pre-Christian Europe, were transformed by the newly dominant patriarchy into minions of the devil. Through the Middle Ages this trend gathered momentum, finally developing a frenzy that legally murdered millions of elder women from the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries.’

As Barbara Walker observes, “Until the Crone figure was sup- pressed, patriarchal religions could not achieve full control of men’s minds. Such religions tended not only to ascetic rejection of the physical experiences of life, but also to fearful rejection of the Divine Old Woman, and by extension of old women generally.” 8

As a symbol, the Crone had to be suppressed by patriarchal religions because her power “overruled the will even of Heavenly Father Zeus.” 9 She controlled the cycles of life and death. She was the Mother of God, the Nurturer of God, and, as Crone, the Slayer of God. While Christianity retained the feminine as Virgin and Mother, it eliminated her role as Crone. It is interesting, however, that in this century, her presence at Fatima and at Medjugorje in Bosnia-Herzegovina (where she might well have been heeded) has cast her very much in the role of the Doomsday Crone of old. Her

message, that the hand of wrath will fall if human behavior doesn’t change, has crystallized her voice in the face of the brutality of the twentieth century.

Since she has not been present in the culture, she has not been readily accessible to the conscious awareness of modern women. Without her, even the dynamic symbols of Virgin and Mother are distorted. The Crone in a woman is that part of her psyche that is not identified with any relationship nor confined by any bond. She infuses an intrinsic sense of self-worth, of autonomy, into the role of virgin and mother, and gives the woman strength to stand to her own creative experience.

In the mythological tale of Hera, the divine consort of Zeus,

we can see the transformation from unconscious wife to conscious virgin, she who is who she is because that is who she is. Hera’s life was totally bound up with what her husband did or did not do. When Zeus was faithful and attentive, she was the bountiful goddess; when Zeus was promiscuous, as he frequently was, she was a raging shrew, taking out her wrath on the “other woman.” Hera’s jealousy consumed her life. Today we would say that her marriage to Zeus was one of quintessential codependency. “As long as Hera projects on her husband all her own unlived creativity, so long as she expects to find fulfillment exclusively in her role as Mrs. Zeus, she creates her own betrayal and a marriage that is in a permanent state of war with brief interludes of peace in bed.”‘°

It was not until Hera finally decided that she had had enough

of Zeus’s promiscuity that things began to change. She left Zeus and returned to her birthplace in Euboea. In aloneness she came to terms with her own essential oneness. She had engaged her Crone state. Women are, by nature, disposed to relationship and connectedness; yet true relationship cannot be embraced until a woman has a deep sense of her at-one-ment. Without this essential independence from all roles and bonds, she is a potential victim for servitude.

Once Hera had let this Crone energy in, had accepted that part of herself that is bound by no relationship, she “bathed in the spring flowing through the foothills and emerged with her virginity re- newed—One-in-Herself, the Celestial Virgin.”11 With her own cre- ative virgin restored, she could become Hera Teleia (fully grown, complete). She returns to Zeus. “[F]illed with a secret, smiling wis- dom that leaves no room for raging jealousy, she is reconciled to him, now ready for the deep marriage for which she has always longed.” 12 From now on, this would not be a marriage based on need—something that Zeus undoubtedly understood and responded to. Hera demanded and got her wish fully met, matched, and mated.

In the story of Demeter and Persephone, Mother Demeter is in anguish for nine days and nine nights after the disappearance of her daughter, Persephone, in the arms of Hades, the Lord of the Underworld. In her grief, she allows the countryside to become bar- ren. On the tenth day Hecate, the Crone, appears and assists Demeter in getting reunited with her lost daughter. Hecate has the wisdom that allows Persephone to be daughter to her mother and, at the same time, wife to her husband. The countryside blooms again.