To Behold a Little God
To Behold a Little God was published by Spiritus Mundi Review in May 2023 in Issue 4: Mythos.
Psyche was a beautiful girl. Much too beautiful, as it turned out.
Say she was a simple country girl. She was certainly naive, cloistered with her parents in their castle—they didn’t let her go out much. They kept her in their castle in order to keep her innocent, and perhaps they thought this would keep her safe. But the gods love punishing the innocent, as much as they love punishing anyone else.
The thing is the gods get smaller as you get older, or maybe they get more powerful even as they seem increasingly stupid. As a child they were so wonderfully large. Now you just have to shake your head and say wow, the pettiness. The pettiness of Venus deciding, again, that this poor mortal girl is a threat to her celestial status.
Upon hearing the story for the first time, I had that natural reaction of a child, which was, why would she pick on someone who was clearly so innocent, to the point of possibly being kind of stupid? It’s a scary story because of that, and maybe that’s the point.
Venus instructs Cupid to shoot Psyche with his arrow while she’s looking upon something conveniently ugly, a pig or something. But when Cupid sees Psyche, he’s so distracted by her beauty that he accidentally pricks himself and falls in love with her, and now the dye has been cast: a little god has made a mistake, his mother is leaning over his shoulder, and a very beautiful girl is caught up in the middle.
It’s the first important image of this story: Cupid looks upon the unconscious Psyche and loves her. It mirrors the same image later, when Psyche leans over sleeping Cupid, holding her lamp aloft. The lamp, like Cupid’s bow: its arrows, the drops of wax, fall upon him and wound him. You can wound with a look, if it falls on one whose defenses are down. Even if they are a little god.
But first. Psyche’s parents ask the oracle of Apollo what will become of their daughter, and the oracle tells them she will marry a monster. They must take her up to a cliff and cast her off of it to give her to him.
Being pious people, they say Okay, sure, we’ll sacrifice our youngest and most beloved daughter to some mysterious and terrifying creature. It’s unclear whether this is a wedding or a kind of forced suicide; they dress her in funereal clothing, and the procession that follows her is one of mourning. And she stands at the edge of cliff, and then—she steps off of it. Psyche walks out into the abyssal unknown.
She is born up by the wind and taken to a beautiful clearing where there is a beautiful house filled with nice things. She’s well-cared for, and at night, in the dark, someone she can’t see comes and makes love to her.
(How did he touch her? Gently, it’s said, but what did his hands feel like on her? It wasn’t painful, we can presume—yet she wasn’t carried away in it. Not yet. He has seen her, but she hasn’t seen him. She bears his love as a dutiful wife, accepting herself as an object in his eyes, the eyes of a husband who might be a monster. And who knows what that little god might look like, in the dark? Oracles, after all, are not known to lie.)
Psyche’s been dumped off the cliff out into a world unknown, but she’s still in the dark, kept coddled and safe and blind. And I suppose this happens over and over again: Psyche opens her eyes and falls, and then she falls more, and then she falls yet more, until she’s all the way in the underworld. But that is later. For now, even though she’s already been thrust into the unknown, she still must choose to see it.
Her sisters, whom Cupid has allowed to visit her, convince her to do it. They want her to look upon the monster that’s been taking her in the night. She doesn’t act out of fear, I don’t think, nor does she do it out of love. No, I think she looks with the curiosity of a child, or a fool. She looks upon love the moment she draws back the curtain and holds the lamp over his prone figure, his angelic face, as if gazing off the edge of a great precipice.
Cupid awakes to those bright drops of oil on his skin, hot and searing. He looks up at his wife, now awake, alive to him and to herself, gazing at him with the first true stirrings of desire she’s ever felt. And he feels a great sense of fear, of foreboding. He feels a deepening in the pit of his stomach. He knows the moment: he knows that now, everything changes.
The rest of the story, well, it happens. Cupid runs away to his mother, and Psyche, heartbroken, runs after him. She goes from goddess to goddess and none can give her aid, until the ants and the reeds and a tower help her. She goes all the way to the underworld and back, and having finally proved herself, she is reunited with Cupid, released from his mother’s bonds. There is the final marriage, there is Psyche’s ascent to divinity.
But all of that, for me, turns on the image of her leaning over him with her lamp. The moment of reversal, the shifting of the object, a young woman realizing the power of her own potent gaze. For her—the thrill, the drop, the sensation of falling as you lay eyes on your lover as if for the first time. For him, the pain, the desperation, the fear of being seen—and what compares to that knowing sight, sliding over you like hot oil on skin?