Cupid and Psyche
A king's youngest daughter, worshipped for a beauty Venus will not forgive, is married to an unseen husband who comes only in darkness and forbids her ever to look at him; her sisters persuade her to carry in a lamp. The labors Venus then sets her, sorting a heap of mixed seed, taking wool from murderous rams, filling a jar at the source of the Styx, fetching a sealed box up from the underworld, are the oldest recorded run of impossible tasks in European storytelling. Told by an old woman to a captive girl inside Apuleius's novel, it was read for centuries as an allegory of the soul.
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Lineage
- contained in ↑ The Golden Ass
- ↓ East of the Sun and West of the Moon
- ↓ Ode to Psyche
Attributes
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
Plot structure
Symbol / motif
Conflict
Culture / tradition
Closest analogues
- 53% · 10 shared
- 51% · 10 shared
- 44% · 10 shared
- 44% · 10 shared
- 44% · 10 shared
- 43% · 9 shared