Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece

She was awoken by a beetle scuttling over her lips. She sat up with a shiver and unpeeled a damp leaf from her brow. She had not dreamed the horrors of the night before. She really was alone in a wood. Perhaps everything before was a dream and this had always been the reality? Or she had awoken inside another episode of a wider dream? It was hardly worth the bother of trying to puzzle it all out. Dream or reality, everything was intolerable to her.

‘Don’t do it, pretty girl.’

Shocked, Psyche looked up to see the god Pan standing before her. The humorous frown, the thick curling hair from which two horns sprouted, the wide hairy flanks tapering down to goats’ feet – it could be no other figure, mortal or immortal.

‘No, no,’ said Pan, stamping the muddy ground with his hoofs. ‘I can read it in your face and it is not to be. I won’t allow it.’

‘You won’t allow what?’ said Psyche.

‘I won’t allow you to dash yourself onto the rocks from off a high cliff. I won’t allow you to court the deadly attentions of a wild animal. I won’t allow you to pick belladonna and drink its poisonous juices. I won’t allow any of that.’

‘But I can’t live!’ cried Psyche. ‘If you knew my story you would understand and you would help me die.’

‘You should ask yourself what brought you here,’ said Pan. ‘If it’s love, then you must pray to Aphrodite and Eros for guidance and relief. If your own wickedness caused your downfall then you must live to repent. If it was caused by others then you must live to revenge.’

Revenge! Psyche suddenly understood what needed to be done. She rose to her feet. ‘Thank you, Pan,’ she said. ‘You’ve shown me the way.’

Pan bared his teeth in a grin and bowed. His lips blew a flourish of farewell across the top of the set of pipes in his hand.

Four days later Psyche knocked on the gates of the grand mansion of her brother-in-law Sato, the husband of Calanthe. A servant ushered her into her sister’s receiving room.

‘Psyche! Darling! Did all go as planned? You look a little –’

‘Never mind me, dear sister. I will tell you what happened. I followed your instructions to the letter, shone a lamp over the sleeping form of my husband and who should he be but the great god Eros. Eros himself!’

‘Eros!’ Calanthe clutched at her amber necklace.

‘Oh sister, imagine my heartbreak and disappointment when he told me that he had only taken me to his palace as a means of securing you.’

‘Me?’

‘That was his dark plan. “Fetch me your beautiful sister Calanthe,” he said to me. “She of the green eyes and russet hair.” ’

‘More auburn than russet –’

‘ “Fetch her. Tell her to go to the high rock. Launch herself onto Zephyrus, who will pick her up and bring her to me. Tell the beautiful Calanthe all this, Psyche, I beg.” This is his message which I have faithfully relayed.’

You can imagine with what speed Calanthe prepared herself. She left a scrawled message for her husband explaining that they were not husband and wife after all, that their marriage had been a calamitous mistake, that the officiant who wed them had been drunk, incapable and unqualified, that she had never loved him anyway and that she was now a free woman, so there.

At the high basalt rock she heard the rustle of a breeze and, with a moan of ecstatic joy, launched herself onto what she thought was Zephyrus.

But the spirit of the West Wind was nowhere near. With a scream of frustration, rage, disappointment and fear, Calanthe tumbled down the hillside, bouncing from sharp rock to sharp rock until her whole body was turned inside out and she landed at the bottom as dead as a stone.

The identical fate befell her sister Zona, to whom Psyche told the same story.

The Tasks of Aphrodite

With her revenge meted out, Psyche had the rest of her life to consider. Every waking moment was filled with the love and longing she felt for Eros and with the pangs of misery that stabbed her, knowing she was doomed never to see him again.

Eros, meanwhile, lay in a secret chamber, racked by the agony of the wound on his shoulder. You and I could endure with ease the slight nuisance of a lamp-oil burn, but for Eros, immortal though he was, this was a hurt inflicted by the one he loved. Such wounds take a very long time to heal, if indeed they ever do.

With Eros indisposed the world began to suffer. Youths and maidens stopped falling in love. There were no marriages. The people began to murmur and grumble. Unhappy prayers were raised to Aphrodite. When she heard them, and learned that Eros was hiding away and neglecting his duties, she became vexed. The news that a mortal girl had stolen her son’s heart and caused him such harm turned her vexation to anger. But when she discovered that it was the very same mortal girl that she had once commanded Eros to humiliate, she grew livid. How could her plan to make Psyche fall in love with a pig have backfired so terribly? Well, this time she would personally and conclusively ensure the girl’s downfall.