Libra Venus: The Morning Star: The Path of Love

Libra Venus: The Morning Star: The Path of Love

Psyche ~ Soul

           There have been many re-tellings of this most ancient myth of Psyche and Eros - most of our famous romances are based on it. When Psyche is taken up into the heavens of Olympus at the end of Apuleius' story, it symbolically proclaims that this kind of loving was not yet meant for this world. And as we look at our history, we can see why. Who does not mourn that Guinevere and Lancelot's love should betray their love for Arthur? How did Love, whose fullness is connection and desire, creativity and life, get twisted into betrayal and lies, destruction and death?

It happened when the Goddess was banished from her place as Consort of the God. It happened when we imagined that love is only play and pleasure (which it undoubtedly is), without realizing that it is also work. It happened when masculine solar consciousness repressed the reflective magic of feminine lunar consciousness. And only by once again celebrating the hieros gamos, the sacred marriage between sun and moon, king and queen, masculine and feminine spirit, man and woman, will Love itself be renewed.

Two millennium have passed since Apuleius wrote this tale of ancient initiation into Love. Two thousand years of Christianity have honed us into a new shape. The hieros gamos must now be celebrated in humanity between the Christ and the Sophia, between eternal Spirit and Wisdom. And so it must first and foremost be a union within the soul of each person, before there can be an outer marriage between soul-mates. We must be someone if we are to love.

Psyche's Tale

As we search for that part of ourselves which is missing, that part which is our most true identity, we are searching for two things. First, we search for ourselves as psyche, as a soul who is capable of self-perception, an identity which bridges the gulf between human and divine. Psyche/soul is the incarnation of Venus/Aphrodite, the Goddess alive in humanity.

First we must face the terror of the unformed ocean of the collective unconsciousness within all of us. But it is out of this ocean that golden Aphrodite is born. It is Aphrodite who brings about Psyche's transformation in the myth by setting her the four tasks. It is Aphrodite's 'jealousy' (those rejected aspects of our personality that finally demand recognition) that get the story moving; it is as much Her Love and desire for connection which sets Psyche, as well as the psyche within each of us, these tasks which will awaken consciousness and the wisdom of the Goddess within her. Psyche can fulfill these tasks with the help of the right ego attitude - a willingness to undergo an initiation, a longing to understand more. In admitting that we are part of a mystery, we can permit ourselves entry into it.

The second thing we search for is Love, the power which moves the soul. We are so afraid of this power, so sure that it will destroy everything we need for security. We have been told often enough that love is not enough to live on; or that passionate love will destroy everything we hold dear. But mostly we have been told that our dreams, which come from Love, cannot come true.

The Great God of Love

Psyche & Eros

This Love we search for is Eros, the God who weds Psyche. Philosophers, from Socrates to C. S. Lewis, have distinguished between many types of love, naming them Amor, Eros, Agape, Cupid. These differences reflect humanity's changing ideas and ideals about love. But no matter its name, Love is a divine creative spirit, that 'fair Desire' who greets Aphrodite upon her arrival in Cyprus. This Eros was believed to emerge at the beginning of time from the World Egg, the original Creative Spirit of the Orphics. In later myths, such as Apuleius' story, Eros or Amor becomes the son of Aphrodite, a noisy, troublesome boy, the chubby Cupid with his bow and arrows, who causes disruption among the gods and men. Eros is the creative spirit of desire that springs up from deep within our souls, expressed in physical sexuality or spiritual longing. He is the passion that is present when we feel fully alive.

Eros is fire and desire, sensuous and aggressive; the motivating force behind our quest for love, for beauty, for goodness and for truth. Eros kindles and inflames us with his passion, urging us on to discover our individuality and the meaning of our lives. He teaches us who we are by going after what we desire. In this sense, he is the dynamic aspect of Aphrodite's connectedness.

This myth depicts our need to awaken psyche into consciousness, for we need life's soul-full quality to enrich and deepen our lives and our world. Aphrodite sets about awakening soul in two ways. First, she sends Eros to stir up unconscious longings, taking us away from our old life into the beginnings of a new life. Psyche's marriage to Eros, and her life with him before she actually sees him, is a metaphor for the longing that disturbs our nights and dreams, and challenges us to search for something more in our days.

It is an initial call to be on the Path: the feeling that there is something more to life, the need to understand the feelings and dreams that make us discontent with our jobs or our relationships, the pressing need to become conscious. There is a certain innocence that keeps us unconscious of our deepest desires; a child-like acceptance of life the way it is. We do what is expected of us and find joy where we can, pushing away the desperate longing we feel deep within. But this leads us to the depressions and addictions which plague our society. Like Psyche being led out to the sacrifice, we do not question our fate. Then also like Psyche, we are left in the dark as to who and what we are married to.

The second stage of our awakening is to make conscious our innermost Self and desires, and then bring them into our daily lives. This stage is symbolized by Psyche's wanderings and her four tasks. The yearning and desire to seek and find our Higher Self drives us on to the knowledge of our essential nature. For the first step toward knowing the Spirit is to know thyself.

Love’s Labors

Psyche's tasks represent the ways of awakening soul to the consciousness of the Self, the archetype of wholeness in human beings. The Self is the spark of Spirit within each of us, as well as our individuality. This myth says that this work takes place in and through love: Aphrodite's love (for it is her power which is at work here) makes Psyche and Eros connect with each other, while Eros' power of desire and yearning draws Psyche to search for him everywhere. 

Psyche and Pan

 

In this myth, after Eros flees, Psyche wants to drowned in her sorrows, but the great god, Pan, tells her to pray to Eros. Here we are told that our first step toward conscious loving must be to listen to our instincts and to embrace our feeling nature. It tells us that Nature itself knows how to love, knows what we must do. When we are in love, the world around us comes alive, for everything speaks to us of our Beloved. The spirit in nature tells us to pray to the very one who seems to have deserted us. Psyche can find Eros through discovering his own spirit within herself and in the natural world around her. The divine spirit is constantly ready to enter our lives if we only turn to it. It is not death which unites us to our divinity, but life. To find Eros, which is the power of the spirit within each of us, we must, like Psyche, complete the four tasks for Aphrodite, for this love and wisdom can only be won by "stubborn and day-long toil."

Psyche's first task is to sort out many different kinds of grains. Unable to imagine accomplishing this task, she breaks down in despair. Then an ant sees the girl and takes pity on her, and summons an army of ants to her aid. Nature takes over when we acknowledge our powerlessness. In ancient Greece, Hesiod had a nickname for the ant - 'wise-wit'. Ants symbolize our instinctual ability to organize and differentiate as opposed to any type of rational organization. And this is achieved through patience. Ants are persistent, carrying loads many times bigger than they are, working together toward a common goal, knowing that it will eventually be accomplished. And that very knowing, that not-giving-up, is what makes for success. It is this patience that Psyche must learn as her first task.

The seeds symbolize the many kernels of life experience that make us who we are, the essence of each situation, complex, feeling or thought we experience. We can learn to discern the origins of things; we can instinctively discriminate between different essences; we can sort out and know the causes or seeds of events if we let our instinctual nature come to our aid.

It takes patience to understand why we do the things we do. To sort ourselves out.

Psyche's second task is to gather the golden fleece of the rams of the sun. Astrologically, the Ram of the sun is the sign of Aries, which heralds the return of the sun force in Spring. The Ram represents the outgoing impulses of new life, which can be aggressive, spontaneous and impulsive when it first bursts into life. The seeds want to give birth to the life within them, and as these seeds sprout they can be dangerous to our psychic awakening, for the ram also symbolizes aggressive power. The planet Mars rules the sign of Aries, and it represents the energy of our desire nature, our aggression and our anger. It is the logos energy of ego-identity, of self-assertion as well as self-consciousness. So when Psyche is told to collect the golden fleece, she has to collect the life-force of these new, aggressive impulses.

Once again Psyche is at a loss over how to complete this task. She wants to die. Which of course is easier than living and working on Love. What she really wants is transformation. And once again, it is nature which teaches her the way. A reed tells her how to gather the fleece without danger to herself. The beauty of reeds is that they mediate between different realms of being, for they are rooted in water and mud, and yet are responsive to the winds of heaven. In many fairy tales and myths, reeds possess the secret knowledge of the three realms of earth, water and air, and can be made into flutes, instruments which give voice to the spirit. A flute transforms something invisible into sound. The secret knowledge of nature can be transmitted to human understanding. All of nature comes alive to help Psyche in her tasks, for now she has entered that mundus imaginalis where all things are alive and conscious. Reeds whisper their wisdom to her, just as music or a feeling help us to know something. What the reed tells Psyche is that we must relate to the new spiritual life in tiny doses, for we cannot assimilate it all at once.

We have to realize that this new life must grow and merge with our old life and world. We have to grow into a new consciousness; we have to learn the reality of soul through the daily experiences of our lives. The golden fleece becomes the thread of our new life if we know to gather it when we come up against the hurtful brambles of our lives. New parts of ourselves emerge when we learn to act on our new insights rather than react to old situations. This is the learning process which teaches us how to handle personal power, for more than anything else these rams represent the dynamic power of the spirit of life.

Psyche's third task is to fill a flask with the waters of the river of death. The River of Death symbolizes the world of change and manifestation, the world of illusion that we create for ourselves out of fear of our inevitable death. Its' waters make us forget where we come from and what our task is – to awake to our divine nature. These illusions keep us from seeing life through the eyes of Spirit. They keep us worrying over money, and security, and social position.

We cannot be reborn into a new life until we can see things from another perspective. This perspective is represented by the great Eagle of Zeus who comes to Psyche's rescue. The eagle takes the flask from her and goes to the source of the spring, where it defeats the guardian dragons and fills the flask. Zeus' eagle acts out the spiritual victory over unconsciousness, for it soars with the sure knowledge that even the desert places in our lives are part of our path. Eagles soar high above the earth, seeing expansive patterns of life with the eye of Spirit.

The eagle gives us the courage and strength to see the larger picture, to sense the purpose of our life and so plan accordingly. The eagle tells us that there is meaning, even in the places we feel most alone and distant from life. Even in death there is meaning. The eagle of Zeus also tells us that we will find justice, not as humans understand justice, but as spirit bestows justice, which is always tempered with mercy. This spiritual vision is the only way we can understand the hard places in our lives when we feel as if we are meeting our deaths. But it is these hard places in life where we can judge for ourselves how far we have come in trust and faith. The only way to contain the waters of death - the feelings of despair, loneliness, hopelessness and fear that we inevitably encounter on the path to consciousness - is to see with the eyes of heaven, to understand with a courageous heart, and to fly with the wings of an eagle on the breath of spirit. This task teaches us belief and faith. It teaches us that spirit is always there to sustain us.

And so we come to Psyche's fourth task: her descent to the underworld for the casket of beauty. It is the descent which brings us face to face with the dark goddess of the underworld. It is the descent to the depths of our human nature, where all the repressed aspects of the Goddess, and they are many, await us. To go into the underworld and reclaim the beauty of those repressed aspects of Feminine Spirit - our sexuality, our powers of feeling and intuition, our powers of enchantment and magic, our imaginations - is to ask for rebirth, a rebirth which unites all the aspects of the Feminine in Psyche. It is necessary to descend into the darkness of the unconscious to retrieve this lost, uncanny, magical beauty.

The tower advises Psyche to keep to her own task, to keep silent and centered on what she must seek. It warns her of the dangers of pity and of being too helpful - just the opposite of what we hold sacred in our world. This is the paradoxical nature of the underworld. What Psyche seeks is a sense of herself; like the Queen of the Underworld, she must develop the objectivity of the "eye of death" which precludes pity for the miseries we see in our own lives. We have to stop seeing ourselves as victims; we have to learn to see our lives from the perspective of death and the underworld, so we can understand the meaning of our lives and just what is important.

Psyche and Her Underworld Beauty

These tasks awaken our soul and unite us with Love. These tasks are what Venus can help us with as she rises before the Sun as a Morning Star We can take the wisdom she learned in Scorpio and bring it to fruition next August when she once again disappears behind the Sun to re-emerge as the Evening Star.

Until then, our work is to awaken our souls to love.