C.S. Lewis loved the story of Psyche and Cupid and spent a lot of time thinking about it from the first time he read it, sometime in his late teens. He attempted to write some poetry about it at 19. He began and then abandoned more than one project intending to retell the story. The tale held his interest during the years of his atheism, his movement into some form of deism, and his eventual conversion to Christianity.
In fact, Lewis himself says that in his first, youthful draft of the story, “(Orual) was to be in the right and the gods in the wrong.” The story was always about Psyche’s sister and her objection to the behavior of the gods, which Orual sees as unjust. It’s about a lot more, of course, which we’ll get to.
For those unfamiliar with the “original” version (which Lewis read from Apuleius), it went something like this: A king and queen had three daughters, two of whom were beautiful but common enough and one who was so beautiful that people turned their worship away from Venus and toward this young woman named Psyche. Venus sends her son Cupid to punish the girl, but he accidentally pricks himself with his own arrow and falls in love with her. Through a series of events, the parents ask the priest of Apollo what should be done and they’re told that Psyche is destined to marry and/or be eaten by a horrible beast that even the gods fear (supposedly).
So they sacrifice her on the mountain by tying her to a tree; the west wind takes her away to a beautiful palace where she meets her new beastly husband, but only in deepest darkness. Her sisters are brought by the wind for a visit, and, jealous of the beautiful palace, they hatch a plan to destroy Psyche’s home and marriage. They urge Psyche to try to get a glimpse of her husband in the darkness, which she does, but the oil from her lamp wakes him and she is sent into exile. She goes through a series of tasks to prove her worth and is eventually rewarded with an official, heavenly marriage to Cupid. Both her sisters, by the way, die before the story ends.
Lewis was immediately taken with the story, and also felt that “Apuleius got it all wrong.” The story didn’t make sense to him. It didn’t ring true. And even as a teen Lewis believed that myth must be, first and foremost, true. Over the years as he worked on the story, he came to think that when it came to Psyche’s story, Apuleius was the “transmitter, not the inventor.” So Lewis “felt quite free to go behind Apuleius” and write, as he thought it must be, the true story behind the myth.
Many of the changes that come in Lewis’ retelling stem from one big change: “The central alteration in my own version consists in making Psyche’s palace invisible to normal, mortal eyes – if ‘making’ is not the wrong word for something which forced itself upon me, almost at my first reading of the story, as the way the thing must have been.” It made little sense to Lewis that the sisters would see Psyche’s palace and, out of jealousy, destroy her life and themselves. It seemed extreme and impious that if they believed fully in the gods and saw their glory that they would cross them (and Psyche) in the ways that they did in Apuleius’ story.
This core change led to many others. It altered the themes and ideas of the story and also “…of course brings with it a more ambivalent motive and a different character for my heroine, and finally modifies the whole quality of the tale.” It allowed Orual to become a sympathetic, even understandable, character. Because of course she “couldn’t see Psyche’s palace when she visited her. She saw only rock and heather.”
Thus the theme shifts in a variety of ways. Orual’s “dreadful problem” becomes “Is P(syche) mad or am I blind?” It becomes a story about faith and doubt, proof, the gods, and whether it’s reasonable to punish human beings for their own inability to see (whether that means seeing themselves, seeing the gods, or seeing a beautiful palace in the remote and inhospitable mountains).
The book becomes, in effect, a sort of biographical tour through Lewis’ own spiritual life. It’s “the story of every nice, affectionate agnostic whose dearest one suddenly ‘gets religion’, or even every luke-warm Christian whose dearest gets Vocation.” (In this context, when Lewis talks about Vocation he’s referring to Christians who give their life to God’s service…a priest or nun, a missionary, someone like that.) And it’s the story of Lewis himself, whose life was much more like Orual’s than Psyche’s.
On top of that, Lewis realizes that this story will let him do something unique from his point of view: write a “Christian” novel from the point of view of an agnostic. As he wrote to a friend, the agnostic position was, “Never, I think, treated sympathetically by a Christian writer before. I do it all through the mouth of the elder sister.”
It is interesting to watch Orual struggle with the reality or lack of reality related to the gods. Her entire book, she says, is a treatise against the gods. But she makes it clear she does not look to the gods to judge (at least in Book One), but rather to the Greeks. “And now,” she writes, “let that wise Greek whom I look to as my reader and the judge of my cause, mark well what followed.”
She meets Psyche in the mountains and is thrilled to find her alive. They play games—or so Orual thinks—where Psyche serves her “fine wine” but it’s only water from the stream in Psyche’s own cupped hands. As they come to realize that they are seeing completely different realities, Orual is horrified (her sister must of course be mad), and Psyche is filled with “sober sadness, mixed with pity.” Psyche falls into mourning: “You can’t see it. You can’t feel it. For you, it is not there at all. Oh, Maia… I am very sorry.”
Psyche immediately leaves off trying to convince Orual that the palace is there, that anything is there. She knows that’s useless. How to convince her to believe in something she can’t see?
Ironically, this is what brings Orual “almost to a full belief.” Psyche’s certainty reminds Orual that this place was “dreadful” and “full of the divine, sacred, no place for mortals. There might be a hundred things in it I couldn’t see.” And with this remembrance comes deep grief. Because she and Psyche suddenly “were not in the same piece.” There was only “hopeless distance” between them now. The gods had stolen her sister away.
The conversation that follows between Psyche and Orual is a painful and beautiful one, where they both acknowledge and mourn the sudden distance that has come between them and wish for a way to bridge it…of course both hoping the other will cross over to their side. Lewis also touches once again on one of his favorite philosophical constructs for discussing the divinity of Christ: the “trilemma.” Basically, if Jesus claimed to be God he must be either a liar, mad, or truly God. (This is a simplification, of course, but that’s the basic point.)
Orual pushes Psyche into this same construct. She can see for herself that there’s no palace there, no god, no husband, and Psyche’s story of being freed from her chains by the west wind is ridiculous. So her story can’t be true. She knows that Psyche is not a liar, at least not purposely: “You don’t mean to lie. You’re not in your right mind, Psyche. You have imagined things.” It’s the fear. The drugs the priest gave her. The loneliness.
Psyche does try to convince her sister otherwise: how is she so healthy? Well-cared for? How has she eaten during her time on the mountain? Orual can’t deny those things, and yet cannot see the palace, either. So there must be another explanation…perhaps a mountain man has taken her in, is hiding her in his shack, feeding her and taking advantage of her madness.
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In later years, when writing her account, Orual admits that she didn’t come to her conclusion of Pysche’s madness with complete honesty: “But I was lying. How did I know whether she really saw invisible things or spoke in madness?”
In fact, Orual’s agnosticism is very much in the middle. She doesn’t believe in the gods, but speaks of them often. She doesn’t see the palace (except for one brief moment, when she’s not sure if it’s truly a palace or the mist). She dreads telling the Fox of things that might make it seem that she does believe, and she mourns the way her own disbelief pushes her from Psyche.
And through it all, Orual is not painted as villain (which is sometimes the norm with religious presentations of agnosticism) but as someone who is doing her reasonable best. Now, Lewis does give us some clues that Orual is maybe being prevented from full honesty in her dealings with the gods by her own emotional state or situation, but even that doesn’t make Orual seem to be a bad person…or at least not to me. In fact, her objections that the gods should be clearer, should be more forthright, seem incredibly reasonable (because, of course, she is falling back on reason, again and again).
Faith must, after all, be a kind of madness to those who do not have it. At the same time, Lewis fully expects that any conversion must come from mystical experience…that is, from personal experience, not just being told what is or should be.
I can’t think of a single example in all our reading of Lewis where someone converts to Christianity (or following Aslan or the gods) in the absence of a mystical experience (the closest may well be Bardia in Till We Have Faces, who has enormous respect for the gods and plays it pretty close to his vest whether he’s ever seen them himself). In Lewis’ story worlds, no one is argued into a belief in God. No one comes to belief in the absence of seeing God/Aslan/the gods. The mystical experience, the moment when the invisible is detected and acknowledged is a key moment in conversion. And Lewis seems to have enormous compassion for those who have not seen the invisible…how could they believe? It would be laughable to do so.
I love where Psyche goes with it: “Perhaps, Maia, you too will learn how to see. I will beg and implore (Cupid) to make you able.” We have a lot more to unpack about this in the weeks to come, but at the core of it I think this is something to keep central as we read Till We Have Faces: Wherever you are in faith or lack of it, this book welcomes you. If you believe in the gods and are furious at them, this book is for you. If you are uncertain about the gods and whether they exist at all, that is a position that is welcome. If you deeply believe in the gods and are cut off from your family and those closest to you as a result, well, this is your story, too. Lewis has purposely designed this book—more so than any of his others—to be honest about his own journey through all those different places, and invites first and foremost our own honesty, not a necessary conversion to his point of view. I think there’s something beautiful and wonderful about that.
Matt Mikalatos is the author of the YA fantasy The Crescent Stone. You can follow him on Twitter or connect on Facebook.
I read Till We Have Faces a few times as a child due to being intrigued by its emotional complexity, but never understood it until this essay. Looking forward to deeper understanding through this series. Thank you for your insights, Matt!
For someone who knows more about linguistics than myself: Is there any connection between Psyche’s nickname for Orual and a lesser angel in Tolkien’s legendarium, both spelled “Maia”?
“Maia” in Greek means “nurse” or “nanny”. Telemachus uses it to the aged Eurycleia in the Odyssey, for instance. I haven’t reread “Till We Have Faces” just recently so I don’t remember if Psyche is intentionally using a Greek name (learned from the Fox?) for Orual.
Just as a side note — most scholars of Classical literature and myth (including me) think that Apuleius DID invent the Cupid and Psyche story entirely on his own. It reads like an original story, not like a myth, and there is absolutely no trace of it in any earlier Greek or Roman literature. So if Lewis came to believe that Apuleius was not the originator, he was disagreeing with the overall scholarly consensus (not the first time he did that, of course!)
The original Cupid and Psyche has elements that are found in a large number of fairy tales. Of course, these are all fairy tales that were written down centuries after Cupid and Psyche was written. Still, it makes it easy to believe the story could have ties to other stories. But, that’s the clear bias of someone reading it after reading an awful lot of fairy tales.
Put another way, someone centuries from now might find it hard to believe how ground breaking the whole “I am your father” thing was in Empire Strikes Back (or how ripped off it would be, probably starting within seconds of the first crowd exiting the first screening and not slowing down much since). Given the billion or so stories since then that use the motif and the billions more we can expect in the future, it might be hard for this future reader to think there weren’t at least a few thousand stores with the same basic outline preceding it.
But, I can also understand looking at this story and feeling like there was something deeper there that hadn’t been touched or had come together wrong. Lewis is writing about things that are in the story but he gave them meaning and depth that Apuleius either didn’t or that don’t come across clearly to modern readers.
Great comments, as always, everyone!
I don’t know that Lewis *actually* thought that Apuleius hadn’t invented the story (though he couched it that way for sure), as he was well read. The moment when Orual hears their own story retold but “wrong” late in the novel might well have been another way of Lewis exploring exactly that… the idea that even the first people to tell the story might not have gotten the truth of it!
#4 — The general consensus is that fairy tales that resemble ‘Cupid and Psyche’ (Beauty and the Beast is the most obvious) are actually derived from it, very much like your “I am your father” example. Apuleius’ story is just too tidy, too, well, literary, too comic in its treatment of Venus and the other goddesses, and too pat in symbolism (Psyche means “soul”, Cupido means “desire”, etc.) to be convincing as genuine myth.
It remains possible, of course, that it WAS a genuine myth, developed over centuries of oral tradition, and that it just happens that Apuleius’ highly ironic, literary version is the only written version that survived. But if that were the case, we would expect there to be traces of the myth in earlier literature, passing references to it, and so far as I know there just simply aren’t any such references.
I very much agree with your final paragraph, and I think Lewis’ brilliance in this instance was to see how Apuleius’ story had the potential to be so much more powerful. In Apuleius, it’s a “tale-within-a-tale,” narrated by an old woman to a frightened girl who has been kidnapped by pirates and is being held captive by them, supposedly to comfort her by taking her mind off her troubles. Lewis’ treatment gave the story a depth and seriousness that Apuleius’ version really doesn’t have.
#5 — Matt, could you tell us the source for Lewis’ comments that you quote, about how “Apuleius got it all wrong”? I’d like to read his discussion of his process of thinking about the story.
The scene where Orual hears her story told “wrong” has always stood out to me as one of the most fictional parts of the novel (if I can put it that way), since so far as I know the “Cupid and Psyche” story never was part of any actual religious practice. Lewis’s imagining of a priest recounting it and saying “it is the sacred story” works beautifully in the novel, but removes it from any connection with actual Greco-Roman practice. But of course, Lewis is very careful to do that consistently throughout the novel by having Orual’s country be definitely NON-Greek, located far away from Greece, and with very different religious practices.
Great stuff, Matt! And you nailed it with Bardia; he’s one of the most interesting characters. Dang, Lewis really knew how to represent the different types of people around him, didn’t? Never more than in The Great Divorce. But your point that this book is for absolutely anyone, no matter their position on faith, rings true. That was one of the things that struck me the most about it. This isn’t, like Mere Christianity (which I love), addressing those who have already come to a certain point in faith. This one is accessible to all.
@7/Elizabeth. Yup, no problem!
From a letter to Katherine Ferrer: “An old, 25 year old idea having just started into imperative life! My version of Cupid, Psyche. Apuleius got it all wrong. The older sister (I reduce her to one) couldn’t see Psyche’s palace when she visited her. Hence her dreadful problem: “is P mad or am I blind?” As you see, though I didn’t start from that, it is the story of every nice affectionate agnostic whose dearest one suddenly “gets religion”, or every lukewarm Christian whose dearest gets a vocation. Never, I think, treated sympathetically by a Christian writer before. I do it all thru the mouth of the elder sister. In a word, I’m much with book.”
@8/JLaSala. I don’t know if we’ll do a whole article on this, but the people closest to Orual also take on the aspects of the Platonic tripartite soul!
the logos/logistikon/ reason is Fox.
the thymos/spirit/ and “source of courage” is Bardia
the eros/epithumetikon/stomach is Redival, who is all desire and always acts on them.
Each one gives us a reflection of a direction that Orual could choose to go: reasonable disbelief; courageous faith in the absence of proof; following her passions into one or the other regardless. As we move toward the conclusion of the novel she manages to bring all three of those things into herself, which is what causes her to become a complete soul (i.e. to get a face) and thus she “becomes” Psyche (i.e. a soul).
It’s an interesting question, for individuals and for society – how “mad” do we let people be based on the possibility that they’re right? We answer that question different ways depending on things like how vulnerable the person is. Young children are more likely to be controlled by others, hopefully to protect them from not being able to tell fantasy from reality. Adult eccentrics are allowed to go their way as long as they more or less obey the law and pay their bills, though they might face social consequences. People who have enough power are apparently allowed to take the world into their madness, willingly or not. But as for what we /should/ do in any given case, I don’t know how to come up with a rule of thumb.
@7/Elizabeth.
I think also if we look at the note from CSL in the novel itself, he says both that the story “first occurs” in Apuleius and that he thinks of him as “transmitter, not inventor.” So he’s assuming that Apuleius heard the story elsewhere (that’s how I read it, anyway), though he’s aware that Apuleius is the first written version we have (he also makes a point to mention that we have “few surviving Latin novels” which could presumably be him casting doubt on whether there might be more occurances if we had more surviving manuscripts.
Also probably of note: Lewis (and many others at the time) was deeply taken with THE GOLDEN BOUGH, which has a lot to say about the transmission of myths and stories with *essential* similarities despite surface differences. So in what sense Lewis is saying Apuleius got it wrong is up for debate, I’d say (i.e. did Apuleius “tell the story wrong” or did he misunderstand the mythic template of his own story).
And yet it was Lewis who said to Tolkien that “myths are lies, even though lies breathed through silver”?
@13/steve morrison.
Yes indeed. Though in that context Lewis and Tolkien were talking about the historicity of Christ. As Lewis responded later in the same conversation, he was coming to understand the story of Jesus as “a myth that really happened.” Which, again, is a great example of what he’s doing in Till We Have Faces. He’s taking the *story* of the Psyche myth and saying “what if it really happened?”
#12/Matt — Thanks; that comment about “transmitter, not inventor” was what I was really curious about. In assuming that Apuleius heard the story elsewhere rather than invented it himself, Lewis is definitely in disagreement with most scholars of Apuleius and of ancient myth — but again, as I said before, of course that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s wrong!!!
It’s true that we have only a couple of Latin novels and only a handful of Greek ones. Apuleius’ “Cupid and Psyche” story follows the template of Greek novels quite closely in many ways (a beautiful young maiden, separated from her beloved, undergoing all sorts of trials and tribulations at the hands of a nefarious captor, etc.), and that’s part of what makes his version seem so very literary and so very much unlike myth.
Bottom line: Lewis COULD, of course, be right that Apuleius is reworking a pre-existing myth. But we have no evidence of any such myth before Apuleius’ own version, and most scholars of ancient literature and myth think that Apuleius was in fact the “inventor” of the Cupid and Psyche story, not the “transmitter” of a myth.
In my mind, though, that makes Lewis’s achievement with “Till We Have Faces” even more impressive. He took what is basically, in Apuleius, an ironic and amusing story that no-one is expected to take very seriously, and used it to craft one of the most memorable literary discussions of the nature of love, faith, personhood, loneliness, exile (for me, the Fox is the character who recurs most often in my mind), etc. etc. that I’ve ever read. My hat is off to him.
Re the “transmitter, not the inventor” quote: I’m not sure that Lewis is saying that Apuleius had some now-lost source. My guess is that this has to do with a passage near the end of Perelandra, in which Ransom sees the Oyéresu Perelandra and Malacandra as Venus and Mars. He is embarrassed at some of the stories which humans have told about the gods, and thinks that what is myth in one world may be everyday fact in another. Furthermore, he muses that there may be some kind of community of minds such that no secret can be kept absolutely but neither can anything be transmitted completely without distortion.
Unfortunately, I no longer have a copy of Perelandra to hand. Can someone find the quote I want?
#16 / Steve Morrison
I think you may have thought about this fragment from “Perelandra”:
“For now he thought of them no more as Malacandra and Perelandra. He called them by their Tellurian names. With deep wonder he thought to himself, “My eyes have seen Mars and Venus. I have seen Ares and Aphrodite.” He asked them how they were known to the old poets of Tellus. When and from whom had the children of Adam learned that Ares was a man of war and that Aphrodite rose from the sea foam? Earth has been besieged, an enemy-occupied territory, since before history began. The gods have had no commerce there. How then do we know of them? It comes, they told him, a long way round and through many stages. There is an environment of minds as well as of space. The universe is one—a spider’s web wherein each mind lives along every line, a vast whispering gallery where (save for the direct action of Maleldil) though no news travels unchanged yet no secret can be rigorously kept. In the mind of the fallen Archon under whom our planet groans, the memory of Deep Heaven and the gods with whom he once consorted is still alive. Nay, in the very matter of our world, the traces of the celestial commonwealth are not quite lost. Memory passes through the womb and hovers in the air. The Muse is a real thing. A faint breath, as Virgil says, reaches even the late generations. Our mythology is based on a solider reality than we dream: but it is also at an almost infinite distance from that base. And when they told him this, Ransom at last understood why mythology was what it was—gleams of celestial strength and beauty falling on a jungle of filth and imbecility. His cheeks burned on behalf of our race when he looked on the true Mars and Venus and remembered the follies that have been talked of them on Earth.”
On a different note: I find it quite interesting how the predicament of Orual and the predicament of the dwarfs towards the end of the “The Last Battle” are treated by Lewis in quite different ways. In “Till We Have Faces” – which is a later work – there seems to be much more compassion for those who find themselves unable to perceive and experience the “heavenly” reality. Though it must be said that Orual does appear to be more open to the very possibility of belief – i.e. she would like to, but she cannot.
I used to teach literature at a parochial high school. One of my favorite units was on Til We Have Faces. It was the final book for seniors, and the last assignment (given prior to reading Part II) was to create a list of Orual’s arguments against the gods and the corresponding arguments that people today could make against God, along with the best Christian counter-arguments they could come up with.
I would give full credit for completion, we would read Part II together, and then I would individually rip each of the assignments in half, returning it with a stapled copy of the final lines from the book about the futility of words being led into battle against other words. In the end, it’s not our clever arguments that determine who is right or wrong or who best understands; be proud and judge others at your peril.
@18: Sounds like the educational philosophy of Charlotte Mason: Human reason has limits. It is the duty of the educator to teach students to use, strengthen, and hone their reason and also to understand where those limits lie.
I have been mulling over what to say about this book, which sank itself into my being like a stone into a well and stayed there.
My understanding of life is filtered by my autism: it can’t not be, the autism is literally part of the structure of the organ with which I think. And when I first read Till We Have Faces, I was facing the gulf between me and (as it then seemed) everyone else, without any tools at all. I had no online life, no counselor, no friend, not even a name for what was happening. I just knew that there was an unquantifiable, ineradicable, and vast difference between the way I lived in the world, and the way they lived in the world. At the time I identified with Istra, and took comfort in the feeling that at least one long-dead Englishman saw me. As I grew up, I began to understand that sometimes I am Orual, scribbling angrily away with my nose in my list of grievances while the real world is going on all around me. And eventually I got the tools I needed in order to work out how to live in this confusing and bemusing place.
From that perspective, and from the perspective of the midpoint of the Easter season, with ordinary time green on the horizon: The death of Orual is in one sense a triumph, because she dies after she finally understands and is freed. But it’s also a problem. After the great opening of the eyes and coming out of the dark pit comes “Now what?” Most of us have to sweep the floor and do the dishes (or run the country and sign the proclamations) after our mystical experiences have deposited us back into our bodies. On the other hand, Lewis had already addressed that in That Hideous Strength.
I have finally ordered Till We Have Faces, which I’ve been meaning to read for quite some time, and this column has inspired me to do. I’d hoped to get to it in time to join the discussion, but that’s not looking likely.
I’ve been absent for awhile but I did want to say how much I enjoyed the columns and discussions. I wish I could have participated a little more, especially when it came to the ending of That Hideous Strength, as the whole interplay of gender, marriage, motherhood, womahood, etc are actually a huge topic of interest in mine. (I exist in a few seemingly contradictory spheres – Catholic, wife, mother, educated and also fairly dedicated to my professional vocation in what is considered a male dominated field – and so have similar struggles as others in the comments with some of the messaging, especially when presented in an overly simplistic way, but also agree with parts of it, even while knowing they are challenging. I’ll just continue to plug St. Edith Stein and her promoting of women and mothers reaching beyond the domestic sphere when called to do so.) But a lot of what I could say would definitely go ‘in the weeds’ – I have a tendency to ramble – so it’s probably for the best I wasn’t there! I was going through a few other stressful things (some of which were related to those very topics) and just didn’t have the emotional/mental bandwidth to keep up with the discussions.
I probably won’t be able to re-join the discussion before they close comments on these last few articles but I did want to chime in and say how much I have enjoyed this column (and the commentariat) over the years, and I am looking forward to reading these as well!
Matt, I’m so glad you’re doing this book. #10 is a brilliant comment! To me, it’s so powerful that Orual does not come to truth until she sees and fully understands the truth of the stereotypically feminine characters–her sister Redival and Bardia’s wife. She has to accept and forgive them both, and overcome her jealousy of them, before she can become who she is meant to be. Both these characters represent lives she might have chosen, a type of femininity she has rejected and denied in herself, and also, in her jealousy of them, her own jealousy of Psyche.