richest and most splendid material. Within everything was considered and she heard servants' voices[1] which invited her to a most pleasing repose and to a most excellent table.[2] Also, afterwards, the most beautiful music was sung. In the evening she lay down to rest; by a soft sound she was frightened, she trembled, fearing something undefined. Already there is an unknown mate there who marries Psyche before daybreak, yet again hastens away.[3] He warns her later of her sisters who visit her and wish to tear from her the secret of her marriage to a god.[4] Unfortunately without success. The envious sisters who were carried by like zephyrs into the magic fields, persuaded her, until at last she finally looked at her divine spouse by the aid of a lamp and awakened him by incautiously spilling oil upon him.
They had represented to her, that her husband was perhaps, as the oracle proclaimed, a hideous dragon, who would yet devour her. Amor, however, makes his escape.[5] Psyche revenged herself on her sisters by telling them that Amor was her lover, and declared that he had run away from her because of the exposure of his secret, but that he was now going to woo one of the sisters. They hastened to the mountain, threw themselves, without the help of the zephyrs, into the air, and were most miserably dashed to pieces.
Psyche wandered, full of misery, through all countries seeking Amor, while Venus, who had learned besides of the adventure of Amor, in renewed anger sought her rival in order to punish her.
Finally Psyche voluntarily gave herself up to the wrathful goddess, was naturally badly treated and was required to fulfill
- ↑ As expressed in psychoses.
- ↑ A "little table sets itself."
- ↑ It has already been mentioned that certain psychotics experience a quite identical nocturnal embrace of an invisible spouse.
- ↑ This mystic union with the god as a higher being occurs as a psychic, sexual wish structure again and again. The Christian mystic has created wonderful cases of this sort. The painting of Coreggio, "The Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine," in the Louvre, has represented such an event in a charming manner. A comical counterpart suggests itself to me in a similar hallucinatory experience of a patient. She invested the Lord with checkered trousers. These trousers betrayed and led to the track of the youth who in the wish structure of the patient had become God.
- ↑ We have already met this motive in different fairy tales.
