Psyche, Beauty & Love in Emoji Land
by Asa Boxer
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Let me tell you the tale of Psyche. It is a tale about the journey of psychological awakening. The individual (Psyche) suffers a shocking and tragic fall from material comfort and high regard when public opinion suddenly turns against her. The trouble emerges from a community that has lost faith in true Beauty and has come to worship material beauty above all else. Psyche is the village beauty. And people worship her. When things go wrong, desperate to remedy a public health disaster, they scapegoat and sacrifice their most adored. We’re talking about a community that has gone so far as to demonise Love (Beauty’s child). There are enough resemblances between this myth and the society we live in today to make it worth considering. (Maybe for some survival tips.)
Psyche is a young woman of such marvellous beauty that many in town praise her as Aphrodite incarnate, or even more sacrilegiously—as more beautiful than Aphrodite herself. The people neglect the shrines of the goddess and she grows angry with them. Local new borns are mostly born weak and soon die. Newlyweds are having trouble conceiving. Overall fertility is in the dumps, and this population famine goes on for several years.
The local priestess advises that to appease the goddess’s jealousy, young Psyche (who isn’t much older than marriageable age) be sacrificed to a monster that lives in the wasteland by a vacant cliffside situated above an unexplored wilderness, an enchanted place shrouded in perpetual fog.
The public health committee issues the order and white clad nurses and black clad officers come to her home with torches. They put a burlap bag over her head to hide her offensive beauty. They load her onto a wagon and drive her out to that wasteland. They direct her to a wide wooden post at least ten times her girth and planted deep in the ground by the frightful precipice. And the officials lash her to it. They depart in haste and fear, leaving her there to be tormented and eaten by some beastly monster that no one has actually ever seen.
Immediately, that first night, the monster comes for Psyche, but it turns out he’s not a monster after all. It’s Love himself. (Sometimes called Eros or Cupid.) Psyche however is unaware of his identity. With that bag over her head, she never sees him. And later, he comes to their bed in darkness and departs before first light. All she knows about him is that he is powerful, magical, and deeply caring… and that she loves him. Sexually, he is gentle and ravishing. Their love for each other is pure and thoughtless as that first couple’s in paradise, satisfying and fulfilling. There is one rule Psyche must obey however to maintain her happy life with her adoring prince: she must never gaze upon his face and figure. She must allow his identity to remain mysterious.
(Psyche is in the dark about this, but Love’s secrecy is on account of his hiding Psyche from his mother, Aphrodite, who has forbidden the relationship. In fact, Aphrodite has instructed her son to make Psyche fall in love with the most hideous beast on earth. Since this tension between Psyche and Beauty (Aphrodite) can never be entirely resolved—due to Psyche’s innate vanity—it is a condition that seeks open recognition and compromise. Psyche is the lesser-Aphrodite.)
On the anniversary of Psyche’s sacrifice, her sisters come to visit. At first they come to the cliff’s edge to bewail the sad fate of their dear departed sister. Psyche (who lives now in the fog-veiled valley of love below) hears them and asks her husband if he can arrange for them to visit. He grimaces because he knows what’s coming. Having a kind heart, he tells her she needs no permission to visit with her family. He does however remind her of her vow to him and warns that her sisters will try to cajole her into breaking her promise. And indeed the sisters do pressure Psyche to take an interest in who her husband might be: monster? demon? sorcerer? prince? god? or demi-god? What’s he hiding? He must be a monster! Or he must be hiding some hideous deformity.
And so Psyche finally snaps, and while Love sleeps, she lights a lantern and holds it over his face and glides it over his body. She is mesmerised—as anyone would be who looked upon such a perfect being. And she is erotically aroused too by the beauty of his face and his wonderful limbs. But in moving the lantern about, a little excitedly at her discovery, she spills some hot oil on his chest. It burns and he awakens with a resounding, preternatural howl, springs out of the sheets and into a bewildered squat and sees what Psyche has done and glares a moment at her in confusion and pain, and spreads his astonishing, lucent, white wings and is gone in a swift, angry updraft.
Psyche is lost after that. Both materially and spiritually, she’s cleaned out after betraying Love, after having broken their bond and lost his trust. What is Love after all without trust? She embarks on a journey to find Love again and to beg his forgiveness. She sets out on a pilgrimage to various temples asking the goddesses of Olympus to intervene on her behalf. They hear her prayers, but none can help her.
Eventually, her tireless efforts and wanderings over the earth reach the ear of Aphrodite, and Aphrodite decides to be done with Psyche forever by assigning her four impossible tasks as penance. And just when Psyche despairs at each challenge, believing she’s done for, Nature provides an ally and helps her out of the jam. One time, ants come along to sort a pile of mixed grains for her. Another time, the eagle of Zeus collects a flask of water from the deadly river Styx for her. Aphrodite is impressed at the supernatural powers Psyche seems to possess. But when Psyche messes up her handling of the final trial and by way of her own vanity, winds up magically ensnared in a death-like sleep, Aphrodite shows no pity.
Love however forgives his beloved. He heals from his burns, escapes from his mother’s overweening care and flies out to rescue Psyche and with a kiss, unclasps her new consciousness from its sleepy cocoon like a butterfly. And harmony is restored in the heavens and in the heart of humanity. Whereupon Psyche achieves immortality among the Olympian gods. And this is why we get butterflies when hit by Love’s arrow.
What sort of society loses its sense of Beauty? A cynical one. What sort of society demonises Love? A puritanical one. What does it mean to neglect the altars of Aphrodite? To grow vainglorious. To believe that one’s own devices and inventions are more admirable than the divine. The myth of Psyche suggests that the individual awakens by way of these errors, by way of betrayals and trials, by walking the gauntlet of the faithless society. It suggests that all societies grow too proud and lose their sense of divine beauty; that vanity and idolatry arise in its absence; that Love is demonised and repressed; and that such a society inevitably scapegoats those who embody and represent Beauty and Love.
Happily, this is the journey of psychological awakening. It’s also a rough road, a true adventure, involving a trip to the underworld—into the inner world, the psychological world—a place that by narcissistic fascination, can ensnare us all in a death-like sleep, a state of self preoccupation without self awareness. Without the grace of Love, without the forgiveness of Love, Psyche is cursed to remain a sleeping beauty, an unconscious, oblivious being.
Psyche’s commitment to Love is key to her awakening, but more important is her disappointment with herself. That part is a necessary catalyst. Her need for redemption drives her to achieve things beyond her ordinary, mortal powers. Before she witnesses the pain she inflicts on her beloved, she is an unconscious shell, a local valley princess caught up in the petty dramas of Gossip Mill High. It takes a mistake, a tragedy, and deep regret to ignite her empathy, her sense that her actions have consequences for those she cares about. Through this empathetic pain, she realises who she is, what she’s done, who she thought she was and who she intends to be.
The awakening psyche must make its peace with a Beauty that is more than merely material. It must recognise that its own beauty is a vain distraction. And it must allow Love the dignity of its mysterious being. Casting the light of analysis upon Love is a vulgar act, a kind of sin. Arguably, it is also a necessary one, the catalyst of her fall from unconscious bliss and the start of her journeys and trials of awakening. To resolve her situation, she has to figure out a way to express her love, a way to give shape to her heart life. Her inner world must find expression in the outer world, the social world. And the shape it takes is the narrative shape of her pilgrimages and her tasks. And even so, her vanity winds up undermining all her efforts, casting her into an unconscious state, where she is helpless, and hopeless without Love’s mercy.
According to the myth, Beauty and Love are essential to the awakening Psyche. The allegory is surprisingly rich, complex and subtle with far more to tease out of it than what I can provide here. The ancient Greeks and Romans were familiar with a version of this tale. And folks who know a story, tend to think about it even when they don’t realise they’re thinking about it. By implication, those Greeks and Romans had a pretty profound sense of the psychological struggle of the soul in a society that turns against it, that scapegoats it. And back in the old days, they seem to have had a pretty sophisticated experience of conceptual beauty and vulgar beauty; of conceptual love and vulgar eros.
As I see it here from atop the barstool, Beauty and Love are essential to civilisation. They are the inner principles by which we measure the impact of our actions. A society that internalises the Psyche myth is one that shepherds its citizens toward self development and fulfilment by putting them in touch with their intuitions about Beauty and Love, about empathy, charity and honest dealing. That is most definitely not our society.
Our society is a gossip society in which beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and we’ve jabbed a pencil in that eye. Love is for fools. Who wants to journey the inner world? It’s too dark and scary in there. So we’ve come to live on a beach behind the breakers. We keep to the shallows. There’s only eros, lust and the satisfying of lust. Passion is just a way of blowing off steam. It’s all chemistry, a bunch of firing neurons. Don’t be mystified. We can describe such things in immense detail even if none of it explains our experience of it all. What matters is that we can make pills and you eat them and they fix you. . . which actually proves that the chemistry is all that matters.
We don’t need to examine our assumptions or get all metaphysical. We can just agree on some basic conventions, institutionalise them as The Science™, kick the machine over to autopilot and forget about it; go have a beer; play some golf. And we can avoid the whole God and consciousness elephant by just ignoring it. The institution will stamp any inquiry into such matters with the big, red PSEUDOSCIENCE stamp, and this Jedi mind trick will shame the weak-minded from looking any further.
These aren’t the ideas you’re looking for.
These are not the ideas we’re looking for.
The Twitterverse is Milton’s Pandemonium and Dante’s Inferno all chewed up by the three-headed dog Cerberus who guards the gates of Hell. . . a new lobby-floor fresco by Heironymus Bosch. The worst dens of torment our greatest artists have been able to dream up find a comfortable niche in social media—the virtual Hades. I have played Virgil, observing the place with an eye on one day giving tours to poets. I confess that I have partaken of the Twitter for the past few months, observing the hive, the ant and the bee, the stock market of blurt where the most obnoxious rise quickly and propagate like a fungus. I have witnessed otherwise respectable, intelligent public figures come off unrecognisably repugnant: negative, hyperbolic, shrill, self-promotional—like just coked-out versions of themselves, especially on Twitter.
Personally, I have experienced emotional reactions, flushes and thrills when receiving one of these babies: ❤️. OMG. I’ve finally found what we’ve all been looking for! Someone tell Bono. And the funny thing is that if I really want a lot of those. (Feel this: ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️. You’re happy now, right? You like it? Want more?) All I have to do is drop all semblance of civility and blurt a glib, tactless version of an observation. “And the collective ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ will pour forth upon thy face like the fountains of Peor” (The Book of Befuddlement, 1:40).
We’re a long way off from Aphrodite and Eros now. With the predominant social media, including Youtube and Rumble, those who engage participate in the clamour of a vast Pandemonium where souls are “shredded,” “slammed,” and “destroyed.” All ❤️ magnets. Some feel compelled to kick up a fuss in the hive because they have determined that without their shredding, slamming and destroying activities, the hive would steer humanity over a cliff. ❤️ Strong stances must be taken. ❤️ Stupid should be called stupid. ❤️ Tact is for pussies. I get it. I ❤️ a vulgar world. But we lose civility, and with it, civilisation. (What? No ❤️? My day is shot. 😢)
Though maybe we haven’t thought about it, we all know that ❤️ isn’t upper-case Love: it isn’t even lower-case love. It’s a chemical trigger meant to elicit addictive behaviour. This is common knowledge. Why have we not seen any class action suits aimed at compelling app designers to remove these elements that are designed to induce addictive behaviour? Addictive behaviour is known to augment frustration, cause anger and lead to confrontation. The compulsiveness it drives is socially, politically and psychologically damaging. Most importantly, it actively erodes civility, whereas we ought to be seeking ways to augment and reward civility. There’s no doubt some lawyer trickery bullshit at work there preventing a proper assessment of how to curtail or direct psychological manipulation in app design and social media.
Aphrodite is most definitely pissed. Our society can barely work out how to represent feminine sexuality. Our movies are full of heroes without lovers. Or if they have lovers, it’s complicated. Psyche is taking Love to court to prove his beauty is in fact a case of toxic masculinity. She feels she was misled, afraid for her life. And she made decisions under duress. She certainly never consented to any of it. He was sexy and great in bed, sure. . . But bluh. Love was no gentleman. He was a total monster. Creepy guy, too, LOL, the way he hid who he really was all that time? Completely sketch. And so, modern Psyche is happy to be done with Love. You can’t always get what you want, right? So Love has basically been cancelled. Psyche has fallen into a blind-drunk stupor. In place of Love, you can have porn and obsess over your genitalia and what you feel they may represent, and post your photos for all that pinging ❤️❤️❤️ that makes life worth living.
Where does Psyche go from here? She’s strung out in the virtual poppy fields, or entranced by the Eye Sirens of Vidéo, or otherwise waylaid and delayed, baking in the glare of her phone, flickin the ol’ bean. What phenomenon of Nature do you imagine will come to rescue her from the fuzzy vibrations and the warm pings of satisfaction and the embracing dings of relief? How resist this electronic Molly, this simple world full of ❤️❤️❤️ instead of all that bloody human mess? As Robert Frost put it: “The woods are lovely dark and deep, / But I’ve got promises to keep, baby girl.” The shallows are plenty deep, my darlin’. All I need is sunshine and a cold drink. But I’ve grown tired of emoji love. And hasn’t anyone noticed that Twitter is a turn off? Yeah. So ima be sticking it out with the messy human thing, cuz this ❤️ ain’t got no heart.
Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies(Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018), and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also a founder of and editor at analogy magazine.