Welcome the podcast “An Ancient Language for a Modern Soul. Poemi Conviviali by Giovanni Pascoli.” Today we will talk about a poem called “Psyche”, which is a retelling of the ancient myth of Eros, the Greek god of love, and Psyche, the human soul, here represented as a young woman. We find this myth in the text of a Latin author, Apuleius, from which Pascoli draws inspiration for this poem.

I’m here today with Professor Lucia Pasetti. Lucia is a Professor of Classics at the University of Bologna, Italy. She has written extensively on Apuleius and on the reception of the myth of Eros and Psyche in various Italian authors between the nineteenth and the twentieth century. You will hear the poem in the translation by James Ackhurst and myself, published in 2022 by Italica Press. The poem is read by Joanna Strafford, the music is by Giovanni Tardini, played at the Celtic harp by Arianna Mornico.

ELENA: Welcome, Lucia, and thank you very much for being here.

LUCIA: Thank you

ELENA: Before we talk about Psyche in the Conviviali, I’d like to delve a bit into the sources of this poem. We know that the story of Eros and Psyche does not begin with Apuleius. It is a very ancient myth, which can be seen archeologically on a variety of artefacts as early as the fifth century BC and all the way until the fourth century AD. We see it especially on tombs – where it was almost a logo for sculptors and engravers. This is not surprising, if we think that the word psyche in ancient Greek means “soul”, and it is etymologically connected to the verb psychein which means “to blow” or “to breathe”. In other words, in ancient Greece, psyche was the breath blowing life into the body – without that breath, the body is dead. Interestingly, the word psyche also means “butterfly”, and we see on many ancient tombs the engraving of a butterfly rising out of a corpse. Although, originally, psyche was only one type of butterfly, a moth, the one that is attracted to light, and this may have generated that part of the myth where Psyche holds a lantern onto Eros. There is a beautiful poem by Edgar Allan Poe, it’s called To Helen, which ends with these lines (I’m gonna go and give it a try):

Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche

How statue-like I see thee stand,

The agate lamp within thy hand!

Ah, Psyche, from the regions

Which Are Holy-Land!

Psyche is the human soul, which leaves the body after death; but it is also a butterfly, and it is also essentially female. The Greek word psyche is in fact gendered, and it is feminine. Eros on the other hand, the god personifying “love” or “desire”, is male. The two of them, the human soul and Eros, have a relationship, which for the soul, is a source of salvation and immortality. If we want to find the philosophical roots of the myth of Eros and Psyche as a love story, we need to turn to Plato. Lucia, which texts in Plato discuss the relationship between Eros and the human soul?

LUCIA

The theme of Eros is the centerpiece of one of the most fascinating dialogues written by Plato: The Symposium . The dialogue is set in Athens, 416 BC, and it takes place during a banquet in the house of the famous dramatist Agathon.

ELENA

“Symposium” in fact, means “banquet”, as listeners know from the episode we did on the poem Solon.

LUCIA.

Yes. Agathon has invited six prominent figures of Athens at the time: one of them is Socrates. During the banquet, each of them discusses a philosophical theory of love, either criticizing it or praising it. And Socrates is the last to speak. What Socrates says is that Eros is neither good nor bad: Eros is simply a desire for what we don’t have. To clarify this concept, Socrates reports a myth that he had heard from the priestess Diotima, who had taught him everything about love. In this myth, Eros is the child of Penia, the goddess of Poverty, and Porus, which we can translate as “expedient, resourcefulness”: the ability to get what you want. Therefore, Eros is poor like his mother, but resourceful like his father. Eros is an attraction towards what one lacks: first of all, beauty, physical beauty. So physical attraction, we can say, is the first step, but then the second step involves the spiritual dimension: from desiring a beautiful body, we begin being attracted to another person’s soul.

ELENA It is a very interesting way of depicting the process of “falling in love”.

LUCIA

Yes, and this process is endless, because it also includes all forms of love, like desire for knowledge, (in Grek “sophia”) which can never be fully satisfied. In this sense, Eros is a philosopher, where this word means, etymologically, a lover of knowledge. We find this notion in another dialogue by Plato, Phaedrus. This dialogue takes place in a rural setting: here we see Socrates with his friend Pheadrus under a plane tree, talking about love. Socrates says that Eros is more than a desire for physical pleasure – what we now call erotic love – it is a desire for beauty: in the physical and spiritual beauty of the person we love we can glimpse into divine beauty.

ELENA We can begin to see here why we call spiritual love “platonic love”, even if it is not what Plato meant.

LUCIA Yes, and the reason why the human soul seeks beauty is because the soul has seen it before, before being born and incarnated in a body. In the experience of human love, the memory of that original beauty resurfaces. But the human soul can only reach that beauty again if it overcomes the attraction of the senses, if it gets past erotic love, and in that way, we can see why the modern expression “platonic love” has come to mean non-sexual love.

ELENA Thank you, Lucia, that is so interesting. The myth of Eros and Psyche is an ancient story, possibly originating in ancient Persia. This story then became loaded with religious and philosophical meanings, turning into a parable of redemption and salvation, consistent with Plato’s notion of the immortal soul. The archeological representations of Eros and Psyche, which span over nine centuries, seem to become more frequent during the second and third centuries after Christ, when we see a resurgence of Plato’s theory known as Middle-Platonism. This is the time when Apuleius lived and wrote his major works. Lucia, who was Apuleius?

LUCIA

Apuleius described himself as a ‘Platonic philosopher’: indeed, as you mentioned, he is considered an important figure of Middle Platonism, a version of Platonism particularly focused on investigating the presence of the divine in human existence. Apuleius was also attracted by mystery cults such as the cult of Isis: these religions involved practices of initiation where the adepts were apparently in direct contact with the gods, and they also promised the soul’s salvation after death. Apuleius was very interested in the supernatural and in magic, in fact at some point he was even accused of using magic to seduce a rich widow. He was tried in court and from his own defense speech, called “Apology” (like in Plato’s Apology of Socrates, here apology does mean the act of apologizing, but it means the act of defending oneself from accusations), we can gather information about his life: he was born in modern-day Lybia, he travelled a lot, and gained recognition as a rhetorician.

ELENA: A rhetorician is what we would call today “a speech writer”.

LUCIA

Exactly, he was also a sort of itinerant lecturer, very skilled in promoting the ideas of Middle Platonism. And we can se how good a writer he was when we read his Metamorphoses, a novel that despite its complexity, is still fascinating to the modern reader. The protagonist of this novel is Lucius, an alter ego of the author: an inquisitive and educated young man, who finds himself accidentally turned into a donkey due to a failed experiment with magic. After many hurdles, Lucius is transformed back into a human thanks to the goddess Isis. Lucius then begins a new life, a spiritual life, as a priest of the cult of Isis.

ELENA And in his book Metamorphoses. Apuleius narrates in full the story of Eros and Psyche.

LUCIA

Metamorphoses contains an extended version of the story of Eros and Psyche, and it is the only written sources, as all other sources are iconographic. Lucius hears this story during his time as a donkey. The story is written like a fairy tale for children, but much like Diotima’s myth in Plato’s Symposium, it used to convey a deeper philosophical meaning. Already the names of the two protagonists, Eros and Psyche, Love and Soul, indicate that the story is an allegory. Psyche is a beautiful princess, so beautiful that many think she’s more beautiful than Venus/ Aphrodites. Venus is obviously upset and seeks revenge. She asks her son Eros, the god of love, to give Psyche in marriage to a monster. Psyche is abandoned on a mountain, presumably to be kidnapped by a monster. However, she is mysteriously brought to a beautiful palace, where she spends the night with a partner without seeing him, in the dark, as the partner forbids Psyche to look at him. Despite this prohibition, Psyche is happy in the palace. But she is also curious to see her mysterious lover. ELENA :

This story reminds me a bit of Bluebeard.

LUCIA:

Yes, it is a common plot of fairytales, in which the protagonist violates a law out of curiosity. Psyche lifts up a lamplight on her lover and sees that he is actually the god Eros. She falls in love with him instantly, but ... Like in many fairytales, she must be punished for her curiosity. Eros abandons her, and Psyche must ask Venus for help with finding him. Venus assigns four very difficult tasks to her, which she manages to complete thanks to some supernatural helpers (again, a very common element in fairy tales) sent by Eros himself. Eros actually helps Psyche with her last test, waking her from a deep sleep, a kind of coma, in which she had fallen.

ELENA: So a happy ending…

LUCIA: Yes, Eros and Psyche are reunited, they have a child called Voluptas, which means “pleasure”, and Psyche becomes immortal for marrying a god.

ELENA In the various archeological representations of Eros and Psyche we see not only the two characters but also the various elements of the story that Apuleius that you described, the separation, the tasks, and their final reunion. At the time of Apuleius, this story had truly become a metaphor for the soul’s tribulation on earth and eventual salvation and immortality. It is also a Gnostic myth, which we find in the Corpus Hermeticum: the soul is a female entity, having to wander and suffer before joining his male counterpart, the spirit, and become immortal. When we get to Plotinus, a Neo-platonic philosopher of the third-fourth century after Christ, we already see the consolidation of the story of Eros and Psyche into a philosophical myth: the human soul eventually becomes immortal by joining God in a mystical union that is symbolized by marriage. Now that we have talked about the sources of the myth of Eros and Psyche, let’s listen to Pascoli’s poem, to the first couple of stanzas.

ELENA:

In this part, we see a character that is not present in Apuleius’ tale: the god Pan.

LUCIA

Actually, Pan is not completely absent in Apuleius’ tale, but his function is limited: he’s just a minor, rustic god, half human half goat, who consoles Psyche with a paternal attitude when she is desperate at the loss of Eros. He’s just one of the supernatural helpers in the story. In Pascoli’s poem, Pan is not at all reassuring: he’s a wild creature, hairy, with two horns: he embodies the elements of nature (the wind, the rain) that threaten Psyche while she’s inside her mysterious house of clay. But he also expresses himself through music, an irresistibly sweet music that makes Psyche cry, thinking of Eros. This multifaceted representation of Eros is embedded in the philosophical culture of the nineteenth century – I’m thinking of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. He also represents music and poetry stemming from a closer, ancestral relationship with nature. This constellation of meanings makes Pan in Pascoli’s poem a co-protagonist, rather than a minor character, more important than Eros himself.

ELENA

Pascoli describes Psyche’s tests and tribulations in a very detailed manner. Let’s listen to a few more stanzas

I ELENA:

Lucia, how does Pascoli diverge from Apuleius?

LUCIA: Pascoli completely rewrites Psyche’s tasks. First, he reduces them to 3 (a symbolic number that recurs in fairy tales); then he shapes them to reflect the most important themes of his own poetry: nature and death. For the last two tasks, in fact, Psyche descends to the Underworld: Pascoli was fascinated by the literary theme of the Underworld, as he was also a scholar of Dante. Psyche’s Underworld is much less defined than Dante’s Inferno, as it is highly symbolic: it is a psychological experience, like the encounter with Eros. Psyche becomes paler and paler, bloodless and exhausted: a shadow with butterfly wings. And Eros is not here; it is Pan who sends the helpers; it is Pan inspiring Psyche with an attraction for the abyss: he inspires Psyche with the same feelings that she felt for Eros.

ELENA: The similarity between Eros and Death, which has inspired so much literature…. And the differences between Pascoli and Apuleius do not end here. What is notably different is the end of the story. While in almost all the sources, Psyche is reunited with Eros after her tribulations, in Pascoli she fails her tests and ... well, let's first listen to the last stanzas.

ELENA: Lucia, how do you interpret this finale?

LUCIA

Pascoli’s Psyche falls into the darkness and silences that both scared and attracted her. She overcomes the threshold between life and death ,and she comes back changed. She is wrapped in Pan’s arms, and she disappears from human sight. In the last stanzas, anxious voices ask about Psyche: where is she? And here, Pascoli seems to echo a passage from Plato’s dialogue Phaedon, where the same anxious question about the destiny of the human soul is asked. Pascoli’s theory about the soul’s immortality does not quite coincide with Plato’s, where the soul is different from the natural world and leaves it upon death. Pascoli seems to have incorporated some psychological theories of his time, which we may call preFreudian: the human soul is fully integrated with nature, just like the other forms of life in the world, and it even preserves the memory of past experiences of other living beings. The soul neither becomes immortal after death nor disappears, but it goes back to the universe to which it belongs. And in the last lines of the poem, we see that someone thinks of finding Psyche “in the flock” or in a lowly worm”. She is at one with Pan, or with Nature.

ELENA. In this fascinating conversation, we have gone from the story of Eros and Psyche as a metaphor for the soul’s immortality to Pascoli’s own version, where the soul returns to the universe. If we had more time, we could talk about how the myth of Eros and Psyche is reinterpreted in early Christianity, remembering that for Christians, it is not the soul that lives forever but the body that eventually resurrects, so this myth , when it appears on tombs, really shows how far Christianity became mixed with Platonism in the early centuries after Christ. But we do not have time, so I’m just wetting your appetite for this fascinating topic. Thank you Lucia for being with us today.

LUCIA: Thank you I will now let you enjoy the full story of Psyche’s tribulations in Pascoli’s poem. Thank you all for listening