Eros and Psyche

Psyche, the youngest of a king's three daughters, is so beautiful that people begin traveling to admire her instead of worshipping Aphrodite, leaving the goddess's own altars neglected. Furious, Aphrodite sends Eros (Apuleius, writing in Latin, calls them Venus and Cupid) to make Psyche fall in love with the vilest man alive. An oracle, consulted separately by Psyche's father about why none of his daughters can find a husband, instead delivers a curse of its own: Psyche is fated to marry a monster no god can withstand, and must be left exposed on a mountain crag dressed for a funeral rather than a wedding. Her family carries out the oracle's order and abandons her there.

The West Wind carries Psyche gently down from the crag instead of leaving her to a monster, setting her in a hidden valley before a palace built by no human hands. Invisible servants attend to her every want, and each night an unseen husband comes to her bed, leaving before dawn and forbidding her, above everything else, from ever trying to see his face. Psyche is content until her two jealous sisters, brought to visit by the same wind, convince her that her husband must be the very monster the oracle described, and that she needs to kill him before he can devour her. That night, Psyche brings a lamp and a knife to bed, ready to strike - and instead finds Eros himself asleep beside her, the most beautiful being she has ever seen. Trembling, she leans in too close; a drop of hot oil falls from the lamp and burns him awake. Eros flees, telling her only that love cannot live where there is no trust.

Psyche searches the world for him and eventually falls into Aphrodite's hands directly, who sets her four tasks meant to be impossible. She must sort an enormous mixed heap of grains before nightfall (an army of ants, moved to pity, do it for her); gather wool from golden sheep vicious enough to kill (a river reed advises her to collect the wool caught in nearby brambles instead of approaching the sheep); fill a crystal jar with water from a Stygian stream guarded by dragons on an unclimbable cliff (Zeus's own eagle carries the jar up and back for her); and finally travel to the underworld itself to bring back a portion of Persephone's beauty sealed in a box, with strict instructions from a talking tower not to open it along the way.

Psyche completes every task the same way: by receiving help she has not earned on her own. But she fails the final instruction on her own initiative, opening the box out of curiosity once she is almost home, hoping to use a little of the beauty herself - and falls instantly into a deathlike sleep, undone by a smoke without color that the box actually held. Eros, healed and free of his mother's confinement, finds her, wakes her with a harmless prick of his own arrow, and pleads directly with Zeus for their marriage. Zeus grants it and has Psyche brought to Olympus and given ambrosia to drink, making her immortal in her own right rather than only by marriage. The gods attend the wedding Aphrodite herself could not prevent, and the couple's daughter is named Voluptas - Pleasure.