Comparison of "Til We Have Faces" and "The Go
Comparison of "Til We Have Faces" and "The Golden Ass"
Recently I have had the pleasure of reading “Till We Have Faces” by C. S. Lewis and “The Golden Ass” by Apuleius. Both are accounts of the myth of the marriage of Cupid and Psyche. Since they are in essence the same story, there are of course many things similar in both stories. However, since both stories were written in such different time periods by such different authors, there are also many differences. In this essay I will present and discuss both these similarities and differences.
The stories both begin in the same manner. A king has three daughters of whom the youngest is so beautiful that men worship her as a goddess and neglect the worship of Aphrodite for her sake. This results in consequences that are different in each account. The king consults the oracle of Apollo for guidance and is told that Psyche, as the daughter is called, is destined to be the bride of a God or a beast of the Gods and should be taken to the mountaintop and left there. The king does as he is advised.
But Aphrodite is jealous of Psyche’s beauty, and has ordered her son, Cupid, to afflict the girl with love for the vilest and most disgusting of men. Cupid sets off to do so, but upon seeing Psyche falls in love with her himself. He has the West wind carry her to a secret place where he has prepared a beautiful palace. He visits her only at night, and forbids her to see his face. In both versions Psyche is visited by her sisters (one or both, depending on the story). She tells her sister/s about her husband, and how he only visits her at night.
They convince Psyche that her husband must be hiding something from her. The sisters tell her that she should take a lamp into the bedroom and night, and bring it out when her lover falls asleep to see what he is hiding. She follows this advice, but when she brings it out a drop of hot oil falls from her lamp and burns her husband on the shoulder, waking him. He wakes, and is so angry with his wife that he decides to banish her from the valley. ...