You Also Are Psyche: Beauty and the Shadow Self
I was a teenager the first time crop tops and low-rise baggy jeans were cool. In my eyes, everyone in my school was a clone of Brittney Spears, and I felt like a hideous beast. Because I couldn’t go around with a bag over my head, I did my best to hide behind books.
One of those books was Till We Have Faces by CS Lewis. It is a retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche from the perspective of Psyche’s sister Orual. Orual was angry and bitter, and she was actually allowed to wear a veil to hide her face. Best of all, since she was a queen, there was no one to tell her not to write an entire book about it.
Till We Have Faces was the perfect medicine for that time in my life. I drank up Orual’s bitterness like illicit beer. I reveled in her self-righteous anger.
Her life was unfair. And she was allowed to file a complaint with the gods!
As she prepared to present her argument, I cackled with glee, convinced that the gods would see the rightness of her cause and... I wasn’t sure what I wanted them to do, exactly. Just the possibility that Orual might be right was enough.
Spoiler alert.
Orual doesn’t get what she wants, exactly, but she does get what she needs. After she is allowed to repeat her rant at the gods over and over again, she realizes that “the complaint was the answer.” She is not actually the righteous victim. The story (and her involvement in it) was more complicated, and she was (unknowingly) complicit in her sister’s suffering. Then she is taken to receive judgement from Eros. Reunited with Psyche, they look into a reflecting pool together, and she sees identical reflections.
“You also are Psyche,” the god says, and that is his judgement.
Orual receives, not mercy exactly, but a lesson in the interconnectedness of all things. She learns that gods and people “flow in and out of each other,” and, so, justice cannot assign blame to a single individual. The ugly sister and Psyche and Venus are one, and their beauty and ugliness and suffering are experienced by each other in the same way a body feels the pain of its hand or foot.
Psyche as the Shadow
As an adult, I have come to realize that Lewis’s version of Cupid and Psyche is about the paradoxical nature of the shadow. When we say “shadow,” we usually mean something ugly or wicked, but the shadow is anything about ourselves we can’t accept.
The difficulty I had with fashion as a teenager was just an outward manifestation of my inward struggle to see myself in my entirety. For whatever reason, it was (and continues to be) easier for me to admit my faults than participate in beauty. Attempts to put my “best foot forward” and present myself “in the best light” feel disingenuous. Like Orual, I am happy to show off my intelligence, but wearing makeup and fancy clothes and sitting in front of a camera feels fundamentally wrong.
It can be more difficult to accept the beautiful in us as it is to accept the ugly, and I get a lot of support from the spiritual community for my position on beauty. In a landscape rendered flawless by filters and Photoshopping and AI, refusing to participate in the beauty game seems humble and honest, but my motivations are anything but honest.
“If I can’t play the game well,” I say to myself, “I’m not going to play at all.”
For me, hiding from the camera is a subtle way of engaging in spiritual bypassing and, in the process, supporting the position that “only the beautiful deserves to show up” that I claim to stand against.
The Astrology of Psyche (Or, You Are Psyche, Too)
“You also are Psyche” is true in a mythical sense, but it is also true in a more literal sense. There is an asteroid named Psyche, which means the Goddess of the Beauty of the Soul appears somewhere in everyone’s chart.
In my chart, Psyche appears in my 10th house, close to my Midheaven, which means that my relationship with the myth of Psyche is an aspect of my soul that is a highly visible part of my personality--visible even to people who don’t know me personally. Psyche is close to my Mercury, giving me a “way with words” and making it easy for me to own the mercurial side of my nature, but Psyche is “close but not close enough” to my sun and Venus making it difficult for me to identify (sun) with Psyche and see her beauty (Venus) in myself.
Being able to see the astrology of a favorite story playing out in my life has helped me to begin the life-long journey of hiking to Psyche’s reflecting pool and seeing her face in mine, and I would like to help you, too.
If you’d like to learn more about asteroid Psyche in your chart, check out my workshop on Cupid and Psyche, or let’s chat over tea!
