Love is in the air I

Love is a simple word but it really hard to define. It come in more forms like sexual love, friendship, family love for example. Let talk about true love. People uses the term soul-mate and today we talk about Goddess Psyche and her story. Psyche was not a "natural-born" goddess; she was a "marry up" goddess. She had problems like regular married couple have mother-in-law from hell, jealous siblings and a husband was a mama boy. Psyche's story begins as a fairy tale.

Once upon a time there was a king with three daughters. They were all beautiful, but by far the most beautiful was the youngest, Psyche. She was so beautiful that people began to neglect the worship of Venus, the Goddess of love and beauty. Venus was pissed, and asked her son Cupid to make Psyche fall in love with a horrible monster. When he saw how beautiful she was, Cupid dropped the arrow meant for her and pricked him, and fell in love with her.
Despite her great beauty no-one wanted to marry Psyche. Her parents consulted an oracle, and were told that Cupid himself told him to say that Psyche be dressed in deepest mourning and placed on the summit of a mountain to be taken away by a winged serpent, stronger than the gods themselves, to make his wife.
They were to take her to the top of a mountain and leave her there. Zephyrus, the west wind, took her and wafted her away to a palace, where she was waited on by invisible servants. When night came her new husband visited her, and told her that he would always visit her by night and she must never try to see him. Paranoid that his mother is going punish him and Psyche.
Although her invisible husband was kind and gentle with her, and the invisible servants attended to her every desire, Psyche grew homesick. She persuaded her husband to allow her sisters to visit her. When they saw how she lived they became very jealous and talked Psyche into peeking at her husband, saying that he was a monster who was fattening her up to be eaten and that her only chance of safety was to kill him. Psyche took a lamp and a knife, but when she saw her beautiful husband, Cupid, she was so surprised she dripped some hot wax onto his shoulder, waking him. He took in the situation at a glance and immediately left Psyche and the magnificent palace she had been living in disappeared in a puff of smoke.
First, Psyche was to spend the night in a room filled with assorted grains and to have them all sorted and bagged by daybreak. Realizing the enormity of the task, Psyche huddled in the corner weeping, when an army of ants took pity on her and came to her aid, getting the job done for her well in advance of the deadline.
 Next Psyche was ordered to bring back the Golden Fleece belonging to a fearsome ram that had already killed several heroes who had tried to acquire his fleece. Terrified that she too would be crushed, Psyche took the advice of a nearby reed that whispered to her to wait until nightfall when the ram slept before entering the field and to gather the fleece that had fallen off the ram and clung to the branches of the blackthorn trees.
 For her third task, Aphrodite gave Psyche a crystal jar and demanded her return with water taken from a waterfall positioned on a high cliff on the River Styx, the entrance to the underworld. In the depths of despair when she arrived and saw the tremendous danger involved, Psyche was amazed when an eagle, circling above her, swept down for the jar and flew off to the waterfall to fill it for her.
The future goddess Psyche's last and most frightening challenge was to descend into the underworld, the kingdom of the dead, and to return with a box of sleeping potion from Persephone, the Queen of the Underworld, all the while ignoring the pleas for help from all the unfortunate that she encountered. This task was her longest and hardest: she succeeded, but Psyche was so exhausted by the effort that she took some of the potion for herself. Finding Psyche in a deep sleep and unable to rouse her, Eros rubbed the potion from her eyes and returned it to the box which he sent on to his mother.
 At last Cupid found out what was going on, and he persuaded Jupiter to order Venus to stop her persecution of Psyche. Then they were married and lived happily ever after - and it really was ever after since Psyche was made a goddess.
The story show that the path to true love is never easy.

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