Author's Note

The story of Cupid and Psyche is found in a book called The Transformation of Lucius Apuleius of Madaura, a book we know today as The Golden Ass.

Lucius Apuleius lived between 123 and 180 CE. Born in what is now Algeria as the son of a wealthy provincial magistrate, Apuleius was educated in Carthage, Greece, and Rome. He married Pudentila, a wealthy woman, but was accused by her family of using magic to seduce her. In 158, Apuleius was put on trial, defended himself, and was acquitted.

The Golden Ass is the only novel in Latin to have survived antiquity. The most famous story in it is "Cupid and Psyche," which is one of the enduring tales of Western civilization. It is a story I first encountered through my interest in the psychology of Carl Jung. In Jungian psychology the tale is considered an important metaphorical delineation of the archetypal psychology of women. (See Robert Johnson's She: Understanding Feminine Psychology and Marie-Luise von Franz's Golden Ass of Apuleius: The Liberation of the Feminine in Man.)

My original idea for retelling the story of Cupid and Psyche was to do a book of seventy-five or so pages in which I would basically retell the story, but in the voice of a Southern black storyteller. However, as so often happens, when I started writing, I found myself bothered by what I considered to be gaps in the story, especially the large one in which Cupid simply vanishes from most of the story only to miraculously reappear to save Psyche. So I began researching Greek and Roman mythology and found all kinds of wonderful lesser deities, like Oizys the goddess of pain, Favonius the West Wind, Aeolus the keeper of the winds, and others. Because it was not my intent to faithfully retell Aupelius's story, I have taken deities and figures from both Greek and Roman mythology. I have also brought together all the stories about Cupid (or Eros).
What began as a projected seventy-five-page book became what you have here. I had much fun researching and writing this book, as it became a book I wished I had had during the frightening and difficult years of my own adolescence when I first encountered the mysteries of girls, love, and myself.

The experience of love is the most central and profound of our lives. Yet we are given no instruction in the ways of love. Popular music and movies are our primary sources for what we think love is and should be, and as entertaining as these media are, the views of love they present are more often expressions of sentimentality instead of representations of the very hard realities of what it means to be human and what the act of loving presents us with.
I ended up writing a book in which I shared something of what I've learned over these seven decades through marriages and many wonderful love affairs. Which is not to say that everything the narrator says is autobiographical. The narrator's voice is mine, and then again, it isn't. Some of the opinions he expresses are mine, and some are very definitely his.

I am deeply grateful to Michael Joseph, the moderator of the Child_Lit Internet group of critical theory in children's literature. Michael is a librarian at Rutgers University. As a visiting instructor there, he has taught the tale of Cupid and Psyche—and he knows it and the critical literature surrounding it far better than I. The e-mail conversations we shared were extremely helpful, and he was gracious enough to agree to read the manuscript. His careful reading and insights were invaluable.

I also want to thank Betsy Hearne, professor of library and information services at the University of Illinois, for helping me think through an important element of the story. I came across a reference (I don't recall where now) that said in some versions of the Cupid and Psyche story, the smoke from the box she receives from Proserpine turns her black. I toyed with the idea of making this part of my retelling. Though neither Betsy nor Michael expressed an opinion on my doing this, after exchanging e-mails with them, I decided that doing so would change the focus of the story. But I am still tantalized by the notion of the god of love marrying a black Psyche.

Finally, and as always, I am grateful to the one with whom I have shared so much love for a decade and a half now, my wife, Milan Sabatini. Since 1991 she has been the first person to read my manuscripts, and all of them, including this one, have been improved enormously by her attention to details.

Julius Lester
Belchertown, Massachusetts

Chapter end