“I am the secret clear stream running beneath the surface of the earth and you are
my constant dream, love of my soul running with me beneath the surface of the earth.
We are Eros and Psyche.”
Today we’ll dive into the spiritual worlds of asteroids Eros, meaning desire, and Psyche, meaning soul or breath of life, and the wisdom they may hold for us to reflect upon and raise from our inner wells of awareness.
To see their position in your natal chart, you may find Eros as asteroid number 433 and Psyche as asteroid number 16. To understand them deeper, let us first understand their story. It’s a story of love, a story of trust, a story of fate. It’s a story of purification and spiritual growth. Fire is a dance, ice is the prayer. Let’s begin.
In the Greek myth of Eros and Psyche, also known as Cupid and Psyche in Roman mythology, Psyche was a beautiful mortal girl with constant suitors desiring to marry her. Her beauty was ethereal, and naturally, Eros, the god of desire and son of Aphrodite, fell deeply in love with her. So deeply in love he fell, that he wrapped a mystical veil around Psyche, so that suddenly no more suitors came to ask for her hand in marriage.
When the suitors magically stopped and there were no prospects of their daughter marrying, Psyche’s parents felt discouraged and frustrated, and went to seek the guidance of an oracle whether their daughter would ever marry.
The oracle spoke,
“She is destined to marry. Her husband will be found on the top of a cliff, though he is a fierce winged serpent!”
The parents protested this creepy prediction, but Psyche left the house and climbed the mountain bravely to meet her destiny. There, on the top of the cliff, the gentle warm breeze Zaphyr carried her to a beautiful palace where she was tended to and cared for like a most beloved queen.
Each night an unseen lover in human shape would join her in bedroom. Psyche didn’t know it but this was Eros who disguised himself as the winged serpent, so that his mother wouldn’t find out that he disobeyed her orders not to marry Psyche.
Eventually though, Psyche grew homesick and invited her sisters in the palace. The sisters became jealous of all the wealth and abundance of Psyche and no matter how much she told them that the winged serpent treated her in the kindest way possible, they convinced her that he was probably a ugly monster, so she must see his face.
That night, shaken and doubtful by her sisters’ words, Psyche lit an oil lamp to see her beloved’s face while he was sleeping – and what she found was a most beautiful man in her bed. But when an oil drop fell on him, Eros woke up in horror, crying out, “My love, why did you do this? Were your sisters’ advice more important than trusting me and the love I show you? Now you’ll never see me again.”
At this moment the gods intervened, and the palace, along with Eros, all disappeared. This set off Psyche on a set of long adventures until she finally found Aphrodite, Eros’ mother, and humbled herself in front of her. Aphrodite gave her a set of four tasks to complete, each seemingly impossible. The final task required Psyche to descend into Hades and retrieve a box of beauty.
Through the process of meeting the challenges of her tasks and integrating her experiences, Psyche grew from a young girl to a mature woman. After the completion of the tasks, Aphrodite blessed Psyche to become an immortal goddess, as well as gave her blessing for her son Eros to marry his eternal beloved Psyche. Of their union of love, a baby girl was born, whom they named Pleasure.
Eros and Psyche, Breathe Life into the Desires of your Soul
The beautiful story of Eros and Psyche is one of true love, deep love. As any other eternal love story, there is romance and passion, Eros is the god of desire and love after all, but there is also depth and spiritual meaning.
It is a story of fate, faith, trust, soul connection, purification and redemption despite loss and separation. Eros, meaning desire, and Psyche, meaning soul or breath of life, remind us through their union to breathe life into the desires of our soul.
Their story is one where body meets soul for the purified true love to become capable of transcending time and space. It is a reminder of the importance of trust and self-love first in order to raise our vibration to be resonance with such higher consciousness, so that the divine is experienced through our physical body. It also reminds us that it takes two to make a relationship work.
Truth and trust are vital for building the foundations of love; and both partners must be honest about their selves from the start. And always, like in the other tales of both real life and fantasy, we need to walk a patience of rhythm – for patience is the mark of truest love; patience opens the soul of matter.
The love story of Eros and Psyche reminds us to fight for love, to fight for what we feel and trust it even when we can’t see it, to stay true to our values and hearts and do things because of how we truly feel and not because of some validation or from a space of emptiness and desperation. We are also reminded to nourish love once we get it and to never ever get lazy with love. Their story reminds us that love really does conquer all – if we let it and follow its path.
We see through what we feel.
In some paintings Eros wears a blindfold, while Psyche herself was in a dark room. We need to learn to see through what we feel. Learn to trust yourself in the dark. Learn to know how you feel in the dark. To follow the path of love is to go beyond the ego, and to go deeper – to go deeper in intention and courage to dissolve some of the pre-conditioning of this world.
It is about shifting our eyes inward and seeking to develop spiritually, to invest in our inner growth, and to mature emotionally. Healthy true love relationships cannot be formed nor sustained long term without maturity and self awareness. To meet your soulmate, you must first meet your soul, your true self. True love can only happen with clear seeing, of both seeing and of being clearly seen, not of flesh but through the flesh.
Eros and Psyche in your Natal Chart
In your natal chart, Eros is the part of you where desire pulls you and desire stirs you into movement and aliveness. Eros is a mysticism that makes us feel alive. To the ancient mystics, eroticism wasn’t about anything flesh-based or physical, it was closely linked to mysticism. Because both mysticism and eroticism are spaces we enter through the dissolution of the known and rational, through the dissolution of the boundaries or limitations.
It’s a space of exploration, aliveness, awe. A willingness not to know; a vow to unknow and to unlearn, so that we free our inner world of boundaries and begin the real knowing. We empty ourselves of the shoulds, the conditioning, the judgments, the opinions, the biases, the everything – and we make space for life itself to mold us, shape us, move through us.
So in your natal chart, Eros isn’t just a point of feeling desire, or in synastry with someone creating a powerful sexual attraction, it is more than that. Eros is where you seek to feel alive, because you seek to dissolve the boundaries and enter the wild unknown lands. If it is in Sagittarius, you feel desirous and alive through freedom, through learning, through distant travel, through spirituality, through channeling your deep bodily desires into something beyond flesh – into something which you can’t even necessarily hold with hands.
Eros in your chart is where you yourself will cross the lines and borders that separate you and limit you, and you will fight for that thing, that person, that feeling, that desire. Because you become the desire itself. Eros is where you are the desire – not just where a desire outside of you desires you. Desire has become you.
Psyche is where you feel a pull from the depths of your soul, and where you are willing to shed the outer skins of identities, masks and pre-conditioning because you will a higher calling, a soul responsibility or even a soul vow towards. In some cases, it may also show one of the desires for this incarnation.
If in your 11th house for example, you may have been seeking through this breathe of life and physical incarnation, to experience the realization of your higher goals and dreams, and make a contribution to humanity, while also destined to received the recognition you deserve for your work. It may also bring you harmonious relationships.
Or if in the sign of Aquarius for example, you may feel a deep connection to humanity, to solving problems that aren’t even into the awareness of most people. You are connected to a cosmic fountain pouring wisdoms from times before times beyond times. Dreams are higher, inspirations are higher, visions are higher.
With this Aquarius Psyche, you may see the distant future, and you may seek to help pave the path for a better world. Your words and ways of seeing or perspectives may even suddenly wake up people to some awareness. Your presence may wake them up, snap them out of some fixed pattern. You see the god hidden in the swan. You see how god is sometimes the wax or the candle flame, or the moth inside the flame; how god is sometimes an iceberg holding a world of silence, and sometimes a grain of sand holding us the ocean.
In synastry, if your Eros is conjunct the other person’s natal Sun, Moon, or Venus or Mars, it can create a powerful physical, sexual, emotional and spiritual attraction and desire; or a connection which may serve to open up within you a newfound of freedom and aliveness.
And with Psyche in synastry conjunct the other person’s natal Sun, Moon, or Venus or Mars, it can create an intuitive link or soul connection as well, or a feeling of deep belonging, or as if it’s something or someone you feel responsible towards, calling you towards greater maturity.
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Cover art is Cupid and Psyche by Friedrich Paul Thumann, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
