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This book is in two parts: the first half contains the story of Amor and Psyche told by Apuleius in The Golden Ass, the second half a commentary on the story by Erich Neumann who takes it as a myth of “The Psychic Development of the Feminine”.
The story, which is given in Butler's translation, is as enchanting to modern readers as it probably was to those for whom Apuleius wrote nearly 2,000 years ago. It was not—as Neumann tells us in a most interesting postcript—the invention of Apuleius, but was an elaboration of a much earlier tale, with comparable motifs in Egyptian mythology where Psyche was a goddess who gave the universe movement and animation, with a partner who was an omniscient dragon monster. “One day when Hermes leads her,” says the text, “she will bring it joy.” Eros in the same Egyptian magic papyrus is depicted as a boy and a living god and was called “dweller in the palace of the heart's desire and lord of the beautiful couch”. There is also a Gnostic myth in which Psyche is abducted by the prince of darkness, to be finally redeemed by the pleromatic supreme godhead; and there is an ancient Greek folk-tale showing close parallels to the Psyche story.
Eros is believed by some scholars to be a successor to the young pre-Hellenic Cretan god corresponding to Attis and Adonis, which links him with the matriarchal stratum of Mediterranean culture; he also appears in Plato's Symposium where he is introduced by Diotima, who is a priestess of feminine mysteries. These mysteries are interpreted by Kerényi in his “Great Daemon of the Symposium” and their work is “to engender and bear in the beautiful”. to bear “a mysterious child who impregnates the body as well as the soul by his presence”, and finally “the re-birth of the initiate as a divine being”. All these are in their varying ways close parallels to Apuleius' story so that there is plenty of evidence to support Neumann's claim that Amor and Psyche is not merely an allegory but a myth, the story of “an ini