The provenance file on Psychḗ
Provenance record 402 · Psychḗ · one temple, fully accounted for.
Provenance
1. The attestation. Ψυχή — "Soul, breath". On record: Apuleius, Metamorphoses (The Golden Ass) 4.28–6.24 — the tale of Cupid and Psyche, Homer, Odyssey 11.488–491; Iliad 22.362–363 — the psyche as shade and life-breath, Plato, Phaedrus 246a–254e; Aristotle, De Anima — the soul as charioteer and as form of the living body, Beekes, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, s.v. ψυχή.
2. The narrative record. The Breath That Leaves — In the earliest Greek, psyche is not a person but an event: the breath that leaves the body at death. When Odysseus meets the shade of Achilles in Hades and congratulates him on ruling the dead, the hero answers that he would rather live on earth as a landless serf than rule down here — and the word for that grieving shade is psyche (Homer, Odyssey 11. The Oracle of the Mountain — In Apuleius's romance a king with three daughters has a problem: the youngest, Psyche, is so beautiful that Venus's temples are abandoned for her, and no suitor dares approach. The oracle of Milesian Apollo gives a monstrous answer: expose the girl on a mountain crag to wed a dire, fierce, serpent-like evil (Apuleius, Metamorphoses 4.
3. The physical record. No cult of Psyche is attested in the Greek world — she was worshipped in story before she was worshipped anywhere — but her image is common in Roman art: engraved gems and finger rings showing the butterfly-winged girl; frescoes of the tale's episodes; sarcophagus reliefs of Cupid and Psyche embracing, a favorite consolation image for the dead; and a Roman sculptural group of the winged pair in the Capitoline collections. The earliest certain reception is textual: within a century of Apuleius (c. 160s CE), the tale was famous across the empire. Her grandest shrines are later still — Raphael's Loggia di Psiche in Rome's Villa Farnesina (1517–1518) and Canova's Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss (1787–1793, Louvre and Hermitage). A goddess with no temple in antiquity built the finest ones of the Renaissance.
4. The current holding. The temple at /psyche/, classified Tier 1. The restoration preserves more than the ASCII form can express — stress, length, or a letter the Latin keyboard lost — which places it, mechanically, in Tier-1.
5. The documented resonances. Mental Health & Emotional Wellness, Mythic Name Restoration, Beauty, Fashion & Cosmetics — seats argued and weighted in the pattern atlas, read through the myths in this temple's Resonance File.
6. The primary sources. Theogony, Homeric Hymns, Works and Days — the library this file answers to, open at the Sacred Texts collection.
7. The continuing record. Psychḗ is one of the great donors to the world's vocabulary: psyche, psychic, psychology, psychiatry, psychedelic, psychosomatic — all borrow her name for the mind's phenomena. In art she had a second life unmatched by any Greek heroine: Roman frescoes, engraved gems, and sarcophagi of the butterfly-winged girl; Raphael's Farnesina loggia; Canova's Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss (1787–1793); Keats's 'Ode to Psyche' (1819), the first of his great odes, which apologizes for arriving late at her worship — she had, he said, no temple, choir, or oracle, so he would build them in verse.
At a Glance
- Restored name: Psychḗ
- ASCII form: psyche
- Meaning: "Soul, breath"
- Domain of influence: Soul, Breath, Life
- Pantheon: Greek
- Classification: Tier 1
- Original script: Ψυχή
- Series: The Restoration Files, No. 402 of 548
The File Continues
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