Preserved most completely in Apuleius's 2nd-century Latin novel The Golden Ass, the story of Psyche is one of the few ancient myths to survive as a full, continuous narrative rather than scattered fragments — and its heroine's very name gives away exactly what the whole story has always been understood to be about.
Psyche's beauty was so extraordinary that people began worshipping her instead of Venus — enraging the goddess, who sent her son Cupid to make Psyche fall in love with something monstrous as punishment. Cupid instead fell in love with her himself, arranging for her to be brought to a magnificent hidden palace where he visited her only at night, on the single condition that she never look at him.
Convinced by jealous sisters that her unseen husband must be a monster, Psyche approaches him one night with an oil lamp — discovering instead the god of love himself, astonishingly beautiful. A drop of hot oil wakes and wounds him, and he flees, devastated by her broken trust.
Cupid, recovered from his wound and still in love, finds Psyche in her deathlike sleep, revives her, and successfully pleads with Jupiter to allow their marriage. Jupiter grants it — and makes Psyche immortal, formally welcoming a mortal woman into the ranks of the gods. Their daughter is named Voluptas ("Pleasure"), a fitting child born from the union of Love and the Soul.
The name says it all: Psyche (ψυχή) is the Greek word for "soul" or "breath" — and since antiquity, this myth has been read allegorically as the Soul's own trial-by-suffering, purified through hardship, ultimately achieving union with Love itself and, through that union, immortality. This reading proved enormously influential in later Neoplatonic philosophy and Christian allegorical tradition.
C.S. Lewis's 1956 novel Till We Have Faces — often considered among his most sophisticated work — retells the myth from the perspective of Psyche's embittered elder sister, exploring jealousy and the genuine difficulty of understanding divine motives from a purely human vantage point.