Saintly Sunday... or not.

I got up today, with the sole intention of writing a blog all about St. Valentine, only to read on Wikipedia how depressingly uninteresting he is. Or, they are. There are actually 14 st. Valentines, all martyrs who died in Roman times for their "valor" which is what Valentine means. So really, they were a bunch of dudes who no one actually knew their name, and thought they were full of valor, so they called them Valentine.

So interesting.

But, there is always Cupid.

Cupid is the son of Venus and her lover Mars. Venus's husband was actually Vulcan who was deformed and lived in a Volcano, and Venus was rather... self centered and she didn't like that much, but she got along with Mars great, because he was powerful and attractive.

Anyways someone fathered Cupid. And, Cupid was a big trouble maker from the start. He was always making Zeus and Apollo fall in love with people, and they hated him for it, until Cupid fell in love himself...

The story begins with Apollo sleeping with a chick, probably because Cupid made him do it... and they had a beautiful daughter psyche. And she was the Venus on earth, and Venus didn't like that. She got really upset, so she told Cupid to make her fall in love with a beast.

Well, Cupid took pity on her and was like, awe... and didn't make her fall in love with a beast, and instead vowed to marry her.

Psyche's parents (her real ones, not Apollo) heard a rumor that she was going to marry a beast, and so they freaked out and told her to go hang out on the top of a cliff:

And so, Cupid sent a Zephyr to get her, and bring her to his house where she was attended on by mysterious invisible servants and only saw him at night.

Her sisters came and visited her and told her she should look at Cupid, even though he told her not to, to see if he was really and icky monster. And Psyche believed her sisters, because she was scared he was really a monster, and no girl really wants to sleep with a monster.

And so she lit a lamp one night, woke him up with the hot oil, and poked herself with his arrow all in the same moment. And he was like, "Shit Psyche, I told you not to. Now we can never be together. Mother was right."

So he runs away to mommy, and Psyche searches the world for him, asking different gods, until finally she goes to Venus and has to undertake these three ridiculous tasks in which Ants, gods, and cupid himself took pity on her and helped her.

And finally Cupid comes to her and says he loves her to, and begs Zeus to let him marry her in a godly fashion. And Zeus is like, Pha, you make me deal with all of these women and fall in love with them, than I guess its time for you to be miserable. And Venus was like "NOOOOOO! I will not have my son marry a mortal!"
And Zeus said "Ha! I will make her a god then!"

And everyone was happy in the end.

And thus is the story of Cupid and Psyche (Illustrated by a Cassone panel by the Master of the Argonauts).

Oh, And Psyche's sisters through themselves off the cliff thinking that Cupid would marry them instead. They died.