Re-reading ...
PoTW said:
One possibility I'm still chewing over is that there were, in a sense, two sisters: the Orual who loved Psyche and truly wanted the best for her, and the Orual who was proud and wanted to jealously possess Psyche as her own. Both of these are expressions of natural love, or where natural love can end up without divine redemption.
I like this interpretation. Orual was, herself, both the sisters in the myth as it came to be passed down.
I am re-reading the book now, and enjoying it very much. What struck me particularly yesterday was when the priest came to the King to demand Psyche as a sacrifice to the gods. The Fox points out that his request is illogical because first the priest said they had to root out who was the Accursed, who had sinned against the gods and become cursed, and then ended by saying they had to give the gods the purest and the best. How could the sacrifice be, at one and the same time, Accursed and the purest? To the logical mind of the Fox, it didn't make sense, it had to be one or the other.
But when you look at the cross, Jesus was both the Accursed and the purest and best. It
doesn't make sense to the logical mind, but in the spirit realm, of course, it's not so black and white, Jesus can be both cursed and pure. Cursed for our sins, pure and sinless from His own life and actions. I don't know why I had never noticed this before in the story, but it really caught my attention this time around.
I think that this quality of being "beyond logic" is woven throughout the story, in large part through the contrast of the Fox and Bardia's disparate understandings of what has happened to Psyche. Orual comes to the conclusion that it doesn't matter which of their speculations is right, whether the Brute or a bandit has captured Psyche, it isn't to be borne. Orual herself is given the choice, and the encouragement, to believe Psyche's interpretation of it, that her lover is a god ... The true solution is neither the Fox's nor Bardia's. although it contains elements of both. When you move from the natural world, and even from the "superstitious" world, and into the realm of the gods, then "both and" becomes more possible than "either or." If you see what I mean?
I was also quite moved by Orual's glimpse of the castle on the banks of the stream in the early-morning twilight. For those moments, she saw what Psyche saw ... but she consciously chose to reject it, to make it an illusion rather than the reality it was ... Now and then I think we all get glimpses of heaven, feelings that the veil which separates this world from the next is quite thin, and if we allow ourselves to believe, we see we are
already there. But then this world crowds back into center stage, and the castle disappears.