Domain: Desire, love, attraction, procreation Symbol: The bow and arrows, wings, the torch, the blindfold Roman Equivalent: Cupid (Amor)
Overview
Eros is the god of desire — and one of the oldest and strangest figures in Greek myth, because he is told two ways at once. In the primordial account he is one of the first beings to emerge from Chaos, the raw force of attraction that draws all things together and without which nothing could couple or be born; even the gods come after him and because of him. In the later, more familiar story he is the winged boy, son of Aphrodite, who fires arrows that make gods and mortals fall helplessly in love. Both are true to what he is: the power that pulls one thing toward another, whether that power built the cosmos or just wrecked a heart.
He is beautiful, capricious, and impossible to refuse. Even Zeus is not safe from his arrows. Desire, in the Greek reckoning, is not something you decide — it is something that happens to you, and Eros is its face.
Key Myths
The first mover. In the oldest cosmogonies Eros springs from Chaos alongside Gaia and comes before the generations of gods — the attractive force that lets the primal beings join and multiply. Everything that follows, every union and lineage in the whole of myth, unfolds downstream of him.
Eros and Psyche. The great love story: Eros, sent by a jealous Aphrodite to ruin a mortal woman named Psyche, falls for her instead and takes her as his secret bride, forbidding her to look on him. When curiosity makes her light a lamp and gaze at his sleeping face, she loses him — and must labor through a series of impossible trials, even a descent to the underworld, to win him back. In the end she is made immortal and the two are wed among the gods. It is myth's clearest statement that love and the soul must pass through loss and trial to truly hold each other.
The two arrows. Eros carries arrows of two kinds — gold to kindle love, lead to kill it. With them he struck Apollo with desire for the nymph Daphne and struck Daphne with revulsion for Apollo, driving the chase that ended in her becoming a laurel tree. The lesson is that desire and its refusal come from the same small, careless hand.
Related
- The Lovers — The Major Arcana card of his domain: attraction, union, the pull between two into one
- Aphrodite — His mother; the goddess of love he serves and torments
- Gaia — The primordial power he emerges beside from Chaos
- Tarot
- Mythology
- Greek Mythology Index