Hedone- Greek SpiritSpirit"Personification of Pleasure"

Birth from Love and the Soul

Apuleius tells the story. Aphrodite, jealous of the mortal Psyche's beauty, sent her own son Eros to make Psyche fall in love with something vile — but Eros pricked himself with his own arrow and fell in love with her instead. He visited her only in darkness and forbade her to look at him. When her sisters planted doubt, Psyche lit an oil lamp while Eros slept and saw a god in her bed. A drop of burning oil fell on his shoulder. He woke, said nothing she could hold him by, and flew back to his mother's house. Psyche wandered the earth looking for him.

She came at last to Aphrodite's door, and the goddess set her tasks designed to kill. Psyche was to fetch golden wool from sheep maddened by the sun, and to descend alive into the Underworld and bring back a casket of Persephone's beauty. She survived them all, though the casket nearly finished her — curiosity drove her to open it on the way back, and she collapsed into a deathlike sleep on the road. Eros found her there, wiped the sleep from her eyes, and carried the casket to his mother himself.

Zeus intervened. He gave Psyche a cup of ambrosia, made her immortal, and wed her to Eros at a feast on Olympus where Apollo played the lyre. From this marriage came a daughter: Voluptas in Apuleius's Latin, Hedone in Greek — Pleasure herself.

A Name Without a Story

No myth casts Hedone as a protagonist in her own right. She has no adventures, no cult, no epithets beyond her name. Cicero lists her among divine personifications in his catalog of gods, and Hyginus records her parentage without adding a single story. She exists at the conclusion of someone else's tale, born only after every trial is survived. Her name is the Greek word for pleasure, and the root of "hedonism."