Personification of Psyche
Nothing in the rest of this post is going to be as incredible as this YouTube gem of Nico reciting part of Edgar Allan Poe's "Ulalume" over clips of a film called Lucifer Rising starring Marianne Faithfull, so I figure I might as well just get this out here, and if you never read the rest of it your time will have at least been well spent to witness this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phoS1rtSTAA
The Pop Empire song "Psyche" takes its name from the direct address of Psyche at the beginning of the second verse, following the bridge—"Psyche walk beside me".
https://youtu.be/WdcvEex0Dsw?t=2m40s
The word "Psyche" is derived from an ancient Greek word ψυχή which was originally a substantive form of the verb "to blow"—psyche is "breath", and thus, "life", "soul", "spirit". The meaning of the word grew ultimately to encompass "the intangible self", "the conscious personality".
Personification of Psyche has precedents in the literary tradition dating back to classical antiquity. I am reminded first of all of the poem "Ulalume" by Edgar Allan Poe, written in 1847. "Ulalume" is driven forward by the repartee between the narrator and Psyche, his personified Soul.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174155
In February 1997 Jeff Buckley recorded a recitation of this poem in New York for the album Closed on Account of Rabies, a tribute to Poe featuring Marianne Faithfull, Christopher Walken, Iggy Pop and Dr. John among others. Not much more than three months later, after settling in Memphis to prepare his second studio album, Buckley went swimming in Wolf River Harbor on the Mississippi. He vanished very suddenly and on the seventh day his body was found in the Wolf River. The Poe tribute album had not yet been released—Closed on Account of Rabies was posthumously dedicated to Buckley, and it represents the last canonical recording from this very memorable artist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoLxQuOFlGY
This haunting turn of events is well matched to the character of the poem itself, which is exemplary of Poe's unique style. Poe himself considered "Ulalume" one of his best works, and the mixed critical opinion of the poem is reflective of divisions among people in their response to Poe more broadly—there are lovers and haters. Yet while the recitative, sing-song sonorities and rhythms, the grandiose and fantastical otherworldliness, and the trademark doom and gloom of may be well out of fashion, Poe managed in his own time and manages still in ours more than 150 years later to do something which exceedingly few learned poets or literary academics can pull off anymore, which is to strike a chord with millions of people, to give expression and a quickness to their inmost thoughts, to make them feel a little less alone in the midst of their loneliness.
Personification of Psyche is best known from and perhaps most developed in the story of Cupid and Psyche in the novel The Golden Ass by the Roman Berber Lucius Apuleius of Madaurus. It is a fascinating and entertaining allegorical myth of the best kind, which permits interpretation in numerous quite contradictory ways, both in and out of the context of the novel.
http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/cupid.html [abridged]
Poe's "Ulalume" references Astarte (a Hellenic name), and Apuleius' novel concludes with the power of the goddess Isis (an Egyptian name) turning the narrator Lucius from an ass back into a human. These divinities are closely associated and often conflated, being understood as alternative names or aspects of the Middle Eastern goddess of love, fertility, sex and war.