Ovid’s interest in erotic psychology led him to the pattern of the inaccessible object of male desire, seen in the myths of Apollo and Daphne, Pan and Syrinx, Jove and Io, Atalanta and Hippomenes, Tereus and Philomela. Men’s irrational yearning and sometimes misogynist anger over the lost feminine, which was originally the mother.

For us, Ovid is still relevant for his exploration of the psychology of love. The non-Ovidian story of Oedipus reflects the unconscious longing for the mother, but Ovid explores how other mythological males pursue inaccessible feminine objects of desire. Apollo and Daphne.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses is organized in 3 ways: (1) thematically, according to the theme of metamorphosis, or change; (2) chronologically, from Creation to Ovid’s own time; (3) psychologically, according to a typology of human desire, based on the paradigm of the inaccessible object.

The Fall interpreted psychologically was the shattering of the unity of all things, in which the subject or self is alienated from a whole objective environment. This leads to two fallen attitudes: fear and hate, resulting in aggression; and desire to pursue and reunite. Ovid: the poet of fallen desire, the Bad Boy of the Classical tradition.

The forbidden tree in Genesis is identified with Christ’s cross, but the image is echoed in Odin’s hanging on the world tree, in the sacrificed vegetation deities called dying gods. The water of death is the Flood, the Red Sea, also Leviathan, identified with Jonah’s fish. On a symbolic level, we are drowned, like Atlantis.

Paradise is a state of harmony and unity. The Fall or decline from the Golden Age is a fall from unity into disunity, conflict instead of harmony, fear and hate instead of love in three contexts, natural, human, and spiritual. Demonic parodies of ideal imagery. The tree and water of life and the tree and water of death.

The Song of Songs, the Bible’s main treatment of human love, though later allegorized as the love of Christ for his Church. The woman’s body identified with the paradisal garden. Two lovers seek each other and finally unite. Ascribed to Solomon, but may go back to old fertility rituals.

Biblical tradition is wary of the pagan tendency to worship nature and of human love, so much of our imagery of Eros comes from the Classical side. Red and white: the colors of Eros on all three levels of love, sexual, romantic, and spiritual.

The J account beginning in Genesis 2:4 of the Garden. The Classical counterpart of the Ages of Man. Originally four ages, as in Ovid. Hesiod adds a 5th, the age of heroes. Decline: each age is worse than the previous. Nostalgia for “paradise lost.” The dangers of nostalgia, but also paradise as a positive model for the good life.

In many Creation myths, a mystery above interacts with a mystery below, and something comes into being in the middle. This is true in the two Biblical versions of Creation, P and J, also in the Classical versions of Hesiod and Ovid. But also in world mythology. The interaction may be (1) sexual; (2) by combat; (3) by emergence from below reaching towards the above.