s and has to win him again from his False Bride by purchasing the
right of spending three nights with him. These incidents come in
logically in the Master-Maid formula but are dragged in without real
relevance into Cupid and Psyche; yet they occur as early as Basile
where there is a dim reminiscence of the Oblivion Kiss. In
reconstructing the formula I have therefore omitted these incidents,
reserving them for their proper place (see Master-Maid).

Cupid and Psyche is of special interest to the student of the
folk-tale since it is a means of testing the mythological, the
anthropological, and the Indian theories of its origin. The
mythological interpretation is nowadays so discredited that it is
needless to discuss it, especially as we have seen that the
mythological names given by Apuleius are only dragged in perforce. The
anthropological explanation, given most fully by Andrew Lang in his
admirable introduction to Addington's translation of Apuleius in the
_Bibliotheque de Carabas_, gives savage parallels from all quarters of
the globe to the seven chief incidents making up the tale, but leaves
altogether out of account the artistic concatenation of the incidents
in the tale itself and does not consider the later complications of
the European folk-tales connected with it. M. Cosquin and others bring
in the Vedic myth of Urvasi and Pururavas, but we have seen reason to
reject the notion that the tale is, in its essence, mythological, and
therefore need not consider its relation to Indian mythology. Cosquin,
however, gives reference to the tale of Tulisa taken down from a
washerwoman of Benares in 1833 (_Asiatic Journal_, new series, vol.
2), which has the invisible husband and the breaking of taboo, the
jealous mother-in-law, and the tasks. This is indeed a close
parallelism sufficient to raise the general question of relation
between the Indian and the European folk-tale. But the earlier
existence of the tale in Apuleius and Basile would give the preference
to European influence on India rather than _vice versa_.

I should add that I have followed Apuleius in giving a symbolic name
to the heroine of the tale, in order to suggest its relation to the
classical folk-tale of Cupid and Psyche, but not of course to indicate
that it is in any sense mythological. The Descent-to-hell incident,
which is found both in the classical and in the modern European forms
and therefore in my reconstruction is only, after all, the applic