Traces two millennia of changes in the tale of ""Cupid and Psyche,"" the major inserted tale in Lucius Apuleus's second-century Latin novel 'Metamorphoses' (or the Golden Ass). While folklorists have tended to deprecate the tale's affiliation with the classic French fairy tale ""Beauty and the Beast,"" it would resurface in the horror movie, ""King Kong,"" an epic retelling that is in many ways acually closer to Apuleius's original Latin. The Middle Platonic philosophic-religious allegorical interpretation of ""Cupid and Psyche"" is used to review the courses of the two later mutations.