Pandora is the first woman of Greek mythology. The Greek equivalent of Eve. Eve has an apple, while Pandora has a box. Both the apple and the box release misery onto the world of men. Both Eve and Pandora are punished. Like Eve, Pandora and all of her daughters are sentenced to "experience difficult childbirth. Having demonstrated the untrustworthiness of her gender, she--and all women yet unborn--were to be dominated by their fathers and then by their husbands." (Quote source: Shlain).
I recently began reading Cassandra Speaks by Elizabeth Lesser, a book published in 2020, with the subtitle "When Women are the Storytellers, the Human Story Changes". Part I of the book discusses origin stories. Chapter 1 focuses on Eve, Chapter 2 focuses on Pandora. The quote at the beginning of Pandora's chapter is from Polly Young-Eisendrath who writes,
"Both Eve and Pandora bring death into the world. This is a curious reversal of the fact that women bring life into the world, but it says something about the meaning of 'woman' within a religion dominated by male gods."
Pandora's story comes to us from the poet Hesiod, who was writing at approximately the same time as Homer, author of Odyssey and the Iliad. Lesser writes, "Historians refer to Hesiod's poems as the 'Genesis' of Greek mythology." She goes on to say, "We relate to Hesiod's words as if they flowed directly from the mouths of the gods, but Hesiod interpreted old myths and folktales from the oral tradition, changing many of them to reflect the issues of his times and to protect the privilege of the ruling, patriarchal class."
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I have also been rereading Leonard Shlain's remarkable bestseller from 1998, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: the Conflict Between Word and Image. I first read it around Y2K and it was one of the first books that really expanded my worldview regarding religion. Leonard Shlain was a brain surgeon who liked to travel. In 1991 he was part of a tour of Mediterranean archeological sites guided by a University of Athens professor. He writes, "At nearly every Greek site we visited, she patiently explained that the shrines we stood before had originally been consecrated to a female deity. And, later, for unknown reasons, unknown persons reconsecrated them to a male one." The tour encompassed Greece, Crete, and Ephesus on the Anatolian coast. On the bus back to the airport he "was struck by the thought that the demise of the Goddess, the plunge in women's status, and the advent of harsh patriarchy and misogyny occurred around the time that people were learning how to read and write. Perhaps there was something in the way people acquired this new skill that changed the brain's actual structure. We know that in the developing brain of a child, differing kinds of learning will strengthen some neuronal pathways and weaken others. Extrapolating the experience of an individual to a culture, [he] hypothesized that when a critical mass of people with a society acquire literacy, especially alphabetic literacy, left hemispheric modes of thought are reinforced at the expense of right hemispheric ones, which manifests as a decline in the status of images, women's rights, and goddess worship. He spent the next seven years researching, exploring his idea, and writing the book.
About Hesiod's version of the myth of Pandora's box, Shlain writes "Pandora disobeyed the order not to open the box because she desired knowledge. Her crime and punishment mirror Eve's in Eden. Both stories have the same purpose: to denigrate women, demote the Great Mother, and create a myth that enables men to dominate women. Women must have possessed power prior to the creation of these stories, or it would not have been necessary for mythmakers to try to alter cultural perceptions."
Indeed, in Cassandra Speaks, Lesser writes, "In versions that predate Hesiod's storytelling, Pandora was not a punishment at all but rather a gift. In fact, the name Pandora means 'all-giving.' Earlier versions of the spoken myth, pieced together from the artwork on 5th century BCE pottery, paint Pandora as an embodiment of the fertility of the earth, a healer and a life giver."
Happily, even Wikipedia seems to be aware of this, today in 2023. The brilliant Jane Ellen Harrision is even referenced in Pandora's Wikipedia article (she is probably also the source the Elizabeth Lesser refers to in Cassandra Speaks). From Wikipedia:
"Jane Ellen Harrison[24] also turned to the repertory of vase-painters to shed light on aspects of myth that were left unaddressed or disguised in literature. On a fifth-century amphora in the Ashmolean Museum (her fig.71) the half-figure of Pandora emerges from the ground, her arms upraised in the epiphany gesture, to greet Epimetheus. A winged ker with a fillet hovers overhead: "Pandora rises from the earth; she is the Earth, giver of all gifts," Harrison observes. Over time this "all-giving" goddess somehow devolved into an "all-gifted" mortal woman. A.H. Smith,[25] however, noted that in Hesiod's account Athena and the Seasons brought wreaths of grass and spring flowers to Pandora, indicating that Hesiod was conscious of Pandora's original "all-giving" function. For Harrison, therefore, Hesiod's story provides "evidence of a shift from matriarchy to patriarchy in Greek culture. As the life-bringing goddess Pandora is eclipsed, the death-bringing human Pandora arises."[26] Thus, Harrison concludes "in the patriarchal mythology of Hesiod her great figure is strangely changed and diminished. She is no longer Earth-Born, but the creature, the handiwork of Olympian Zeus." (Harrison 1922:284). Robert Graves, quoting Harrison,[27] asserts of the Hesiodic episode that "Pandora is not a genuine myth, but an anti-feminist fable, probably of his own invention."
Thus was inspired my most recent painting, entitled "The Story of Hesiod and Pandora". The story:
Once upon a time there was an angry misogynistic man. He heard a story about the beautiful creator Goddess who brought all the good things to the world. She was the earth mother. Her name was Pandora, the giver of all things. Her festivals were joyous. This made the man jealous. But he felt powerful, because while the women had music and stories and beauty and the power to create life, he knew the alphabet and was wealthy. He inscribed on lead tablets the story of Pandora, the evil woman who brought all the bad things to the world. He felt better for a moment, but remained bitter to the end of his days. This man's words survived and were cherished by other bitter men for thousands of years. But eventually, his words were questioned and the truth of the Goddess was brought forth again. And She lived happily ever after.
The painting:
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