Pandora box...

Nadai

Active Member
...we must be talking about different books or different religions...I'm refering to Christianity and the Holy Bible, not some mythological story. I understand to some the Bible is mythology, but not to me. Genesis speaks of "the serpent who tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden" (Genesis 3:4 and 3:14), the serpent who we, as the reader, know to be Satan.
But regardless of whether it was Satan or just some random talking snake, in my opinion, it would have been better for a lot of people had she not listened.
 

Alejandro

Active Member
yea well that's the problem here. why create something (a box in this case) if it's NOT MEANT to be opened, like why CREATE IT? What's the point of creating cars if they are not meant to be used, they are used so their creation has a logic. The box was created and not meant to be opened, well why creating it? and if it was meant to be opened, why not then open it yourself instead of waiting, cause it would be opened anyway... is this too hard to understand what I am saying here?
In the original version of the story, from Hesiodos' Works & Days, it was a pithos, which is a sort of jar, not a box. Hesiodos is generally accused of possessing a pessimistic and misogynistic worldview framing a not-so-benevolent picture of Zeus. According to Hesiodos, womankind, represented by Pandora, was created specifically in order to become, as he says in the Works & Days, a plague to the bread-eating Earthling race of creatures called men. If we take it from this vantage point, it makes perfect sense for Zeus to organise that she gets the pithos, which, as Nadai has pointed out, he knew she would open.

The point really is not that the container was made to stay closed; the point is that Zeus was vexed sore by human beings, for a number of reasons, many of which are connected with the gifts they received from his rival Prometheus, and so he sought to burden them with every single bad thing he could think of, all tightly sealed in a kitchen jar and borne by the hands of the trickiest evil among them: a woman. Bio-engineered to be destructively and treacherously curious, Pandora was given the infamous container, together with Zeus' confident expectation that she would do his dirty work for him even if she didn't know that that's what she was doing. Of course not every ancient mythographer necessarily has such a grim picture to paint of women and Zeus, but Hesiodos would definitely have us believe that Zeus' warmest feeling toward human beings is that he is irritatedly tolerant of their existence.
 

Nadai

Active Member
The point really is not that the container was made to stay closed; the point is that Zeus was vexed sore by human beings, for a number of reasons, many of which are connected with the gifts they received from his rival Prometheus, and so he sought to burden them with every single bad thing he could think of, all tightly sealed in a kitchen jar and borne by the hands of the trickiest evil of them all: a woman. Bio-engineered to be destructively curious and treacherous, Pandora was given the infamous container, together with Zeus' confident expectation that she would do his dirty work for him even if she didn't know that that's what she was doing. Of course not every ancient mythographer necessarily has such a grim picture to paint of women and Zeus, but Hesiodos would definitely have us believe that Zeus' warmest feeling toward human beings is that he is irritatedly tolerant of their existence.
I love how you worded that:D
 
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