Who Opened Pandora’s Box? The Answer Will Surprise You
The myth of Pandora’s Box as we tell it today sounds like a variant of the Adam and Eve story, probably because it served as a template for the tale. There are a few key differences that the Judeo-Christian tradition revised when it adapted the story mostly involving Satan. The ascendancy of Christianity has allowed a strange, retroactive recasting of the original story. Lots of stories that intersect with the Bible have been coopted and rewritten in an ancient version of propaganda to create an illusion of historical consistency and unquestioned universality in its doctrines. However, what has been lost is the integrity of tales such as Pandora’s that makes all the points fall together into a single meaningful allegory.
What is not in dispute is that Zeus made Pandora, the first woman because he wanted to take humankind down a peg after Prometheus gave them fire. He made a woman out of clay and had all the gods give her gifts to make her the most beautiful and attractive creature possible. Then Zeus added a sealed jar. (One Renaissance translation called it a “box” and since jars were not really used anymore to store valuables, the label stuck.) Then Zeus gave Pandora’s husband, Epimetheus, the key that would open it. We don’t mention the key much these days, but that, too, is not in dispute. Zeus also told Epimetheus not to ever use the key to open the jar. Some stories say Epimetheus opened it anyway (Look at this engraving from the 1500s titled, Epimetheus Opening Pandora’s Box) and some say Pandora opened it. Either way, all the miseries that plague humanity came out. Hope, however, had not escaped when the lid trapped it safe in the box.
Hold on, you say. How do you open a jar that is sealed with wax by using a key? It had to be a box, you might insist with literal-minded precision. Let’s look at this symbolically. We all live in a post-Freudian world. Keys, like pens and other tools, are phallic substitutes, which is why languages that mark gender make these words masculine. Jars, boxes, openings we walk through like doors: these all take feminine endings. So the “key” that Zeus gave Epimetheus on marriage that could “open” Pandora’s “jar” is suddenly a reference to sex. Poor Epimetheus, whose name suggests that he doesn’t consider the consequences of his actions, was supposed to resist having sex with a woman who possessed every attraction the gods could devise. Not a chance. So he had sex with her. And what happened? All the evils that come with human society were unleashed on the world. Except that there, in her “jar” or uterus was hope in the form of new life.
This clarifies one weird inconsistency that bothered me when I was a kid. If the things coming out of the box meant they could then affect people, wouldn’t keeping Hope inside prevent hope from helping? I thought they should have let Hope out so it could reach people too. Seeing the jar as representing the uterus means that Hope was found inside her through reproduction. Evils are abroad, but hope abides within women.
That new possibility of life turned out to be truly the hope of the human race. Pandora’s and Epimetheus’ daughter, Pyrrha, married Deucalion, the pre-Christian Noah. Only their children survived the flood that destroyed the rest of humanity.
The myth basically says allegorically that if humans want to have sex and children, then the price is individual suffering and death, with the hope that they can live on in the offspring.
