Greek legend has it that the first woman ever, Pandora, once opened a jar (loosely translated as "box") out of curiosity, releasing all the evils of mankind upon ourselves. She left only Hope inside the jar after closing the lid.
Mind you that she did not open the jar out of malice or shame, but rather out of curiosity. Are humans no different? Will we obliviously plummet to our ultimate doom? Does this metaphor reflect the premature forecasting of demise brought upon us by the female population, or rather the potential for women to bring out the worst in us? This has a sexist, albeit historically valid, undertone.Alternative, equivocal perspectives on this philomythical metaphor illustrate the human capacity to "create" at will. It also highlights the extreme interpretive flexibility we have, guided by our personal goals and emotions. We create thoughts, fantasy, fears, emotive extremities, and context-friendly reasoning; we voice these through story, art, song, poetry, dance, music, drama, and, of course, general instruction. There is hardly a device in this world that could penetrate and dismantle the human need to create and explain. Illusory beliefs realized into fanciful, ambiguous words are merely cultural tools that humans use to explain that which is unknown and chaotic to us - an operationally defined feature of human fear.
AlternativeLY***
ReplyDelete"historically" valid....expand plz?
ReplyDeleteI think we've gotta go back to the root of the myth. Pandora was created as a punishment in response to Prometheus stealing fire.
The myth's "moral lesson" seems to be in the vein of "curiosity killed the cat"
We can also see the myth demonizing three things: curiousity, daring to overstep one's boundaries (stealing the fire), and females.
Ironically all 3 things are essential to the proliferation of humanity (without one of these things...none of us could come to exist).
I think this myth is not so much a future prediction but a reflective, negative catharsis on humanity's insatiable need to push boundaries. It's taking almost a masochistic self-hating tone because while we can say all evils come out of "Pandora's box" ...
humanity also comes out of Pandora's box. aka every mother's vagina.
For this myth to demonize not only a trait that is at the crux of the human condition - curiosity/daringness, (and arguably our most valuable one, as you say, because it leads us to "create)
but also the SOURCE of all human life -- - - has some serious repressed self-hatred themes!
While the Ancient Greeks DID believe that in essence all children come from the sperm and the vagina/womb is but an oven, if we call the oven evil what kind of evil cookies must come out of it??
Maybe get the men who CREATED this myth into a psychoanalysts office. stat
- alyssa