Pandora's box
According to Greek mythology , Pandora's box contained all evils such as work, sickness and death, unknown to mankind. They escaped into the world when Pandora opened the box.
myth
At the direction of Zeus, Hephaestus had made a woman from clay, Pandora. She was part of the punishment for humanity for the fire stolen by Prometheus . Prometheus' brother Epimetheus and Pandora were married.
Zeus instructed Pandora to give the box to the people and to tell them that under no circumstances should it be opened. But immediately after their marriage, Pandora opened the box. Thereupon all vices and vices escaped from it . From that point on, the bad conquered the world. Before that, mankind had not known any evils, troubles, or illnesses, or death. The box contained hope as the only positive thing ( Greek ἐλπίς elpís ). Before it could escape, the can was closed again. So the world became a desolate place. Occasionally one finds in secondary literature the claim that the box was opened a second time, so that hope could also escape. These could be attempts to explain why people know hope. In the original by Hesiod there is no reference to such a second opening. It is therefore also unknown which evil was able to escape last.
This contrasts with Nietzsche's view , according to which hope is in truth the greatest evil of all curses in the box: Zeus wanted man, no matter how much tormented by other evils, not to throw away life, but to continue to let oneself be tormented again and again. In addition, he gives people hope: it is in truth the worst of evils because it prolongs people's torment.
reception
According to Gisela Fuchs, the myth of Pandora was hardly received in antiquity. It only gained importance again in the Renaissance . Today opening Pandora's box is the epitome of creating a calamity that cannot be repaired.
In 1956, Dora and Erwin Panofsky succeeded in proving that the word Büchse came from a translation mistake by Erasmus von Rotterdam when translating the Greek text into Latin. In Hesiod is even talk of a πίθος Pithos - Greek for large, earthen storage jar (. Eg for wine, oil and cereals). However, Erasmus modified the figure of Pandora: taking the psyche of Apuleius as a model, Erasmus gave Pandora as an attribute instead of the πίθος ( Latin : dōlium ) the much lighter and thus also wearable pyxis (Greek: πυξίς pyxís ; Latin: vāsculum ), which means can or can .
misogyny
The Irish author Jack Holland describes Hesiod written fixation of the Pandora myth as the origin of the world's misogyny .
Modern presentation
Modern film and television depictions often involve someone getting (or could get) possession of the can and trying to open it, or trying to protect it from being opened by others.
The myth is interpreted in such a way that opening the box leads (or led) to the escape of the evils in it, which are then in the world and cause suffering and grief there. At the same time, hope remains (or remained) in the can if it is closed in time, which means that hope is protected from being lost. This preserves hope for humanity. A heroic protagonist tries to prevent the evils from escaping or to return evils that have escaped to the can.
The contradiction why the escape of evils brings it into the world and so on, while the escape of hope leads to its loss, is not explained. The contradictory situation is simply put into the room in some form of narrative, accepted and continued without criticism by the participants.
In other representations, this contradiction is circumvented in that hope as the content of the can and its relationship to the other content is largely excluded or completely ignored.
The role of hope actually represented in the myth as a possible salvation or relief, which remained ineffective in the can, or (according to Nietzsche, see above) as a further, particularly insidious evil, is actually not found in the popular modern reception.
The reproachful portrayal of Pandora (or the femininity and woman she represents) as a victim of her feminine curiosity, as a doer of doom or responsible for what is bad in the world is popularly not mentioned or tried to neutralize through opposing representations.
literature
- Joachim Harst, Tobias Schmid: Pandora. In: Maria Moog-Grünewald (Ed.): Mythenrezeption. The ancient mythology in literature, music and art from the beginnings to the present (= Der Neue Pauly . Supplements. Volume 5). Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2008, ISBN 978-3-476-02032-1 , pp. 545-550.
- Dora Panofsky, Erwin Panofsky: Pandora's box. Change of meaning of a mythical symbol . Translated from English by Peter D. Krumme. Campus, Frankfurt am Main 1992, ISBN 3-593-34628-1 .
- Almut-Barbara Renger, Immanuel Musäus (ed.): Myth Pandora. Texts from Hesiod to Sloterdijk . Reclam, Leipzig 2002, ISBN 3-379-20033-6 ( review by Florian Gelzer at literaturkritik.de).
swell
- Hesiod : Works and Days 47-105 ( German , Greek )
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Herder Lexicon: Greek and Roman Mythology. Herder, Freiburg 1981, Lemma Pandora.
- ^ Friedrich Nietzsche: Menschliches, Allzumenschliches . 1878, 71. "The Hope" ( textlog.de ).
- ↑ Gisela Fuchs: The cup of the sun god. For the development of the motif “Cup of Wrath”. Hamburg / London / Münster 2003, p. 60 books.google .
- ↑ Dora and Erwin Panofsky: The Pandora's Box. Change of meaning of a mythical symbol. Pp. 17-38.
- ↑ Hesiod: Works and Days , Theogony . Translated and edited. by Otto Schönberger, Stuttgart, Reclam jun. 1996/1999, p. 11 and 49 (quoted from Holland).
- ↑ Jack Holland: Misogyny. The story of misogyny. Translated from the English by Waltraud Götting. Two thousand and one, Frankfurt a. M. 2007 (2006 edition), ISBN 978-3-86150-793-2 , p. 30.