Pandora

This article deals with the mythological figure. For additional meanings, see Pandora (disambiguation) .

The articles Pandora's Box and Pandora overlap thematically. Help me to better differentiate or merge the articles (→  instructions ) . To do this, take part in the relevant redundancy discussion . Please remove this module only after the redundancy has been completely processed and do not forget to include the relevant entry on the redundancy discussion page{{ Done | 1 = ~~~~}}to mark. 217.86.200.43 19:08 , May 4, 2018 (CEST)

Pandora ( Greek  Πανδώρα Pandṓra “ all-giver ” from pan “all-”, “total” and doron “gift”; traditionally translated as “all gifted”) is a woman created by Hephaestus from clay in Greek mythology . Hesiod describes Pandora as a beautiful evil ( καλὸν κακόν , kalón kakón ) . From Hermes she will Epimetheus brought - including the disastrous Pandora's box .

myth

Pandora ( Jules-Joseph Lefebvre , 1882)

The earliest narration of the Pandora myth comes from the poet Hesiod. At the behest of Zeus , the father of the gods , Pandora is made of clay by Hephaestus to take revenge for Prometheus' theft of the fire . For this purpose, Pandora receives a box containing all the evils in the world and hope. To make it seductive, Pandora is endowed by the gods with many gifts such as beauty, musical talent, dexterity, curiosity and high spirits. Aphrodite also gives her gracious charm, Athena adorns her with flowers, and Hermes gives her an enchanting language. This finally gives her the name Pandora, which Hesiod already explains as the "all-gifted".

Hermes brings Pandora to Epimetheus , Prometheus' brother. Prometheus, as the one who had previously considered, warns him to accept gifts from Zeus. But Epimetheus, as the one who later thinks about it, ignores the warning and marries Pandora. She opens the box that Zeus gave her, and the plagues in it come into the world. Before hope (Greek ἐλπίς, elpis ) can escape from the box, it is closed again. Thus the world becomes a desolate place and Hesiod concludes that one cannot escape the will of Zeus.

In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche describes hope as the worst of all evils, because “man, no matter how much tormented by other evils, does not throw away life, but continues to be tortured again and again” and so ultimately the Agony prolong. But the golden age in which mankind was spared work, disease and death is over for good.

According to a different reading of the works and days , Pandora's fall ends not the golden, but the heroic time . Both ideas are fundamentally similar and conditionally share the same attributes, but are under the rule of different gods (that of Kronos and his son Zeus). Since Pandora is only a creature of Zeus, it can be assumed that its creation does not fall in the time of the father Kronos.

In addition to this popular tradition, other variants are known: For example, at the beginning of the modern era, Prometheus was declared the creator of Pandora, which was then no longer equipped with a barrel, but became a problem as the first human woman herself. Babrios, on the other hand, does not name a female figure, but only tells of a barrel that Zeus filled with all the goods in the world and left to people. As soon as they lift the lid out of curiosity, the goods rise again to heaven: only hope remains.

Originally, Pandora was possibly not associated with evil, but with the gifts of the earth: On a white-grounded kylix (approx. 460 BC) you can see Athena and Hephaestus completing their creation of the first woman - which is the title Depiction, however, with the name Anesidora ("sending the gifts"). This view connects Pandora / Anesidora with Demeter and Gaia , goddesses of fertility with positive connotations . Such a view is confirmed by the Scholion on verse 971 of Aristophanes ' Birds , which mentions a cult of Pandora: she is the goddess of the earth who gives all things necessary for life. Thus, Hesiod's story with its misogynous presentation could already be the alienation of a more original material.

Reception of the myth

Parallels between the Pandora myth and the biblical fall of man have been drawn since early Christianity. Pandora becomes the seductive Eve and Epimetheus becomes the seductive Adam . Pandora and her vessel have become a symbol of the seductive power of women in modern times . So it is not surprising that Pandora is stylized as a female elemental force - either as a seductive femme fatale (as depicted in the paintings by Dante Gabriel Rossetti or with the sculpture by Edwin Scharff ) or as a destructive elemental force. After all, it can also appear as a giver, for example in Goethe it is a “vessel of all gifts”; or, withdrawn, from Wedekind ( Pandora's box ) .

The thesis that Pandora itself should have been the box (or jug) is also discussed. In ancient Greece, jugs were often decorated with the image of a woman. The comparison of the female body with a can was based on analogies between a jug and a woman's uterus. More to compare with the Holy Grail and Mary Magdalene . The term “box” results from a translation error attributed to Erasmus of Rotterdam (see Pandora's box ).

In the DC Universe , the character of Pandora made its first appearance in US Flashpoint # 5 (October 2011). In the The New 52 issues, she was part of the Trinity of Sin , along with the Phantom Stranger and Question , three people who had to repent for their deeds - in the case of Pandora, for opening the box and releasing evil into the world. Pandora received its own comic series from the DC Comics publishing house with US Trinity of Sin: Pandora , which reached 14 issues (2013/14). In the 80-page initial DC Rebirth issue (May 2016), Pandora was presented by Dr. Manhattan murdered.

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.
• Patrick Kaplanian: Mythes grecs d'Origine. Volume 1: Prométhée et Pandore. Édition de l'Adret L'Entreligne, Paris 2011, ISBN 978-2-909-62306-1 .
• Almuth-Barbara Renger, Immanuel Musäus (ed.): Myth Pandora. Texts from Hesiod to Sloterdijk. Reclam, Leipzig 2002, ISBN 3-379-20033-6 (in the appendix: Scholien zum Pandora-Mythos) ( review by Florian Gelzer ).
• Jean-Pierre Vernant : Le mythe prométhéen chez Hésiode. In: Ders .: Mythe et société en Grèce ancienne. Maspéro, Paris 1974, pp. 177–194 (German: Mythos and Society in Ancient Greece . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt / M. 1987, ISBN 3-518-11381-X ).
• Dora Panofsky, Erwin Panofsky : Pandora's box. Change of meaning of a mythical symbol. Campus, Frankfurt / New York 1992, ISBN 3-593-34628-1 .
• Paul Weizsäcker : Pandora 2 . In: Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher (Hrsg.): Detailed lexicon of Greek and Roman mythology . Volume 3.1, Leipzig 1902, Col. 1521-1529 ( digitized version ).

Web links

Commons : Pandora  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Pandora in the Theoi Project (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Hesiod, Theogony 585
2. ↑ Robert von Ranke-Graves : Greek Mythology. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1984, p. 128.
3. ↑ ^{a b c} Herder Lexicon: Greek and Roman mythology. Herder, Freiburg 1981, Lemma Pandora.
4. ↑ Hesiod, Theogony 570-612; Works and Days 53–105, esp. 81 f .; Library of Apollodorus 1,7,2; Hyginus , Fabulae 142; see also Immanuel Musäus: The Pandoramythos in Hesiod and its reception to Erasmus von Rotterdam , Göttingen 2004, pp. 13–41.
5. ↑ Hesiod, Werke und Tage , 81f.
6. ↑ Bodo Gatz: Age of the world, golden age and related ideas. Georg Olms, Hildesheim 1967, p. 36.
7. ↑ Babrios, Mythiambos , p. 58.
8. ↑ Jack Holland: Misogyny. The story of misogyny. Translated from the English by Waltraud Götting. Two thousand and one, Frankfurt a. M. 2007 (English edition 2006), ISBN 978-3-86150-793-2 , p. 30.
9. ↑ All of the above issues were published in German by Panini Comics between 2012 and 2017 , see www.paninicomics.de .