I am a massive nerd for anything historical,
but Ancient History and mythology is how a lot of people get into the subject
and I really do not blame them; is there any myth that isn’t great? Well, there
are probably some, but one that certainly is not is Pandora’s Box. When you are
young it is really just a myth about a smoking hot lady, Pandora, who might have
done well in the looks department, but not so much in the smarts department;
she ends up stumbling across a box that she just has to open, releasing all the
evils into the world, leaving only one thing inside: hope. It is kind of hard
to believe this all happened so long ago, when so much has happened in 2020 –
are we sure they weren’t simply predicting the future?
When I was a child and I read
this, I too just believed this to be an interesting myth with an optimistic
message at the end. Now, as an adult, I realise how naïve I was (and the rest
of this post will show how we should cling on to our naivety a little longer). We
could always talk about the beautiful woman without brains who brought evil to
the world, because there is a lot to unpack there, but I would rather look at
the one thing left in the box.
We are told that hope is left in
the box, so humans always have it, despite all the evils left in the world. That
is what is in the mythology story books, and that is what most people will
recall from the myth, and it is a pleasantly optimistic view. Still, it dawned
on me, as it has some scholars, that if hope is in the box, do we have hope? This
came on me at a random time because I have found myself with time where I can
think about these big questions for absolutely no good reason, and my friends usually
get the brunt of my waffling – but now I have this, so you can read it too, out
of choice!
Griffith suggests that the myth of
Pandora’s Box is not as optimistic as we are taught as children, but that hope
is actually a blessing withheld from us, to make our suffering just that much
worse. People only began to suffer from evil when Pandora opens the box and releases
it into the world, so if hope is left in the box, how would humans have access
to it? The reason Pandora was created was to have her open the box and release
these evils upon the human race, so might it have been part of the plan to have
it slammed shut just before hope got out?
It is a fair interpretation, but there
is another possible reason hope was in the box: is hope a bad thing? The
original text for the myth has been translated several times, and some have
come to the conclusion that the word is ‘hope’, while others have suggested it
should be translated rather as ‘deceptive expectation’. Everything in the box was
to cause suffering for humanity, and is there anything worse than expecting
better only to find out that it will only ever remain an expectation? Is having
hope actually causing us more pain than the other evils in the world?
Still, I think we should remain
optimistic. Earlier I said we should remain naïve, but it is not naïve to
believe that hope is a good thing, or to be optimistic. Without hope, even ‘deceptive
expectation’, nothing would be achieved; hope pushes us forward, allowing us to
create change ourselves. ‘Deceptive expectation’ is to only believe that
someone else will come along and solve our problems and cure us of the evil in
the world. Once you create your own path and your actions influence the bettering
of the world, even if it is just your world, hope is a blessing.
