Pandora - The First Woman, or the Earth Goddess

Pandora - “all-giver”, a title of the earth goddess Rhea, embodied as the first woman in a misogynic fable by Hesiod, who tried to blame war, death, disease and all other ills on women.

Hesiod claimed that Zeus sent Pandora to earth to punish people who had offended him. She carried a vase filled with curses: strife, pain, death, disease and all other afflictions. Pandora, in her curiosity, opened the vase, as Zeus knew she would, and let them out among the people. In a refinement of his cruelty, Zeus also gave a deceptive hope to prevent men from killing themselves in despair and escaping all the suffering their heavenly Father had intended for them.

Pandora's vessel was originally not a box but a honey vase, pithos, from which she poured out blessings: a symbol of the womb, like the Cornucopia, used in antiquity as a vessel for death and rebirth. Pandora's vase became Pandora's box only in the late Middle Ages, when Erasmus mistranslated pithos as pyxis.

The basic theme of female curiosity as the cause of the world's misery is familiar, we find it also in the myth of Eve.

Pandora's Earrings