And just about every hack journalist in search of a cliché will open up “Pandora’s Box” before long. Just as the name of our Goddess Isis has been hijacked of late, so a google for Pandora now prioritises shopping. In my local ‘high street’ Pandora has been turned into a shop selling expensive bling – no doubt in costly ‘boxes’. This painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti is pretty much standard – tells us more about the artist’s relationship to the model (Jane Burden Morris) than about Pandora. Except maybe that the word ‘box’ is sometimes used as a euphemism for female organs…This has been a very sticky error – one even finds Goddess-worshiping Pagan writers caught up in it. Just about every artist since then has reproduced the mistake – lovely pictures but not much help when it comes to understanding Her. The story was somewhat confused with that of Psyche (the story within a story in Lucius Apuleius wonderful ‘The Golden Ass’). Pandora never had a ‘box’ – the 16th-century writer Erasmus mistranslated the Greek word ‘pithos’ (a large storage jar) as if it had been ‘pyxis’ (box). Some new insights have arrived since then. I wrote rather more briefly about Pandora in the collection ‘Naming the Goddess’ ed. Perhaps now that hardly anyone actually believes in ‘Eve’, Pandora is tops! She has the distinction of being the second-most-blasphemed Goddess in human history – after Eve, Mother of All Living. You’ve all been told the story of the silly girl whose curiosity released all the ills of the world.
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