Western culture believes that all material is dead, and so there is no debt incurred when human ingenuity removes something from the other world. Consequently, we end up with shopping malls and space shuttles and other examples of "advanced" technology, while the spirits who give us the ability to make those things are starving, becoming bony and thin…. We think we’re getting away with something by stealing from the other side, but it all leads to violence. The Greek oracle at Delphi saw this a long time ago and said, "Woe to humans, the invention of steel.
– Martin Prechtel, in “Saving the Indigenous Soul”
The old people came literally to love the soil and they sat or reclined on the ground with a feeling of being close to a mothering power. It was good for the skin to touch the earth and the old people liked to remove their moccasins and walk with bare feet on the sacred earth. Their tipis were built upon the earth and their altars were made of earth. The birds that flew in the air came to rest upon the earth and it was the final abiding place of all things that lived and grew. The soil was soothing, strengthening, cleansing and healing. That is why the old Indian still sits upon the earth instead of propping himself up away from its life-giving forces. For him, to sit or lie upon the ground is to be able to think more deeply and feel more keenly.
– Luther Standing Bear, (1868-1939), Oglala Sioux
Consider the gifts of fire: not only ovens, to cook bread and roasts, but also ceramics, metallurgy, tools to shape wood, to till the ground, to make weapons to protect all the surplus that the tillers harvest; to make war, to conquer new ground when the plow reduces fertility to dust….not to mention the internal combustion engine, nuclear weapons and…
We don’t think of Pandora when we think of fire; we think of Prometheus, who stole it from the gods and gave it to humankind. Pandora was the one who opened the forbidden box and brought evil into the world — right?
I don’t think so. First of all, “Pandora’s box” wasn’t a box, it was a pot, made of clay, by hand; carpentry tools and boxes only came much later (see the archaeological record, and the history of the translation). That pot was itself born of fire. Whatever it contained, it embodied all the gifts of fire — the comfort we take into our bodies with every meal; the hope we feel when we gather around the hearth with family and friends, and, of course, all the energy and technologies born of combustion.
A pot (like an oven) is also, both, a hole and a whole — a maternal vessel made of earth, empty until warmed by father fire and re-filled by mother earth with rich nourishment for all the kids.
The clay pot (Latin, aulla, which gives us our word “oven”) can cook our food without consuming it because of the way it moderates the heat, a quality it gains from the fire itself, which transforms the malleable earth and makes it rigid — but still receptive to the otherwise all-consuming energy of fire.
Who made the pot? Where did it come from? Who knew the secrets of earth and fire, and shared them with humankind?
The answer’s in the story, but the story most of us hear isn’t set out with all the details. Let’s start with Prometheus, he who gave fire to humans. In truth, Prometheus’ and Pandora’s stories are all one story (I take much license in this telling; see the Wikipedia article for a longer intro to all the complications of (mis)interpretation and historical intrigue).
After the world was made and Old Zeus took command, and after his brother (son?) Prometheus pissed him off by stealing the fire of the gods and giving it to humankind, Old Zeus made (bribed?) Pandora to seduce Prometheus, as part of a trick to punish his arrogance. But Prometheus (whose name means forethought) suspected the trick, and spurned the beautiful babe. His brother, Epimetheus, on the other hand, fell for her, hard — and married her. (Did Zeus give away the bride? Was Prometheus jealous?)
Before the theft of fire, however, the other gods had tasked the brothers Prometheus and Epimetheus with creating (from clayey earth, of course) numerous creatures to populate the newly created world. Prometheus took his time making a creature like himself, but Epimetheus (less thoughtful, but his hands were quick) made all the rest – and breathed into them the breath of life. Once alive, the gods invited these new creatures to choose the gifts they would need to thrive – teeth, claws, wings, horns, speed, strength…. But by the time Prometheus finally finished fashioning his humans in his own image, no gifts remained. Or maybe the gods didn’t like the likeness. In any case, to make up for the absence of gifts, Prometheus gave us god-like creativity – and fire. Of course Zeus was pissed!
Many versions of the story exist, but the one that went viral came from a grumpy old Greek named Hesiod who must have had a really bad marriage. He made Pandora out to be a “beautifully evil” representative of the “deadly race and tribe of women” who carried in her jar “all the woes of humankind:” pain, suffering, disease, anger, conflict, etc. But Pandora means “all gifts,” and if you dig past Hesiod, she is clearly a version of the all-giving Goddess herself who possessed — and embodied — everything that makes human society possible: the gifts of green, growing things, of pottery, cooking, weaving — not to mention physical beauty, which brings with it, naturally, desire — the invisible, immaterial gift that inspires all new life. From these gifts, our ancestors fashioned what we now call civilization – or at least culture — an edifice we maintain and add on to with our tool- (and fire-) wielding hands.
The story holds so much more. What about the jar as a hand-made embodiment of the universal container, the womb? I think perhaps Pandora’s most important gift was the container (see Ursula Leguin’s “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”).
And I see Pandora’s pot as full, not of plague and pestilence, but skill — and knowledge, of consequences, and responsibility. I also see the jar itself in Pandora’s care. I suspect she warned her husband Epimetheus about the gravity of it’s contents. And I wonder if maybe it was Epimetheus (whose name, after all, means afterthought) who opened the jar? Or perhaps, as in so many families, the kids just didn’t listen to their parents, and and busted it by mistake while they were playing soccer in the house on a rainy day. We will never know. (One version of the story says that Pandora and Epimetheus had a daughter named Pyrrha (related to the Greek word for fire) who plays a different version of her mother’s role as creatrix).
Imagination asks questions. Is the story really a parable for maternal caution? (Matter and maternal, of course, are both children of the root word mater, Latin for “mother.” It’s all “mother earth.” And always has been.)
Despite the popularity of grumpy old Hesiod’s misogyny, I think Pandora (and Eve) were the first mothers, and mothers first. And that we need to stop blaming them for bringing down “the wrath of God” on our heads. We all owe our lives to mom, no matter how dysfunctional she may have been. We owe our lives to a creative partnership of male and female, yin and yang, equal opposites who together create the life we get to live.
The tools and things we make, despite our making, are no less the body of our mother. And while the consequences come whether or not we acknowledge mom — the jar, after all, was made with an opening — our behavior is critically important.
Hesiod’s moral was that you can’t escape the will of Old Zeus — in other words, “do as you’re told or suffer….Obey or be punished.” He makes Pandora a scapegoat, to take all the blame while the rest of the cast carry on just the same, and point to someone else to blame for our own faults and shortcomings. Not so different, it seems to me, from the Christian stories, with Eve as one scapegoat, Jesus another?
But there are other stories, other ways of telling, and other ways to think about things. Instead of scapegoats, consider tricksters: Coyote, Loki — even the Greeks had Hermes — all play jokes, suffer reversals, and still manage to come out, if not as heros, at least as survivors who get to play again. When a trickster blunders and makes mistakes, they generate heat and light, like steel on stone. The spark generates fire, and new life — even when it burns down the whole forest.
Pandora (and Eve!) gave us the (earthen) vessels to catch those sparks, contain them, feed them, keep them going. We cannot blame them for the consequences of our own actions, our own uses of the sparks they taught us to catch and keep and use.
Where trickster warns us to not think too highly of ourselves or to get too carried away with all our fancy stuff and technology, what does Pandora really say?“Go slow, be careful, pay attention”? “Be grateful, and rejoice”? “Give more than you take, because if you don’t feed what fed you, how will your children live”? “Love your mother, no matter what”?
FURTHER READING (among others): The Gift; and Trickster Made This World, by Lewis Hyde; Women’s Work, by Eliz. Wayland Barber; Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human, by Richard Wrangham; Dirt, The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth, by Wm. Bryant Logan; anything and everything by Martin Prechtel...
"There is a discussion as to when fire was created. According to Levi the original light created on the first day served man for 36 hours, i.e. during the 12 hours before the onset of the first Sabbath, i.e. the first 12 hours after his creation, and the 24 hours of the Sabbath. When the world sank into darkness as a result of G’d withdrawing the original light, as part of Adam’s punishment for having violated His commandment not to eat from the tree of knowledge, Adam was disconsolate and exclaimed (Psalms 139,11) “is darkness to conceal me permanently?” G’d responded to his cry of anguish by replacing the original light with fire, sparks, by teaching him how to produce fire by striking two flints against each other. Having been successful in this, Adam blessed the fire. This corresponds to the view of Shemuel who taught us that the reason we pronounce a benediction over fire on the evening following the Sabbath is that this was the time that fire was created. Rabbi Avuhu added in the name of Rabbi Yochanan that we also bless fire on the evening after Yom Kippur because the fire had to observe “Sabbath” during that whole day, i.e. handling it was out of bounds to us. [Of course, fire is also prohibited for use (handling) on the Sabbath, but Yom Kippur is also called Sabbath even when it does not occur on the day we would normally observe the Sabbath.]" (from https://www.sefaria.org/Radak_on_Genesis.36.24.2?lang=bi)
In the Hindu stories, there is Agni (whose name stems from the same root as "ignite"), of whom Wikipedia says:
"The Vedas describe the parents of Agni as two kindling fire sticks, whose loving action creates him. Just born, he is poetically presented as a tender baby, who needs loving attention lest he vanish. With care, he sparks and smokes, then flames and grows stronger than his parents, finally so strong that he devours what created him."
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