15. Pandora was personally blamed for releasing all the evils of the world, despite being designed by Zeus as a punishment for humanity’s sin of accepting fire from Prometheus
Pandora, according to the Greek mythical tradition, was the first human woman, created by Hephaestus, the God of smithing, on the instructions of Zeus, the King of the Gods atop Mount Olympus. First appearing in Hesiod’s epic poem Theogony, after humans accepted the gift of fire from Prometheus, the Titan creator of humanity who had stolen the power from the Gods, Zeus sought to afflict humanity with punishment to balance out their condition; after deliberating, Zeus instructed Hephaestus to mold the first woman from clay and to make her a “beautiful evil” whose descendants would forever torment Prometheus’s creation.
Described by Hesiod as “sheer guile, not to be withstood by men”, “from her is the race of women and female kind: of her is the deadly race and tribe of women who live amongst mortal men to their great trouble, no helpmates in hateful poverty, but only in wealth”. The arrival of Pandora, and women more generally, is said to have ended the Golden Age of Man – an all-male civilization of immortals who lived in perfect existence – and ushered in the Silver Age, in which man was now subject to illness, decay, and death. In later editions of the myth, instead of innately possessing and disseminating these undesirable virtues and ills Pandora is given a jar containing these evils by Zeus and told never to open it; unable to control her curiosity, Pandora peers inside and inadvertently releases darkness into the world of men.
Analyzing beyond the inherently misogynistic undertones of the legend, depicting women as the duplicitous root of all evil and men as divine goodness, Pandora is the physical embodiment of the very definition of “scapegoat”. Her creation and divine purpose was to exact the vengeance of Zeus for the rebellion of humanity against his authority, and as such Zeus, not Pandora, should be ultimately held responsible for the negative consequences of her existence; furthermore, Pandora as typically depicted in Greek mythology, never intended, even in opening the jar, to cause the outcomes that occurred, which were, as noted, divinely preordained.