So it turned out that when Zeus told Pandora , do not open the pithos or large jar usually used for storing wine, oil or grain and often the size of a man. The Box ,came much later and its origin ,is in the misspelling of Erasmus of Rotterdam. in the 16th century, instead of pithos he wrote, pyxis which meant box in Greek. Dante Gabriel Rossetti's painting of Pandora with a box, further compounded this . So back to Zeus, he knew that she would go ahead and open the jar revealing all the evils of the world, so why did Zeus set her up? Is this the change from the matriarchal societies, to the patriarchal world we still live in, that began around the birth of Christ. All that was female especially in term of religion was destroyed or absorbed, so the female energy was blamed for every ill in society. Seems about right to me.
This relates to my work because, I was working on a drawing that looked like all the evil of the world flying out onto the paper. The piece had started as the drawing of the 7th Chakra, but it just wasn't right , so I cut it in half ,added a panel of paper and carried on trying to finish it. I wanted to add the box of Pandora's fame but it didn't seem right. After doing some research and finding out about the jar imagery, I finished the piece. You can see the results below.
