Pandora as Anodos

Pandora, in Hesiod’s account, is not first the woman with the jar but the figure of an anodos — the rising of a chthonian and agricultural power. Vernant, glossing the Hesiodic chunk directly, identifies her precisely: “Pandora is the name of a goddess of the earth and fertility. Like her double, Anesidora, she is represented in illustrations as emerging from the earth, in accordance with the theme of the anodos of a chthonian and agricultural power” (Vernant 1983).

The reading recovers Pandora from the moralizing reception that reduced her to the first woman who released evils into the world. In the depth-tradition frame she is something more ancient: a personification of the earth’s mixed gift to human life, embodied as a figure whose ascent (anodos) from the underworld bears both nourishment and the conditions of human suffering. She is the cousin of Gaia, the structural counterpart of the divine prohibition Prometheus violates, and the first figure in the Greek imagination of what later traditions will personify as the Great Mother in her ambivalent aspect.

Hesiod’s account thus contains in compact form the archetypal pattern of the chthonian feminine as bringer of both life and the conditions under which life must be borne — a pattern the alchemical and Jungian traditions will elaborate over two millennia, but whose Greek headwater is precisely this passage.

Relationships

• hesiod
• works-and-days
• theogony
• neumann-great-mother
• gaia-as-foundation

Primary sources

• works-and-days (Hesiod c. 700 BCE)
• theogony (Hesiod c. 700 BCE)
• vernant-myth-and-thought (Vernant 1983)