PANDORA'S BOX

The primordial gods were female.

Women have been sidelined and belittled or minimized throughout history, but it wasn't always that way. In Greco-Classical Mythology, the initial goddess who gave birth to everything and everyone was Gaea, aka Earth Mother or Mother of All, personification of the Earth, and, for all intents and purposes, the Mother of Everything Beautiful in the world. And the oldest of the gods recorded was Innana of Sumer (whose counterparts are the goddesses Ishtar, Asherah, Astarte, Freya, Anat, Aphrodite, Isis, Venus among others). In the West, vestiges of the cult of mother earth, aka Gaea reside today in the cult of the mother of God, the Virgin Mary and the Black Virgins.

If we look at the goddesses of mythology, we see that their attributes have been altered over the centuries in order to support male chauvinism and to make women secondary.

Although the Iliad focuses on the last year of the 10-year Trojan War, the thread running through Homer's entire plot was earthly women and goddesses. However, what they teach us and the current voice, focuses on the deeds of Achilles, Ulysses and others. Why this design of minimizing the female role?

At the time when the blind poet Homer wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey, I have some doubts that this was the case, and what I am convinced is that the interpretations have been modified over time. Euripides wrote 8 tragedies about the Trojan War of which 7 were about women!

In the Iliad, Helen of Sparta, the casus belli, is interpreted as a puppet. From whom? From Aphrodite, another woman. However, in the Odyssey, Helena appears to us much more autonomous and independent and prestigious, something that is never mentioned. In fact, what it refers to is that the bitch Helena slept with Menelaus, provoking a 10-year war, but it never mentions that Ulysses during the Odyssey hangs 12 women, deceives Calypso, Nausicaa and Circe in a demeaning way (making her a son and escaping afterwards)!!! Nor that Helena has the right to choose whom she wants to get laid!!!

Penelope (cousin of Helen of Sparta) the submissive wife of Odysseus is presented as the faithful, loyal and devoted wife (as for chauvinists’ women must be). However, no one questions that Ulysses goes to bed with whomever he wants and in fact did horrible things being no hero at all. In Ovid's Heroides, Penelope regrets that Odysseus did not think of her and her son before embarking on the Trojan adventure. And that part in which Odysseus, on his way back from Troy, landed in Thrace and massacred all its inhabitants, just because he was in a bad mood, is never remembered! As it is not remembered that he was saved by women whom in the end he deceived, as was the case with Calliope with whom he slept for several years and Nausicaa the daughter of King Feaces who rescued him from a shipwreck and snuggled him until he left her.

So, Ulysses led a life of adventure and debauchery for 20 years and when he returned home his wife was waiting for him loyal and submissive. If he was my husband, I would have all his stuff at the door!

In any case, it is certain that Telegonus, Odysseus'and Circe's son, took revenge on his mother, and it is he who kills Odysseus for what he had done to his mother.

Another character that is always misinterpreted is Medusa, who in our imagination is a terrible monster with snakes instead of hair that petrifies whoever she looks at.

The truth is that Medusa was raped!

Medusa, was one of the three gorgons, was a woman of extraordinary beauty, who liked to take care of herself (care of skin, hair and more daring clothes), was very vain, and was the young and faithful priestess of Athena, the virgin goddess. It is worth mentioning here that Athena always scolded Medusa, telling her to beware of her manners. That she shouldn't behave like that.

However, Poseidon and Athena, at one point, had a dispute to decide which of them would sponsor the city (Athens) capital of the Ionians. Athena was victorious and this aroused a fury in her brother, who was somewhat irrational.

And to get revenge, Poseidon, without any shame, decided to sexually abuse Medusa. After that, rumors of the fact began to spread. And no wonder most people blamed Medusa, saying she was to blame for being raped because she wore sexy clothes and put on make-up! Where have we heard this? Medusa was the first woman found guilty of being raped! And the subsequent story has tried to present us with the victim as the culprit.

Perseus (another debauched adventurer who became a hero) to save Andromeda first needed to capture Medusa's head, which he did. And after being decapitated, Medusa's head had the power to petrify anyone who looked at her. From now on to be presented as an evil being, feminine, of course.

Pandora, another intellectual fraud, is presented as possessing a box (or safe) whose lid she opened, and thus released all the evils of the World. This is not the original story; this is the story influencing and influenced by biblical Eve. In the original story Pandora never had any box, safe or jar. The closest is found in Hesiod where she has a little bottle, but in most depictions or descriptions she has none. Pandora was throughout antiquity represented as Earth deity both good and bad, positive and negative, strong and weak, thus being a morally neutral character. It was only after Erasmus of Rotterdam (16th century) that she was accused of having a safe with the evils of the world, thus allowing the evils of men to be derived from women.

Why? Because Erasmus mistranslated the Greek word pithos, which meant flask, for chest-like box, and from then on, the woman was denigrated for being moved by curiosity and volubility, having spread the evils of the world, and the poor men had to put up with them, poor things incapable of defending themselves.

Let's make the History of Humanity clear and let's give women the real role they played. While men were having fun making wars and killing each other, women took care of children and homes, therefore civilizationally much more advanced.

"A Thousand Ships" is a 2019 novel by Natalie Haynes which retells the mythology of the Trojan war from the perspective of the women involved. I invite you all to read it.