 | | In the power of these evils men rapidly pass into old age. But then woman, raising the jar's great lid in her hands and scattering its contents, devised anguishing miseries for men.
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| | (Frazer 1983, 99)
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The text seems to manifest an internal contradiction. On the one hand, the narrative states openly that the woman is herself an evil:
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| | Son of Iapetos, you who surpass all others in planning, you rejoice in your theft of my fire and in having deceived me, being the cause of great pain to yourself and men in the future. I shall give them in payment of fire an evil which all shall take to their hearts with delight, an evil to love and embrace
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| | (Frazer 1983, 98)
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But on the other hand, the last part of the narrative implies that Pandora loosed evils upon the world only because she opened the jar, not because she herself is evil. Furthermore, one might ask whether Epimetheus, by accepting the gift he has been warned against, is just as culpable as Pandora herself in bringing evil upon men. This elision provides strong support for the reading (Sissa 1990, 15455; Zeitlin 1990) that the jar
is
Pandoraor rather Pandora's womb/vulvathe opening of which is the event that brings all evil into the world.
15
In Zeitlin's persuasive reading of the text, opening of the jar is breaching of Pandora's virginity,
and she is made wholly responsible, as it were, for this act as well!
The text refuses to record the first sexual act between a man and a woman, because by doing so it would have to reveal that which it seems determined to suppress, the simple fact that men are also agents in the performance of sex and thus at least equally responsible with women for whatever baneful effects sex is held to have.
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Female sexuality is, on this reading, the root of all evil. The fact that it is Pandora who opens the jar and not Epimetheus is only a further displacement of any possible guilt or responsibility for "the human condition" from the male to the female. The parable in the midrash seems to depend either on the Pandora story itself (Lachs 1974), or if not directly on it, then on similar folkloristic motifs of the woman as source of evil in the world. There are, however, crucial incongruities in the relationship of this story to its intertext:
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| | 15. For a similar interpretation arrived at by other means, see Sissa (1990, 15456).
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