Pandora

There are often stories arguing what type of vessel Pandora’s “box” was. Is it a vase or an actual box? Neither.

The answer is the “vessel” is the incarnate body of Aphrodite that is attacked for her gifts, abilities, and power. The actions by these people damn them and their lines forever. The only way is to restore what was taken.

In my story, The Goddess Aped, Aphrodite was originally Pandora. She was the goddess with all of the gifts and powers. When she spurred the advances of the other Gods, Hephaestus made a golem replica of Aphrodite. However, because it was a golem, it was not formed with her unusual traits. He was a master craftsman and so the golem figure was more symmetrical than Aphrodite. He could never replicate the goddess no matter how hard or how often he tried.

This golem went by many names as she had several copies created over time. One of those incarnations was as Eve/Evie. Her name is close to the Arabic word “hivi,” which means “empty” or “failure,” or hawa which ancient Q’uaran Arabic means, “empty heart.” The reasons for this are 1) Eve is a vessel. Life is breathed into her but she has no soul or what the ancients called the “heart” or was in the location of the heart. The spiritual functions of the heart were eventually attributed to the soul. And 2) she is seen as a failure because she can never be like the god of her image, Aphrodite. She neither looks, talks, thinks, or acts like the goddess. They are completely different from one another and this is what begins the curse of original sin for Eve. How can Eve have original sin without a soul? Because she is still an incarnate mortal being with the essence of life-like a manufactured or artificial soul. The curse of jealousy is upon her and her life essence-the breath. And for her descendants, this curse travels through their blood and DNA.

It is with this life essence that she would be able to potentially reincarnate but never become immortal or a goddess. She also would never go to heaven or hell. Any time she dies, she must go to purgatory (murder, suicide, martyrdom, etc.) otherwise there is no anchor for her ether and she goes to her final death-becoming clay once more.

Other names for incarnations of Eve include Hestia. And Hesperia-named after Hephaestus himself. There was likely also Hebe, Athena, and others. However, the very first was  These were not gods but rather mortals who felt they were equal to gods. They believed they were fashioned after Aries and Aphrodite. In my story, the incarnations of Eve are hunting the incarnations of the earthly immortal embodiment of the goddess Aphrodite–to torment her, ruin her, shame her and essentially torture her in the hope of somehow getting her to forfeit being a goddess so it can be given to Eve. However, no gods gifts can be transferred, nor can immortality.  So, as revenge, Eve performs a number of acts that are then blamed on Aphrodite. One of these is the opening of a box given to Aphrodite among her other gifts.

While Zeus could not mitigate the damage done when Eve opened “the box”, he allowed Aphrodite to change her name. The blame was then placed on Eve by re-naming her Pandora-the first woman.  However, once she was no longer under the scrutiny of Zeus, Pandora continued with a series of name changes as she pursued Aphrodite through time. Given that she was a vessel, and she becomes increasingly more greedy, power hungry, angry and conniving, there stands the question of whether Eve still has the pure life-fore instilled in her upon her creation or, in an attempt to become immortal, did she accept a djinn or demon to inhabit her vessel in exchange for her prana?

One statue reflects my version of the story involving the goddess and the first woman. As Eve/Pandora stands with the open jar/box in hand, a cherub hangs on her arm-a sign that the little god tried to stop her.

In reading some debates on the word “hawa” for Eve, it was striking to once more see an intentional shift in the meaning of her name from being one with an empty heart (no soul) to one who has fallen. As readers will see in, The Goddess Aped, this is just one more example of a mortal trying to use subtle tricks and changes over time to alter the meaning of words or names so that the mortal then seems to be immortal. In this case, Eve would have used her contacts made over time as a queen and person in the community to influence language. Who wouldn’t want others to think they were a fallen angel rather than an empty vessel? And, of course, the female humans would be more than happy to comply since part of the curse of Adam and Eve is that the mortal women of her direct line are made in the image of Eve and all mortals are bound to the human condition.