The following is from Sacrifice in Greek Myths: I. Prometheus, Greek and Egyptian Mythologies, compiled by Yves Bonnefoy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 123. It is intended as a serious, scholarly critique written by a reputable French professor of Mythology. No offence is implied. After all, it is a myth:
Furious at seeing, among men, the fire that he had determined to withhold from them, Zeus concocted a gift tailor-made for men. All the gods contributed to the design of the gift, which was the counterpart, the reverse, of the stolen fire: it would burn men, make them pine away, and do so not with flames but with strain, trouble, and anxiety. This gift was Woman, named Pandora, "gift of all the gods." She appears in the myth as the first woman and the ancestor of the female species. Until that moment, men lived without women. They arose directly out of the earth, which produced them all by herself, like crops. They knew nothing of birth by begetting nor of the old age and death that went along with it. They disappeared into a state of peace similar to sleep, still just as young as they were in the first days of their lives. The Woman was man's double and his opposite. The male was going to have to plow her to hide his seed within her womb if he wanted to have children, just as he had to till the earth to hide the grain within it if he wanted to have wheat, and just as he had to hide the seed of fire in the hollow of a fennel stalk if he wanted to kindle it on the altar. So Zeus moulded this Woman as a lure, a deep trap from which there was no escape. On the outside, she looked like an immortal goddess; irresistible grace and charm radiated from her beauty. On the inside, along with lying and deceit, Hermes inserted the soul of a bitch and the temperament of a thief. Divine in looks, human in speech and in her role as legitimate wife and mother, bestial in her insatiable appetites for sex and food, the appetites of a bitch, Woman summed up in her person all the contrasting elements of what it means to be human. She was evil, but a likable evil clothed in stirring beauty, a "kakon kalon," the kind of evil one can neither do without nor endure. If you marry her, her belly eats you out of house and home and lands you in poverty in your own lifetime. But if you do not marry and lack a female belly to receive your seed and nurture the embryo, you have no children to carry on your line, and as you cross the threshold of death, you are all alone. With Woman, good and evil, like the divine and the bestial, are merged and confused.
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