I need to close Pandora’s box … er, I mean jar

I also need to rewrite an old bad pun:
When is a box not a box?  When it’s a jar.

But that’s just part of the problem.  The now defunct department store, Eaton’s (Eaton, pour le francophonie, qui est plus discombobulated par une apostrophe et une ess) once had a Christmas ad on TV that started with a voice over saying something about how when the elevator doors opened on to the toy department, or maybe it was coming down on Christmas morning, it reminded him of Pandora’s box opening.  And he sounded happy about it.

What reminded me of this idiotic ad campaign was that I just got a Google ad thingy from a jewellery company called Pandora’s, who suggested that if I clicked on their cyber box, it would reveal a charm.  12 charms, for the 12 evils, I mean daze of Christmas.

Now I am a pretty big fan of Christmas, not just because Jesus was born in March, but because it is a fun time for the family, basically.  And I like having a tree in the living room.  A very bizarre cultural artifact and much to be desired and emulated.   It should just grow there, all year round.  But I digress, just didn’t want to get accused of bashing Christmas, even though it does drag attention away from the more important birth of Xty, the day before.

But why would anyone want you to associate Christmas with letting loose all the evils of the world, and hope this would make you want to go shopping?  Or are they just astonishingly uncurious and just didn’t notice.  Did no one vet the ad campaign?  Ask the guy who designed it just who this Pandora chick was anyway?  And if they had bothered to look, they would have found it was a jar after all and she really should have kept it shut:

Pandora’s box is an artifact in Greek mythology. The “box” was actually a large jar (πιθος pithos) given to Pandora (Πανδώρα) (“all-gifted”), which contained all the evils of the world. When Pandora opened the jar, the entire contents of the jar were released, but for one – hope.  Today, opening Pandora’s box means to create evil that cannot be undone.*

It is a colossal blunder, and it has bothered me for years.  I mean the ad campaign.

As to Pandora and her jar, well it is a silly story.   Why would hope and evil be trapped in a jar anyhow?  Why always blame women for unleashing evil on the world?  [Are you sure you want to ask that, ed.?]  But I am being rhetorical …  The connection between Pandora and Eve was actually first explored in remarkable detailed by Jean Cousin the Elder in about 1550:

According to the Louvre write up, where this lovely work hangs:

Eve, guilty of original sin as related in the Book of Genesis, is here equated with Pandora who, in Greek mythology, spread all the evils that have afflicted mankind by curiously opening the box entrusted to her by the gods. When King Henri II entered Paris in 1549, Jean Cousin decorated a triumphal arch with an allegory of the city as ‘The New Pandora dressed as a nymph’.!

Why being the new Pandora would be a good thing I am not sure … and I really don’t want to get into the symbolism of entering the city through an arch decorated as Pandora’s anything.

But whatever use you do make of the myth, let’s at least keep a lid on it having been an excellent idea for Pandora to open her box or leave anything ajar.

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* http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Pandora_s_box.html
! http://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/eva-prima-pandora