In the beginning there was an empty darkness. The only thing in this void was Nyx, a bird with black wings. With the wind she laid a golden egg and for ages she sat upon this egg. Finally life began to stir in the egg and out of it rose Eros, the god of love. One half of the shell rose into the air and became the sky and the other became the Earth. Eros named the sky Uranus and the Earth he named Gaia. Then Eros made them fall in love. After much fighting the younger generation won. With Zeus as their leader, they began to furnish Gaia with life and Uranus with stars.
Soon the Earth lacked only two things: man and animals. Zeus summoned his sons Prometheus (fore-thought) and Epimetheus (after-thought). He told them to go to Earth and create men and animals and give them each a gift. As the sun god rode out into the world the next morning Prometheus took some of the fire and brought it back to man. He taught his creation how to take care of it and then left them. Another of his sons created a woman of great beauty, Pandor.
It’s certainly more interesting than the story of Genesis from the bible but a lot of the same items are there such as Pandora who is the equivalent to Eve in the bible and Pandoras Box is similar to the apple that Eve ate (i.e. representing human inability to avoid temptation).
Also 2 sons like the bible (Cain and Abel).
Remember this is thousands of years before the bible was written so probably a lot of the stories from the bible are modernized versions of this.
Pandoras Box is now used commonly as a euphemism for something that will cause trouble i.e you say don’t do that it will be like opening Pandoras Box.
No comments:
Post a Comment