The Power of Hope

First days of the first month of the year. Every beginning is a birth. In Genesis, God fashioned man out of clay and breathed the breath of life into his face. In the Greek cosmogony it is Prometheus who fashioned man and Athena, who breathed the breath of life on the clay image. The creation of women is more controversial, but no one disputes that when they appear on stage the plot is encouraged. The structure is similar: there is a prohibition, the woman disobeys and, with her act, causes the misfortune of the rest of humanity. It's a drama. In both cosmogonies there are translation errors related to the evils that will plague human beings. The forbidden fruit of the tree of good and evil, which Eve ate and gave Adam to eat, was not an apple. In his translation of the Bible from Hebrew to Latin, Jerome of Stridon used the term malum, which can be interpreted as "evil" and also as "apple."

Pandora, the first woman in Greek mythology, uncovered a jar that she had been forbidden to open, out of curiosity. From that jar (pithos), which a mistranslation by Erasmus of Rotterdam in 1508 turned into a "box" (pyxis), escaped the sufferings that were pressing to go out into the world to torment men. The procession of horrors that accompany our existence flew swiftly: shattered hearts, shattered bodies, shattered homes, shattered countries, shattered seas, shattered forests... In some versions it is Pandora's partner, Epimetheus, who opens the jar, but tradition has consecrated that the protagonist was a woman of extreme beauty, but with "the spirit of a bitch and a sly heart".

Alarmed, Pandora hurriedly capped the jar, but inside there was only hope, which had not had time to escape. Before woman was created, Prometheus is credited with granting men not only the gift of fire, but also "blind hopes" to prevent them from foreseeing their fate. With the change of character, misfortune changes into consolation. That sexist bias, which condemns the feminine and exalts the masculine, is older than coughing. It is the shovel that has dug the mass grave for women throughout history. But to read is to interpret, and a different reading of cosmogonic accounts raises another possible conversation with the world. What if Eve represents consciousness? What if, thanks to Pandora, the grim fabric of our existence improves?

Myths are sometimes very small stories, but they possess immense power. They have traversed centuries and cultures. They have gone through patriarchy, feminism, environmentalism... Nothing, not even artificial intelligence, has altered the darkness they carry, the light they project. What does it mean that hope was included among the evils in the myth of Pandora? In that echo chamber that is time, voices are raised for and against. Plato condemned her as a "foolish counsellor." For Nietzsche it was the worst evil, because it prolongs the torment of human beings. Aristotle, however, defended his utopian breath as "the dream of the waking man." Its ambivalence makes it all the more enigmatic.

Have hope, we say to each other in times of anxiety. It is the last thing to be lost, we affirm while laughter turns into shouts and schools into cemeteries, when where homes once stood there are smoking ruins and where the trees were green there is nothing but ashes. Hope is a match in the midst of darkness and, even when its brief flame burns our fingertips about to go out, we say: do not be afraid, there is light. And like the magician who utters abracadabra before performing his trick, we trust in the truth of the lie.

What is hope made of? Excitement, without a doubt. That imaginary flesh condemns it, but, at the same time, makes it part of the Good, with a capital letter, which is fiction. Imagining allows us to escape from reality, to transcend it. It's not a form of escape; On the contrary, it is the only way to undertake the only transformation that is in our hands. What will change will not be the world, but us. Hell won't go away, but it's not inevitable that it will devour us either. To get out, you have to go through it. Hope, said Isidore of Seville, is like the foot to walk, because where the feet are lacking there is no possibility of walking.

That pedestrian definition is an organic part of any beginning. From a new story from the beginning where Pandora becomes the guardian of something apparently so simple and, nevertheless, so difficult: to take one step and then another and then another. As the year progresses and chaos tries to take over history, it will be good to remember that hope is sheltered in the jar.

Nuria Barrios is a writer and translator.

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