Pandora's Box

• 3 minute read
• Ages 8-12
• Moral Stories

When the gods made the first woman they gave her gifts, each one of them adding something.

Beauty, from one. Skill with her hands, from another. A gift for music, for persuasion, for kindness. Because everybody had given her something, they called her Pandora, which means all-gifted.

And the last god to come forward gave her a sealed jar and told her it was hers, and that she was never to open it.

He did not say why. He did not say what was in it.

Living with it

Pandora went to live in the world, and the jar went with her, and she put it in a room and did not open it.

For a long time.

It is important to be accurate about this, because most retellings are not: she did not open it immediately. She lived with it for years.

But it was in the house. It was there when she woke up and there when she went to bed, and nobody had told her what was inside it or why it mattered, and the not knowing worked on her the way not knowing does.

And one afternoon when the house was quiet she took the lid off, just enough to see in.

What came out

Everything came out.

Sickness came out, and old age, and hunger, and envy, and cruelty, and grief, and war, and every hard thing that people have had to live with ever since. They came out of the jar in a black stream and went out of the window and across the whole world in a few seconds, and could not be caught.

Pandora got the lid back on. Far too late, and she knew it, and she sat on the floor next to the jar and did not get up for a long time.

The last thing

And then she heard something moving inside it, still.

There was one thing left. It had not got out with the rest.

She sat there with her hand on the lid and had to decide, knowing exactly what had happened the last time she opened it, whether to open it again.

She lifted the lid.

And what came out last, moving slowly, after everything else had already gone into the world, was hope.

Which is why it is here at all, and why it arrived after the troubles rather than before them, and why it has always been the thing people have had to reach for deliberately.