Valuing Pandora

When looking through history, the most equitable balance of male and female powers is found in pantheons, antiquity’s cultural projections of superpowers onto goddesses and gods. Take Concordia and Justitia, Hera and Aphrodite. Romans and Greeks had powerful women in their pantheons, deities personifying justice, agreement, motherly care, and beauty. Even better, some important versions of the flexible Roman and Greek divinity circles were almost perfectly gender-balanced, entailing top six gods and top six goddesses. My own favorite always was Pallas Athena, whom I like to liberally describe as the Greek city-goddess of brains, brawn, and domestic industry.  And then comes the shocking turn: enter Pandora. It seems that the first created woman always gets a disastrous reputation. Pandora and the box. Eve and the apple. But honestly, can one deny that these archetypes of women were set up in those narratives (by all means, guess by whom) to look