Prometheus's Theogony: The Greek Creation Myth

Throughout the world, and throughout time, humans have created myths to explain the happenings of the natural world in a way they can understand. These myths are stories which are either written, usually in a holy book, or passed orally through generations. Whether any of these myths are true is not the topic of this paper; instead, this is to recognize just how related many of these myths are. A motif is a concept, idea, or situation which is repeated consistently among various stories, ideologies, or essentially anything which could have a repeated idea. The mythologies of ancient people are full of motifs; myths which were developed in places literally across the world from each other have the same explanations for the same natural occurrences.

The Titans came from the Earth and the gods from the Titans. When Zeus became the ruler of the universe after defeating his father Cronus, he gave the Titans Prometheus and Epimetheus the job of creating life. Epimetheus created animals first and foolishly gave them all the best gifts, such as body armor, speed, sharp teeth, and flight. When Prometheus went to create man, then, there were no gifts left to give him, so Prometheus did something special. He fashioned humans upright in the ways of the gods, and gave them the gift of fire so they could still be above the other animals. This fire could have been actual fire taken from the sun, or it could have been a metaphorical fire which gave humanity the “spark” of intellect. This much is not really known. It is clear, though, that humans were created last of all creation and were given gifts better than everything else, being in the image of the

God had created the luscious Garden of Eden and given the man and woman he created all the plants and animals they could ever want for food and also given them the gift of free will. His only request was that they not eat the fruit from a single tree, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, which was located in the center of the garden. He warned them that if they ate from this tree, the consequences would be bad. There was a serpent in the tree, though, who tricked the woman Eve into eating the fruit, and she, in turn, had her husband Adam eat it. When God saw they had eaten the fruit, he was angered and deprived Adam and Eve from paradise and essentially cursed humanity. Eve, followed by Adam, caused all of sin and evil to be released upon the human race.
In the Theogony, Pandora was the woman created by Zeus with the aid of the other gods to send to man as a punishment because Zeus was unhappy with their creation. The gods provided Pandora her namesake box within which each of the gods placed some sort of plague or evil. They then sent Pandora to Earth and told her never to open the box. Despite this, whether by curiosity or malintention, Pandora did open her box, and by doing so, released all of the evils into the world. Famines, plagues, war, death; all of these came out of the box and humans were left only with hope to survive the new world of