Folklore Friday: Elpis, the Greek goddess of Hope

And her dangerous duality

What is hope? What is it good for? Fighting the good fight regardless of the outcome? Or sitting down and believing everything will turn out alright?

It’s something I’ve been wrestling a lot with lately. Especially this week as we’ve basically lost the American republic. What does it mean to have hope? So we’re looking at Greek mythology where Elpis is the goddess of hope. Her most prominent myth is that of Pandora’s jar.

(Not a box; box was a mistranslation).

Sculpture by Bertel Thorvaldsen, 1817 in the Thorvaldsens Museum in Copenhagen, Denmark.

The Myth

So, as the story goes, Prometheus (god of foresight) stole fire from Zeus so that humans could have access to the foundation for complex civilization. Metalworking, pottery, cooking… none of it is possible without fire. It’s what separates us from the animals and what pushes us closer to the wisdom and knowledge of the gods.

Except Zeus didn’t want humans developing anything that pushed us closer to the gods, so he got very upset and chained Prometheus to a mountain to have his liver eaten by an eagle every day.

Bummer.

But the story doesn’t end there.

Zeus isn’t content with just punishing Prometheus. He has to punish all of humanity so that’s where Pandora comes in.

Pandora was created as a mortal wife for Prometheus’ brother Epimetheus (god of hindsight). Epimetheus married her because he couldn’t foresee the trap. His brother warned him that Zeus was planning something bad, but Epimetheus wasn’t very clever and didn’t listen.

Pandora was given the jar as a wedding gift and told never to open it. What they don’t know was that all of the daimon had been trapped inside. Daimon are the personified spirits of abstract concepts like love, plague, generosity, doom, strife, and hope.

When Pandora inevitably opened the jar, the spirits escaped. The blessed spirits like charity, grace, and honesty, flew back to Olympus, but the dark spirits like doom, plague, hunger, and death were doomed to roam the Earth tormenting humanity until the end of everything.

Except Elpis.

Elpis stayed trapped inside the jar forever. But why Elpis?

Lawrence Alma-Tadema's water-colour of an ambivalent Pandora, 1881

Scholars disagree.

Some say hope kept in the jar is meant to be a merciful blessing to humanity. We still have access to hope. We can carry it around throughout life as if we own it. As if we can control it and use it to survive. That we might use it to strive against the other ills that plague us, allowing humanity to carry on through trying times. Truly, Zeus is a merciful god!

Other scholars say that it was Zeus’ final curse against humanity. While we cling to hope in our most trying moments, it leads us blindly into the dark where we sit idly and ignorantly thinking everything will be okay because we have hope.

“Everything will be okay,” we chant as the streets fill with tanks. While our neighbors are carted off to foreign prisons and our children are stolen away to labor camps. “We will be fine.”

Thus is the duality of hope.

So which is it? A blessing or a curse? Sometimes, I don’t think there’s much of a difference between the two.

But without hope entirely, we get lost in paralyzing fear unable to do anything. We have to be able to think success is achievable in order to achieve it.

Foresight

Let’s go back to Prometheus, because I think he is the key.

Foresight is what distinguishes the difference between hope that leads to death and hope that carries us towards survival and success.

We have to know and recognize what is coming in order to prepare. Having foresight allows us to make informed decisions as we prepare and plan. That is how we survive.

In the absence of foresight, we cling to hope, denying the inevitable. Sticking our head in the sand with repetitive chants of, “It will all be okay,” and that is how we die.

That is what I think the entire saga actually pertains to. It isn’t a matter of cursing Prometheus, Elpis, and humanity. It’s not a question of is Hope a blessing or a curse?

It’s the separation of Elpis and Prometheus that inevitably curses humanity. Without both, we are doomed to fail.

Current Events

In terms of everything happening right now, I am much more inclined to trust people who feel hopeless than I am people who feel hopeful. If you feel hopeful in that everything will turn out okay because… reasons? then you are not paying attention.

Sit with the feeling of hopelessness, but not for long. It is vital that we recognize that we are in extremely dangerous times and people will die. But hopelessness and helplessness are not the same thing.

Plan, organize, prepare.

Find the foresight and put your hope there.