Loraine Haywood
Conjoint Fellow, The University of Newcastle, Australia
E-mail: loraine.haywood@uon.edu.au
Special Issue on Diseases, Death and Disorder, 2020
Abstract
Hesiod used the dragon Queen Tiamat as a foundation for his mythic Pandora. Tiamat belongs to a theogony in the supremacy of Patriarchal gods in a political contest for the throne. Hesiod transforms Pandora from the place of the goddess in the cultures of the ancient world, to her creation by the gods as punishment, and domesticated. She has a jar that is the knowledge of evil. These Western foundations form the attitudes toward women crystallised in Genesis, Eve is the fallen agent who wants knowledge of good and evil. In the ages of the world this nostalgia for a past Eden, or a golden age, existed in an era of the rise of patriarchal dominance. The mythic fall into mortality, disease, and toil came about by a woman.
Two viruses are circulating in the world: neoliberal capitalism and COVID-19. How can both pandemics be overcome? If we can ever emerge from our caves perhaps it is an eco-curve that would be most beneficial. Returning to old formulas and prosperity in economic consumer salvation will not change human slavery to capitalist gods, encroachment and ecological destruction which lead to the further release of ancient evils.
Keywords
Pandora, Pandemic, Eden, Nostalgia, Shi Zhengli, Capitalism, neoliberal, Trump, Democracy, Wuhan
Introduction
In Genesis, the Garden of Eden was a mythic “binary code[of] elementary binary distinctions, along with mediating categories like serpents” (Hampden-Turner 22). The myth places human beings within a context of competing players in the origins of human consciousness. This “nostalgia for Eden” (Eliade 207), that looks back from a fallen world of toil, disease, and death, to a past of wholeness is the same reminiscences of Hesiod in Works and Days and Theogony. His mythical Pandora was written in a time of change from Goddess-centred religions to patriarchal constructions. She represents a liminal space of a shift, a great change, as “a double-faced female Janus” (Springborg 494). Her literary construction looks forward and backwards on the religious and social world in transition. Pandora had queenly beginnings in ritual honours, but as women lost their prestige and place in goddess cultures, it was to her knowledge and discovery of “ills… and grim cares” (Hesiod 39) that became the founding narrative.
Pandora was blessed by the gods who bestowed all their gifts on her by the command of Zeus. This he devised as a punishment inflicted on human beings because Prometheus gave them the gift of fire. Pandora as the all-gift, shares a role in our current context with the status of Shi Zhengli and the COVID-19 pandemic. Searching in the caves of China for the coming plagues for humankind, her discovery opened the jar to the knowledge of evil.
The Pandora’s Box theory of the outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic is not just America and Australia’s political attempt to divert attention via a counter-narrative, it is the reassertion of patriarchy. A return of the war of opposites between a goddess culture of creativity and human endeavour, and the coded phallic word of law. The world circulates in mythological spheres, particularly in the West, of its dominance and progress but it is in the twenty-first century that these leaders have found a Pandora in the Virologist, Shi Zhengli.
More ancient than Hesiod’s Pandora, SARCoV-2 is the evolution of the surviving remnants of a past age of simple bacterial life, that returns as the symptom, a disease known as COVID-19. What slipped or passed through the streets of Wuhan in China was just as deadly as what passed through Western rhetoric on its causes. Western leaders found a Pandora. Adorned in her combat gear to face the chimera Zhengi-Li Shi looked for a hero while the misogynistic, moronic gods in the poisoned fruit of capitalism waged war on life. Without her scientific research and experts like her in the world, the future symptoms of our ecological destruction will return from the past.
The result of human praxis on the ecology of the world is an answer of the Real. Our social reality is just as fragile, as Slavoj Žižek explains, “This social reality is then nothing but a fragile, symbolic cobweb that can at any moment be torn aside by an intrusion of the real” (1991, 17). The fabric of society has been ruptured and torn, but it cannot be allowed to return to the fruits of its own collapse.
Through creation myth and the fall of the goddess, in Western foundational texts such as Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days and Biblical texts, serpents, women, gods, work, diseases, and human praxis, can be compared to our current context. Mythical, ideological, economic, technological, and biological viruses infect the planet. As the world explores origins it is perhaps timely to engage in a mythic response.
Origin Stories: Biblical, Babylonian, and Hesiod
When God confronts Adam about his disobedience to the commandment to not eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, his reply is to devolve responsibility for his own agency and blame Eve. In Genesis 3 it is all the fault of “the woman”. Likewise, Hesiod blames women for toil through a nostalgia for a golden age where the gods and men lived in harmony spending time in luxurious repose. This type of absent hedonism enjoined in Hesiod and Genesis, is the lament of capitalist structures that rely on human labour to service the economy. With the fall in human production during the pandemic, the economy’s throat cut, Western leaders looked to advertise their strengths by finding someone to blame. The result was a rise in patriarchal hubris in the face of primordial returns. Whether this virus is human-made or not, our incursion on the frontiers are transgressions against all living things.
Ancient authors (Hesiod, Aeschylus, Apollonius) declare that Prometheus, as the god of knowledge and forethought, bestowed on humankind the gift of fire stolen from the gods. Zeus devised a counter-gift as a punishment for men, commissioning the creation of women. As the first woman created at the request of Zeus, Pandora was bestowed with all the gifts of the gods. Hesiod created in his myth of Pandora “a type of equivalent of an earth goddess/dragon lady Tiamat (Springborg 490). Enuma Elish is a Babylonian political myth that traces the fall of the goddess and the triumph of patriarchy. The myth of Pandora has a similar trajectory as it domesticates the goddess in a misogynistic vein. Pandora “opened the earth and released its power” (Marquardt 290).
Springborg considers “The icons of queenly power, relics of the great goddesses of the heroic age, portrayed in east Mediterranean and Near Eastern foundation myths may be the last instance of the powerful woman figure that our civilisation records” (490). The universal tendency of patriarchy is to dethrone the goddess, and as the myth of Pandora manifests it is a type of “fall” (Springborg 490). In the Book of Genesis, female creative power is used by Yahweh in the Garden of Eden’s mythology displaying his omnipotent power in an appropriation and “the use of female procreative imagery as symbolic of male political power” (Springborg 489).
Finding Pandora
Caught in the political games of phallic omnipotent power, Janus-like Shi Zhengi looks both forward and backward in the caves and in her laboratory in Wuhan. Figuratively looking into the jar and staring at diseases that could be let out on humankind. The patriarchal solution to this mythic goddess is to break her ties to Promethean forethought and create a Pandora (someone to blame).
Shi Zhengi was accused of opening Pandora’s jar, and labelled as Bat-woman. As the Director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology she has been targeted for her discoveries of corona viruses in bats and the recombination with other species that result in Chimeras. Now the world has found a Pandora. This is misogynistic fantasy at its purest, it does not deny that things escape from the jar, but the Western world exploits all the world’s resources for the wealthy few. This includes American involvement in labs throughout the world. This mask or label of Bat-woman is the fantasy that there is something behind the mask, some hidden truth (Zizek 2007, 114) that must be discovered, but all the research from the Institute was published and is freely available on the internet.
Shi Zhengi has become a mythic Pandora, accused of opening the jar and letting out diseases on the world. The Patriarchal Western world has evoked the misogynistic rhetoric of Hesiod in their attitude and accusation to cast her under the omnipotent gaze of capitalism, a religious order that has labelled her some type of sinister force that disrupts its smooth functioning.
Western Neoliberal capitalism wants an immediate return to its former state of enslavement, blaming Pandora for spoiling the continuation; the selling of the return to an Edenic wholeness of consumer capitalism. There is a direct correlation in the results of the lockdown between the control of the virus and the death of capitalism. Capitalism itself is a pandemic that has spread throughout the world enslaving and infecting whole countries.
The Temples of our Gods or Neoliberal Capitalism, The Problems of its Spreading Virus
In a return to a mythic past, Western democratic leaders became obsessed with finding a cause for the disease, a Pandora. Instead of understanding human praxis as the catalyst for all our woes, their economic conditioning will not allow them to disengage from the exploitation of the world. Western democratic society believes it is just, equal, and free while paradoxically living in obedience to the gods of the economy and the temples that ensure the preaching of its continuing doctrine and domination. While society condemns the experts, they listen to the moronic leaders of Western governments inflicting their toll on ecology. Western leaders even consider themselves as God’s instrument making everything they do permitted and sanctioned (Zizek 2007, 92). The pursuit of happiness in the hedonistic consciousness just leads to the misery of others where wealth is read as a sign of God’s favour.
Will we ever face the real problem? Governments, particularly Neoliberal governments, have stripped the natural environment and now climate change is overtaking us. It is our encroachment on the forests and human praxis that interferes with native species. In fact, one of the papers published by Wuhan Institute scientists noted the “recombination events from the cave in Yunnan… the nearest village to the bat cave we surveyed is only 1.1 km away, which indicates a potential risk of exposure to bats for the local residents” (Hu 19).
Is the pandemic a medical problem or an ecological, political, or cultural, and social issue? Shi Zhengli is not responsible for our social problems and our encroachments. World governments need to ensure the proper health standards in wet- markets and that zoning for housing gives adequate protection from close contact with native species. The world is consumed by tradition, culture and folktales that threaten our response. America spreads the neoliberal virus that there is only one God, that being money. But there is not much room at the top of the pyramid and only the obscenely wealthy exist there. However, salvation is offered to all through consumer spending, supported by the Holy Ghost of the economy. The market[s], Pharmaceutical companies and their medicines are the Saviours that keep the consumer religion humming, the slaves working; these are the crazy concerns of the world.
Mythic Time, American Colonisation, Disintegration and Disease
American exceptionalism is the ultimate myth and watching the disintegration resulting from the pandemic is the real test. Because of aggressive neoliberal capitalism and the closing of over 7,000 hospitals due to Trump’s funding cuts, extensive privatisation of services, particularly of health services, the outbreak overturned the lie of exceptionalism by demonstrating the Real of suffering and poverty. But let us not forget death… “There’ll be a lot of death unfortunately… there will be death” (Trump White House Press Conference, April 5, 2020). Paradoxically his neoliberal push to open is insisting like the serpent in the Garden of Eden “that you shall not die” and telling people to go back to work to keep the economy going. He is encouraging people to partake of what is forbidden, his words are poisoned fruit (Hampden-Turner 22). American citizens are victims of fanatical neoliberal policies that have been exponentially heightened during the pandemic. The country that boasts of its God-given right to be a beacon for civilisation, and the world, showed it was nothing other than an empty jar because the wealthy have made slaves of the underclasses. Witnessing the absolute poverty of its citizens and their struggle with death caused by those conditions was enlightening and frightening at the same time. The turmoil was heightened by the obscene President who incited citizens to ignore state directives for their safety. This obscene man is a Zeus-like figure: excessive, obsessive, powerful, jealous, a womaniser, wealthy and manipulative. He is an example of the political moron who ignores the advice of experts and turns to his own opinion as authoritative. His use of social media allows him to laugh at facts scorning our vain attempts to reveal truth. He embodies the cultural superego, the CEO of American myths, and dreams of his own significance, and American significance that has now passed.
Trump bombards the world with banal and stupid social media commentary, poisoned fruit. Media technologies harbour the Real of viruses where comments and mediated images are considered as “going viral”. Interestingly the spread of this Trump virus is due to the technological use of media for sophistry. Stephen Grosz considers that Trump “colonises the mind” (Freud Lives! How to Academy October 9, 2017), overwhelmingly dominating the discourse even if we do not want to catch whatever he says.
These neoliberal ideologies are a virus, a disease spread throughout the world. It converts people and gives them monetary value. Science can also be used to keep the slaves working to service the creation of wealth, such as cold and flu tablets designed so that people could continue to go to work while sick. Science is also militarised and used to make weapons. The casualisation of employment with no sick leave provisions and access to annual leave, as well as the crisis in housing requires a new world. America-style privatised health and lack of providing for their citizens via the repeals to Obamacare and Pandemic preparedness is a corporate failure. Instead of listening to or servicing America in their continued tripartite domination that follows the pattern of consumption/disaster/disintegration, the world needs to change headings from this collision-course to an eco-curve.
Western democracy employs mythic elements as fantasies to sustain fears of economic chaos, downturn, and lack of prosperity. Mythic time is a type of “sacred time where human beings are just creative effects of the gods” (Springborg 489). If we do not want to become just an effect of American policy and colonisation then we need to flee capitalism as an apocalyptic void. The world has been subsumed into a fantasy effect, a religion that preaches prosperity and salvation through economic models. We have become a creative effect of America and American myths of its own prosperity.
The pandemic feels like mythic time in its suspension of the reality of human praxis that has been shut-down to the scene of blue-skies; air pollution has dropped dramatically. Without our continued servicing of the gods of capitalism we also stop the destruction. Within our hands is the ability to construct a future of creative power without apocalyptic destruction. Wuhan will give up its secrets if we can confront the primordial time of the virus.
Conclusion
Hesiod and Genesis as foundation narratives in Western culture blame women for the ills of the world. Various world traditions involve appropriations of female creative power where women are evil agents. The political agenda of our current context provides interesting parallels to ancient shifts in primordial time and human consciousness. Politics is full of mediating serpent’s spruiking god-like knowledge as deceptions. These figures of colonisation do not accept any responsibility for the state of the world. The world is full of “ills… and grim cares” (Hesiod 39), the majority of which are human made and created. What was begun by white colonisation, considered as God-given rights to dominate, is complemented by the incursions in the technological sphere. Returning to Eden’s collapse that was a fall into division and disharmony where human relationships were divided by blame (Hampden-Turner 22).
The figure of Pandora was constructed in a world of change from a gynocentric universe, to the appropriation of female creative power in the rise of patriarchy. Her engagement with the ills of the world and grim cares that come upon humans seems appropriate in the current pandemic. But not in the way Western leaders want to use Shi Zhengli as a political Pandora.
As the Western world leaders focus on the economy that denies the realities of a changed world they turn to misogyny and nostalgia. To conceive of a world without slaves and the masters of capital is impossible. There is only hope left in the jar, maybe people will finally question human praxis in the age of the Anthropocene. Flattening the curve of the virus and re-emerging from the bat-cave could be an opportunity to create an eco-curve toward a new world.
Springborg considers that in Greek myth and Near Eastern monarchy were “queenly figures of great power” (488)and these were foundational archetypes before the codifying of law and the subsequent dethroning and relegating of women to the domestic sphere. Shi Zhengli has been framed in the same way Hesiod dethroned Pandora. The intervention of creator gods to appropriate women’s creative power in the myth of Pandora becomes replayed in the role of patriarchal government leaders. Their religious belief in the economy as salvation is the doom of our time. Shi Zhengli must continue her scientific study, only by looking in the jar at the ills that are coming our way can we be prepared for the next wave.
Works Cited
Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Translated by Willard R. Trask. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961.
Hesiod. Theogony and Works and Days. Translated by M. L. West. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Hampden-Turner, Charles. Maps of the Mind. New York: Collier Books, 1982.
Hu, Ben, Lei-Ping Zeng, Shi Zheng-Li, and et.al. “Discovery of a Rich Gene Pool of Bat Sars-Related Corona Viruses Provides New Insights into the Origins of SarsCornonavirus.” PLOS Pathogens 13, no. 11 (2017): 1-27.
Marquardt, Patricia A. “Hesiod’s Ambiguous View of Woman.” Classical Philology 77, no. 4 (1982): 283-91.
Springborg, Patricia. “Pandora and Hatshepsut: Ancient Archetypes in the Iconography of Kingship.” Australian Journal of Political Science 26 (1991): 488-509.
Žižek, Slavoj. How to Read Lacan. New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 2007.
Žižek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.
The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version with the Apocrypha : An Ecumenical Study Bible. 4th ed. Edited by Michael D. Coogan, Marc Z. Brettler, Carol A. Newsom and Pheme Perkins. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
How to Academy, “Freud Lives! Slavoj Zizek and Stephen Grosz.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XniIQaL1b8k. United Kingdom: YouTube, 2017.
Loraine Haywood is a Conjoint Fellow with the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. She has completed a Bachelor of Arts Degree and a Master of Theology (2017), at the University of Newcastle. Her research focus is embedded trauma in film and psychoanalytic geography. Her interests in psychoanalytical theory generally focus on the works of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and the extension of these theories in film studies by Todd McGowan, E. Ann Kaplan, and Slavoj Žižek. She considers the 9/11 as an irruption of “the Real” and a historical trauma in Western society and culture; representing suspension, the apocalyptic of our postmodern society.She is also interested in Biblical Christian master narratives that intersect storylines in popular culture.
She has published in the Seachanges Journal for Women Scholars in Religion and Theology, “Nostalgia for Eden”: Joseph Kosinski’s Oblivion, an Apocalyptic Genesis, (Vol. 7, 2016). University of Otago Working Papers, Reflecting Absence, Mediating the Real: Oblivion as a Requiem for 9/11, (Vol. 1: 2, 2018, 26-46). She has presented various conference papers and has several book chapters forthcoming.