The Hope

 

Via dei Fori Imperiali. ROME – 30 October 2020

“Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all.”
(Emily Dickinson)

Hope is said to be the last to die.

I also asked my friends in Malaysia and India, and it seems that the same saying is used there too.

But when I asked if they knew where this saying comes from, no one was able to answer.

Certainly language chews on itself, in constant and daily use, often making us lose all traces of its etymologies, such as words or idioms.

 

It's an ancient story, born within Greek mythology, and once again linked to Prometheus, of which I have already written.

This myth is narrated, in its most famous form, by Hesiod, in verses 90-105 of the “Works and days”: that is, Pandora's box.

Zeus, enraged by Prometheus' theft of fire, as a gift to the human beings he had created, punished him as I have already told. But the mighty Lord of the gods also reserved punishment for men.

To them he sent a lethal gift and the first woman was entrusted with the task of carrying with her, into the world, infinite suffering. He ordered Hephaestus to give birth to a beautiful girl, Pandora. Every god offered her a divine gift: beauty, virtue, skill, grace, cunning, ingenuity.

Pandora was given a jar (πίθος, pithos), which was supposed to contain wheat (βίος, bios), but which instead contained all the evils of the world. The evils would have had to remain sealed in the box, were it not that Pandora's curiosity led her to open the box and all evils were dispersed in the world, agglutinating humanity.

 

Only Elpis (ελπίς) or Spes, the Hope, the expectation or the thought of the present-future remained in the bottom of the vase.

When Pandora realized what she had done, she hastily closed the box and Hope could not get out, becoming the only content.

“But that female the great lid of the pain opened,
with mourning heart, among men, and the evils scattered there.
Only the fear of the future remained under the brink of pain,
into the unbreakable house, nor flew out the door,
because before Pandora vessel locked the lid,
like the Egyptian Jupiter, whom the clouds gather, imposed them.
But the other evils among men go astray,
because the land is full of troubles, the sea is full.”

 

John William Waterhouse. “Psyche Opening the Golden Box”, 1903

There are several versions of this story.

There is that of Aesop in his “Fables”.

Where Zeus delivers directly to men the vase full of all useful things, with a stone on it. But you know, man is unable to control himself, and does not waste time opening the vase, making all the things Zeus put inside fly in the sky, towards the abode of the gods – except Elpis, the only thing left inside the vase, when the vase was closed again.

From that moment only Elpis – Hope – is among us humans, promising to be able to one day return all the good things that were promised to us by the deities.

 

What is certain is that this myth has more ancient roots, moreover the root Spes is in common with the Sanskrit spa, which means “to strive towards a goal”. The primitive myth is that of the goddess Pandroso, or Pandoro, Pandora, names of the same goddess in several Greek cities.

The Goddess entrusted three priestesses with baskets of figs, but in only one of them there were instead snakes.

Not surprisingly, in Athens, a procession was celebrated in which the priestesses carried baskets of snakes into the basement of the temple.

This ancient link between the Great Mother and the serpent is the basis of the great difference between matriarchal and patriarchal society: in the matriarchal society the transgression of a prohibition is rewarded while in the patriarchal one it is punished.

The male God is Law – the female Goddess is Knowledge.

The priestess who found the snake in the basket was considered the favorite and was the only one entitled to oracle in the name of the Goddess.

 

But here we are talking about ancient societies that are lost in the mists of time.

 

What is interesting to consider about the Pandora myth is the camouflage of the gifts in the box.

Here is the cruel deception of Zeus: the “evil” is presented as a gift, and when man realizes that in reality those gifts were “evils” it is too late.

In order to collect the bios, the nourishment, and fill the jar with “goods”, man must face the fatigue and suffering now widespread everywhere. Only work, perseverance and diligence can fill the jar of life with goods and nourish it with good hopes, thus giving human existence moments of serenity in the midst of the evils spread by Pandora as desired by Zeus as punishment.

 

Again, it's no coincidence that Hope was also in the box containing the evils for humanity, making it also an evil enclosed within.

This tells us how Elpis had a double meaning for the Greeks: in fact, hope from one side allows man to look away from his destiny of suffering and death, but at the same time it's a smokescreen that prevents him from seeing clearly. the future, the reality and truth of things.

 

Spes, the Hope

In short, this is the origin of the way of saying that Hope is the last to die, or rather, the last to abandon human beings afflicted by suffering.

And man's ontological suffering is fear for his own future.

As the philosopher Edmund Husserl said, hope is typical of man since he “is a being who plans his future”, and his greatest desire is that of a better and happier life than the present.

It's to realize this desire that we use our thoughts and imagination: “We think of the possible because we hope to be able to realize it. Hope is the foundation of thought ”. (Husserl)

 

The problem is that thinking about the future, despite hope (or perhaps because of hope, in the evil meaning desired by Zeus), generates more fear than anything else.

 

Why all this?

Because a few afternoons ago I was walking through one of the most famous streets in Rome, Via dei Fori Imperiali, a street that at 5pm is usually crowded with people.

Instead that afternoon it was totally deserted, with one or two people staggering in the winter darkness at the gates, under the ancient stones of the Colosseum.

It made me think about the history of Spes.

How our lives are now indelibly marked by the conflict between hope and disillusionment, between project and fear.

Every time this pandemic seems to have come to an end, giving us back those normal lives that were promised to us after paying the death toll, it returns instead to bite, to crush us into the corner of our fears and loneliness.

 

Like an endless dark road.

 

This was Zeus’ most astute deception: playing on man's curiosity and his habit of transgressing prohibitions, and giving a last goddess who was the mirage of a life not only afflicted by evils, but also full of “hope”.

 

But Hope is one of the many evils in Pandora's box, the latest and the most subtle.

 

And while we tell ourselves that hope is the last to die, it is we who fall one by one, into the physical and symbolic death of our loneliness and fear of the other.

 

Much better to focus on the present moment.

To survive, and to seek our happiness in the present moment, because this is the only certain, and no raging deity will be able to deprive us of it.

 

As the ancient priestesses did: grabbing the snake by the throat.

Olivier Föllmi. Tibet, 1994

Italian version