If hope seems lost, thats only because its locked up in a tiny box.

Sometimes the hunt for Artifacts needs to begin at the Metropolitan Museum of Art when you are out of leads. Walking around the recently refurbished Greek Galleries, there is the definitive feeling that all of the leaps the Greeks made were not purely from the inspiration of men. The otherworldly strive towards perfection that the Greeks sought strikes me more as an affliction than the rewards from building a cohesive civilization. Whatever the motivation, they sure left impressive relics behind.

New York looks east to the hazy Mediterranean palisades of Greece to reference its foundations of its cultural and political history. Is it any surprise that New York chose to also adopt the hedonism and bravado of the darker side of this early civilization, just like Rome before it? Like Rome, all roads lead to New York well, at least JFK but this path was paved by the Greeks.

Our democracy, the white columned faade of the New York Stock Exchange, even the average diners in Queens and the marble statues depicted on the sides of their paper coffee cups all of this we have imported from the ancient Greeks. If these pillars of our society were influenced by the Greeks, so were our gutters.

In a perfect world, Pandora would never have opened the box given to her. Prometheus had just stolen fire from the gods and Zeus was looking for any excuse to see if the audacious and meddling humans beneath him could truly handle a gift from the gods. So Zeus presented Pandora the first woman on Earth to the brother of Prometheus. But gifts from the gods should always be accepted with hesitation. For Zeus also gave Pandora a gift a tiny container he claimed to be filled with various gifts from the gods. But with this gift, he gave her the explicit instructions to never open it.

Too bad people are a curious lot. Sometimes we just shouldnt know whats inside our Nathans Hot Dogs. Had Prometheus brother Epimetheus truly embodied his name meaning afterthought, he wouldnt have jumped at the chance to marry Pandora. Had Pandora not been curious, hate, anger, fear, sickness, poverty, and every other bad thing the world presents us with would have never come to exist in our world. The astonished Pandora, who was frightened at what she had released, would also never have opened the box and prematurely closed it before hope could escape.

In this cultural legacy, we can blame the existence of evil on Pandora unleashing the wrath of the gods. Just as she inadvertently locked hope away, there are those who would try to open the box again and return hope to the world at least to counter all of the evil that had been unleashed during the dawn of man. But myth is one thing, reality another. If Pandoras Box truly exists, who knows if its full reserves of evil had actually been depleted before Pandora shut the box.

Identifying this object comes with some degree of difficulty. Historians debate whether or not it was either a classic upstanding Greek jar, commonly called a pithos, or an ornate wooden box. Based on the varieties of its physical characteristics and its ability to get the best of our curiosities, I would just as soon have presumed the box to be formless, representing what most ignites our desire to pursue the unknown. Recent evidence, however, leads me to believe it is a stone.

In a battle between fire and ice, obsidian is formed. When lava cools too rapidly to permit crystal growth, it forms into a sharp black glass. Stone Age cultures valued the material and fashioned it into arrowheads. On Easter Island, the monolithic Moai statue heads had obsidian inserted to represent the pupils of the eyes. There is darkness in the obsidian. In the darkness, there is the wisdom of the primal forces of our universe. If you break an obsidian stone in two, its edges are razor sharp to the degree that the edge can only be viewed microscopically. Breaking this stone in two is no minor feat, and it doesnt release the immense power that was required to form it.

Perhaps Pandora was the only woman meant to cut through the darkness.