Pyxis Quotes

Magnus Bane walked some distance into the Sanctuary, shaking his head as he studied the scene before him. “I want to know what you’re doing, but I must confess I’m afraid to find out,” he said. “A spot of demon-summoning, I gather?” “It’s a bit complicated,” said James. “Hello, Magnus. It’s good to see you.” “Last time I saw you, you were facedown in the Serpentine,” Magnus said cheerfully. “Now you’re fiddling with a Pyxis. I see you have decided to follow in the long Herondale tradition of poor decision-making.” “So have I!” said Lucie, determined not to be left out.

It’s called the Pyxis,” said Raven. “Don’t let the fancy name intimidate you. It just means ‘box’ in one of those Old Earth languages, Roman or Spanish or Klingon…

Why did Erasmus[…] transform the image of a woman yielding to the temptation of an enormous storage jar into the image of a woman carrying with her a small pyxis [box] ?” Dora and Erwin Panofsky, Pandora’s Box: The changing aspects of a Mythical Symbol, p. 18

It’s surely not enough to blame the whole thing on Erasmus. Countless translators have made countless errors in texts through the ages, and most of them have had nothing like the resonance or impact that Erasmus’ mix-up of pithos and pyxis has had. But somehow, he coined an idea which has echoed through the centuries. Everything used to be okay, but then a single, irreversible bad decision was made, and now we all live with the consequences forever. It’s reassuring in a way: the problem was caused long before we were born and will persist long after our deaths, so there’s nothing we can really do about it. In the immortal words of Valmont in Dangerous Liaisons, it’s beyond my control. It allows us to be children again: injustice, cruelty and disease are all someone else’s fault, so it isn’t our problem to try and fix them.

The original Greek word was pithos, a sealed jar for storage. But in the sixteenth century, that word got bastardized into pyxis, which means ‘box,’ and it never got corrected.