03/28/2024
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The Cosmic Egg is one of the most prominent symbols in comparative mythology, existing in numerous creation myths across different cultural traditions. While not mentioned in Hesiod’s Theogony, the egg is a distinct feature in the cosmogony of the Orphic tradition of Ancient Greece. The Orphic Egg, named after Orpheus, the mythical poet and founder of the Orphic Mysteries, was believed to be the first spark from which the universe was created.
“The egg is a germ of life with a lofty symbolical significance. It is not just a cosmogonic symbol — it is also a “philosophical one”. As the former it is the Orphic Egg, the world’s beginning; as the latter, the philosophical egg of the medieval natural philosophers, the vessel from which, at the end of the opus alchymicum, the homunculus emerges… the spiritual, inner, and complete man.”
- C. G. Jung, Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious
According to Orphism, in the beginning there was only darkness, and nothing existed except for two winged serpents, Chronos (the personification of time) and Ananke (the personification of inevitability and necessity), who together produced the Cosmic Egg. One of the serpents then wrapped around the egg until it hatched the brightly lit, golden-winged hermaphroditic deity Phanes, also called Protogonus which translates to ‘first-born’. Phanes created heaven from the top half of the shell and earth from the bottom half, assigning to the world the placement of the sun, moon and stars, and producing from himself all other Gods. He is representative of the Sun, “[bringing] light into the darkness and order out of chaos.” (Joscelyn, The Orphic Mysteries, p.25)
“The ancient symbol of the Orphic Mysteries was the serpent-entwined egg, which signified Cosmos as encircled by the fiery Creative Spirit. The egg also represents the soul of the philosopher; the serpent, the Mysteries. At the time of initiation, the shell is broke and man emerges from the embryonic state of physical existence wherein he had remained through the fetal period of philosophic regeneration.”
- Manly P. Hall
Jung, who studied and wrote about Orphism in his work Transformation and Symbols of the Libido would later come to incorporate this learning into his own ritualistic effort to revive the Orphic God Phanes, bringing into secular consciousness a renewed God image. Through his exploration of the human ego’s confrontation with scientific modernity, as detailed in the Red Book, Jung comes to view Phanes the light of a new consciousness and resplendent source of spiritual energy.