(1) Rig-Veda, x. 90.
(2) Lobeck, Aglaophamus, i. 470. See also the quotations from Proclus.
(3) Gylfi's Mocking.
(4) Aglaophamus, p. 473.
In process of time Chaos produced an egg, shining and silver white. It is absurd to inquire, according to Lobeck, whether the poet borrowed this widely spread notion of a cosmic egg from Phoenicia, Babylon, Egypt (where the goose-god Seb laid the egg), or whether the Orphic singer originated so obvious an idea. Quaerere ludicrum est. The conception may have been borrowed, but manifestly it is one of the earliest hypotheses that occur to the rude imagination. We have now three primitive generations, time, chaos, the egg, and in the fourth generation the egg gave birth to Phanes, the great hero of the Orphic cosmogony.(1) The earliest and rudest thinkers were puzzled, as many savage cosmogonic myths have demonstrated, to account for the origin of life. The myths frequently hit on the theory of a hermaphroditic being, both male and female, who produces another being out of himself. Prajapati in the Indian stories, and Hrimthursar in Scandinavian legend—"one of his feet got a son on the other"—with Lox in the Algonquin tale are examples of these double-sexed personages. In the Orphic poem, Phanes is both male and female. This Phanes held within him "the seed of all the gods,"(2) and his name is confused with the names of Metis and Ericapaeus in a kind of trinity. All this part of the Orphic doctrine is greatly obscured by the allegorical and theosophistic interpretations of the late Platonists long after our era, who, as usual, insisted on finding their own trinitarian ideas, commenta frigidissima, concealed under the mythical narrative.(3)
(1) Clemens Alexan., p. 672.
(2) Damascius, ap. Lobeck, i. 481.
(3) Aglaoph., i. 483.
Another description by Hieronymus of the first being, the Orphic Phanes, "as a serpent with bull's and lion's heads, with a human face in the middle and wings on the shoulders," is sufficiently rude and senseless. But these physical attributes could easily be explained away as types of anything the Platonist pleased.(1) The Orphic Phanes, too, was almost as many-headed as a giant in a fairy tale, or as Purusha in the Rig-Veda. He had a ram's head, a bull's head, a snake's head and a lion's head, and glanced around with four eyes, presumably human.(2) This remarkable being was also provided with golden wings. The nature of the physical arrangements by which Phanes became capable of originating life in the world is described in a style so savage and crude that the reader must be referred to Suidas for the original text.(3) The tale is worthy of the Swift-like fancy of the Australian Narrinyeri.
(1) Damascius, 381, ap. Lobeck, i. 484.