The above is Maurice’s translation. Sir William Jones renders it:—“The sole, self-existent power, having willed to produce various beings from his own divine substance, first, with a thought created the waters, and placed in them a productive seed. That seed became an egg, bright as gold, blazing like the luminary with a thousand beams, and in that egg was born himself, in the form of Brahma, the great forefather of all spirits.”
Aristophanes, in his Comedy of the Birds, is thought to have given the notions of cosmogony, ancient even in his days. “Chaos, Night, black Erebus, and wide Tartarus first existed: there was neither earth, nor air, nor heaven; but in the bosom of Erebus black-winged Night produced an Aerial Egg, from which was born golden-pinioned Love (Phanes), and he, the Great Universal Father, begot our race out of dark Chaos, in the midst of wide-spreading Tartarus, and called us into light.”
We find this conception clearly embodied in one of the Orphic fragments, the Hymn to Protogones, who is equivalent to Phanes, the Life-giver, Priapus, or Generator.
“I invoke thee, oh Protogones, two-fold, great, wandering through the ether;
Egg-Born rejoicing in thy golden wings;
Bull-faced, the Generator of the blessed and of mortal men;
The much-renowned Light, the far celebrated Ericapæus;
Ineffable, occult, impetuous all-glittering strength;
Who scatterest the twilight cloud of darkness from the eyes,
And roam’st through the world upon the flight of thy wings,
Bringing forth the brilliant and all-pure light; wherefore I invoke thee, as Phanes,
As Priapus the King, and as the dark-faced splendour,—
Come, thou blessed being, full of Metis (wisdom) and generation, come in joy
To thy sacred, ever-varying mysteries.”
We have, according to these early notions, the egg representing Being simply; Chaos, the great void from which, by the will of the superlative Unity, proceeds the generative or creative influence, designated among the Greeks as “Phanes,” “Golden-pinioned Love,” “The Universal Father,” “Egg-born Protogones” (the latter Zeus or Jupiter); in India as “Brahma,” the “Great Parent of Rational Creatures,” the “Father of the Universe;” and in Egypt as “Ptha,” the “Universal Creator.”
The Chinese, whose religious conceptions correspond generally with those of India, entertained similar notions of the origin of things. They set forth that Chaos, before the creation, existed in the form of a vast egg, in which was contained the principles of all things. Its vivification, among them also, constituted the act of creation.
According to this and other authorities, the vivification of the Mundane Egg is allegorically represented in the temple of Daibod, in Japan, by a nest egg, which is shown floating in an expanse of waters against which a bull (everywhere an emblem of generative energy, and prolific heat, the Sun) is striking with his horns.
“Near Lemisso, in the Island of Cyprus, is still to be seen a gigantic egg-shaped vase, which is supposed to represent the Mundane or Orphic Egg. It is of stone, and measures thirty feet in circumference. Upon one side, in a semi-circular niche, is sculptured a bull, the emblem of productive energy. This figure is understood to signify the Tauric constellation, “The Stars of Abundance,” with the heliacal or cosmical rising of which was connected the return of the mystic reinvigorating principle of animal fecundity.”[6]
In the opinions above mentioned, many other nations of the ancient world, the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Phœnicians, and the Indo-Scythiac nations of Europe participated. They not only supported the propriety of the allegory, says Maurice, from the perfection of its external form, but fancifully extended the allusion to its interior composition, comparing the pure white shell to the fair expanse of heaven; the fluid, transparent white, to the circumambient air, and the more solid yolk to the central earth.
Even the Polynesians entertained the same general notions. The tradition of the Sandwich Islanders is that a bird (with them it is an emblem of Deity) laid an egg upon the waters which burst of itself and produced the Islands.