But there are myths which speak for themselves. In this class we may include the double-sexed first creators of every Cosmogony. The Greek Zeus-Zên (Æther), and Chthonia (the Chaotic Earth) and Metis (Water), his wives; Osiris and Isis-Latona—the former God also representing Æther, the first emanation of the Supreme Deity, Amun, the primeval source of Light; the Goddess Earth and Water again; Mithras, the rock-born God, the symbol of the male Mundane Fire, or the personified Primordial Light, and Mithra, the Fire-Goddess, at once his mother and his wife; the pure element of Fire (the active, or male principle) regarded as light and heat, in conjunction with Earth and Water, or Matter (the female or passive element of cosmical generation).[304]
All these are records of the primeval divine Hermaphrodite.
Stanza VI. The Evolution Of The “Sweat-Born.”
22. The evolution of the three Races continued. 23. The Second Race creates the Third and perishes.
22. Then the Second evolved the Egg-born, the Third.[305]The Sweat grew, its Drops grew, and the Drops became hard and round. The Sun warmed it; the Moon cooled and shaped it; the Wind fed it until its ripeness. The White Swan from the Starry Vault[306] overshadowed the big Drop. The Egg of the Future Race, the Man-swan[307] of the later Third (a). First male-female, then man and woman (b).
(a) The text of the Stanza clearly implies that the human embryo was nourished ab extra by Cosmic Forces, and that the “Father-Mother” furnished apparently the germ that ripened; in all probability a “sweat-born egg,” to be hatched out, in some mysterious way, disconnected from the “double” parent. It is comparatively easy to conceive of an oviparous humanity, since even now man is, in one sense, “egg-born.” Magendie, moreover, in his Precis Élémentaire de Physiologie, citing
A case where the umbilical cord was ruptured and perfectly cicatrized,
yet the infant was born alive, pertinently asks: