Cosmic egg
The idea that the world began as an egg: its shell split into sky and earth, or the first god hatched from it. It is told in the Upanishads and the Puranas, in Orphic poetry, in ancient Egypt, in the Finnish Kalevala and in one Chinese account of Pangu.
Meaning
In the Chandogya Upanishad (3.19) the world was at first non-being; it became being, grew, “turned into an egg”, lay for a year and split. “One of the two eggshell-parts became silver, one gold. That which was of silver is this earth. That which was of gold is the sky.” The membranes became the mountains and the clouds, the veins the rivers, the fluid within the ocean (Robert Ernest Hume’s translation, 1921). The Puranas tell it in their own way: in the Vishnu Purana the elements combined into an egg that “gradually expanded like a bubble of water”, resting on the waters, the dwelling of Vishnu in the form of Brahma. Its translator H. H. Wilson noted that every Purana gives a similar account, with the epithet “golden”, as the Laws of Manu do. The other tellings, Greek, Egyptian, Finnish and Chinese, belong to their own traditions, and the egg in each does something different.
Origin and history
The Greek egg is Orphic. In Aristophanes’ comedy The Birds the chorus sings that in the beginning “black-winged Night laid a germless egg in the bosom of the infinite deeps of Erebus, and from this, after the revolution of long ages, sprang the graceful Eros with his glittering golden wings”. Jane Ellen Harrison, in her Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903), called this “pure Orphism”: Homer knows no world-egg, and Hesiod, who tells of Chaos, Night and Eros, leaves the egg out. Damascius, in his Inquiry concerning first principles, preserved a line he credited to Orpheus himself: “What time great Chronos fashioned in holy aether / A silver-gleaming egg.” Harrison concluded that the cosmic egg “was Orphic”, and was probably a doctrine taught in the mysteries and based on an old rite.
Egypt had more than one egg. E. A. Wallis Budge, in The Gods of the Egyptians (1904), writes of the earth god Seb, or Geb, represented by the goose that was supposed to have laid “the great cosmic egg”. He also reports the reading of the Egyptologist Brugsch, that creation began with an egg formed out of the primeval waters, from which came the light of day, the sun god Ra. At Memphis the god Ptah bore the title “creator of the egg[s] of the Sun and Moon”, and Donald Mackenzie adds that his priests showed him turning the egg on a potter’s wheel.
The Finnish epic Kalevala opens with an egg. In its first rune, as John Martin Crawford translated it, a duck looking for a nest settles on the knee of the daughter of the Ether, floating in the sea, and lays six golden eggs and one of iron. When the maiden’s knee burns and she shakes the nest, the eggs fall and break: from the lower half of the egg grows the earth, from the upper half the heavens, from the white the moonbeams and from the yellow the sunshine.
In China, Mackenzie records two versions of the first being, Pangu (P’an Ku): in one he is born of a long division of “something” into male and female parts; in another, Pangu emerged from the cosmic egg.
One egg or many?
Comparing the eggs is an old habit, and so is reading one meaning into all of them. Jacob Bryant, in 1774, thought the egg in the mysteries was an emblem of Noah’s ark, “in which were preserved the rudiments of the future world”. Wilson, translating the Vishnu Purana, took the wide spread of the idea as proof of its age, but set aside the question of whether it typified the ark, “as Bryant and Faber suppose”. Mackenzie warned that the egg myth called primitive might come from a much later stage of human development than writers on “the workings of the human mind” assumed. The sources themselves tell different stories: a shell that becomes earth and sky in India and Finland, a winged god hatching in the Orphic poems, a god who makes the egg at Memphis.
The serpent coiled round the egg
The picture of a serpent wound round an egg reached modern books from Bryant. It is Plate IV of his second volume (1774), facing page 242, captioned Ophis et Ovum Mundanum, Tyriorum, “the serpent and the world egg of the Tyrians”, and his list of plates says it was copied from Vaillant’s Coins of the Colonies. The plate is signed by the engraver James Basire, to whom William Blake was then apprenticed, as Victoria University Library in Toronto notes of its copy. The coin is real: the numismatist Gabriela Bijovsky (2007) writes of “a serpent coiled around an oval object on a well-known coin type” of Roman Tyre, and takes the word AION, eternal time, on an unpublished coin of the city to suggest that the motif “reflects cosmic Orphic principles”.
The Orphic accounts that survive have the serpent make the egg. Athenagoras, a Christian writer some three hundred years before Damascius, reports that in Orpheus water and mud produced “a dragon with the head of a lion growing to it”, with the face of a god between, named Heracles and Kronos, and that this Heracles “generated an egg of enormous size”, which burst in two: the upper part became heaven and the lower part earth. Damascius gives the same theogony, which he credits to Hieronymus or Hellanicus: a serpent with the heads of a lion and a bull and wings on its shoulders, called ageless Chronos or Heracles, with Necessity living beside him (in Junyan Song’s translation, 2024). Bryant used Athenagoras: in his first volume he writes that Hercules, “the same as Chronus”, was said to have produced the mundane egg and was represented in the Orphic theology as a lion and a serpent, “and sometimes of a serpent only”. In the texts the serpent makes the egg; the coil round it is the Tyrian coin’s.
The druids’ serpent’s egg
A different egg is tied to serpents. Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History, describes an egg prized by the Gauls, made, he was told, by snakes twined together, which the druids said the serpents threw into the air by their hissing. Pliny said he had seen one, round and as large as a moderate apple, and scoffed at the claim that it won lawsuits. It has nothing to do with the creation of the world.
Read next
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- Pliny’s druids’ serpents’ egg, a different egg from the cosmic oneSnake symbolismIn Genesis the serpent tempts Eve, and Moses raises a bronze serpent on a staff; in Roman legend the god Aesculapius, “the restorer of health” in Ovid's words, comes to Rome as a serpent; in Norse myth the Midgard serpent circles the world biting its own tail. The Cherokee regard snakes as supernatural beings, to be neither killed nor named carelessly.
See also
Geb, Tree of life, Labyrinth, Crescent moon, Spiral, Moon gods and goddesses.
Sources
- The Thirteen Principal Upanishads (Hume translation), Robert Ernest Hume, 1921, Oxford University Press, Introduction, quoting Chandogya Upanishad 3.19
- The Vishnu Purana: A System of Hindu Mythology and Tradition, Translated by H. H. Wilson, 1840, John Murray, London (Internet Archive, Digital Library of India copy), Book I, chapter 2, and note 30
- The Birds, Aristophanes, The Birds (translator uncredited), Project Gutenberg, parabasis of the chorus
- Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, Jane Ellen Harrison (Cambridge University Press, 1903), Project Gutenberg, Chapter XII, “The World-Egg”
- The Gods of the Egyptians, Volume I, E. A. Wallis Budge, 1904, Methuen, London (Internet Archive), Vol. I, pp. 109, 288, 500
- Myths of China and Japan, Donald A. Mackenzie (Gresham, 1923), Project Gutenberg, Chapters II and XIX
- Kalevala: The Epic Poem of Finland, Translated by John Martin Crawford, Project Gutenberg, Rune I, Birth of Wainamoinen
- A New System, or, An Analysis of Ancient Mythology, Volume II, Jacob Bryant, 1774, Internet Archive, p. 323; list of plates, Plate IV (facing p. 242; Internet Archive leaf n271)
- The Natural History of Pliny, Volume 5, Pliny the Elder, translated by John Bostock and H. T. Riley, Project Gutenberg, Book XXIX, chapter 12, “Serpents’ eggs”
- A New System, or, An Analysis of Ancient Mythology, Volume I, Jacob Bryant, 1774, Internet Archive, p. 480
- Deus Lunus Heliopolitanus; Ophis et Ovum Mundanum, Tyriorum; Deus Lunus Carrhenorum., Bentley-Blake Collection, Blake no. 699 v. 2, Victoria University Library, University of Toronto, resource details and notes
- AION: A Cosmic Allegory on a Coin from Tyre?, Gabriela Bijovsky, Israel Numismatic Research 2 (2007), pp. 143–156, abstract, Israel Numismatic Society, INR 2 abstracts
- A Plea for the Christians, Athenagoras, translated by B. P. Pratten (Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 2, 1885), New Advent, chapter 18
- Is Lion-Headed Man Orphic Chronos?, Junyan Song, ΣΧΟΛΗ 18.1 (2024), Novosibirsk State University, pp. 57–59 and n. 7
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from circles or curves and waves.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 8, 2026. How we research
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