the mundane egg

“Whence this universal symbol?

 
The Egg was incorporated as a sacred sign in the cosmogony of every people on the earth, and was revered both on account of its form and its inner mystery.

 
From the earliest mental conceptions of man, it was known as that which represented most successfully the origin and secret of being.

 
The gradual development of the imperceptible germ within the closed shell; the inward working, without any apparent outward interference of force, which from a latent nothing produced an active something, needing nought except heat;

 
and which, having gradually evolved into a concrete, living creature, broke its shell, appearing to the outward senses of all a self-generated, and self-created being – must have been a standing miracle from the beginning.

 
The secret teaching explains the reason for this reverence by the Symbolism of the prehistoric races.

 
The “First Cause” had no name in the beginning. Later it was pictured in the fancy of the thinkers as an ever invisible, mysterious Bird that dropped an Egg into Chaos, which Egg became the Universe.

 
Hence Brahma was called Kalahamsa, “the swan in (Space and) Time.” He became the “Swan of Eternity”, who lays at the beginning of each Maha-manvantara a “Golden Egg”.

 
It typifies the great Circle, or O, itself a symbol for the universe and its spherical bodies.”

 

H. P. Blavatsky