Back to Home Page or Contents Page or Past and present beliefs or Index

Egg, Orphean

The cosmic belief of the legendary hero Orpheus. He declared, "God, the uncreated and incomprehensible Being, created all things, the ether proceeded from him; from this unshapely chaos and the dark night arose, which covered all things. The unshapen mass formed into the shape of an egg, from which all things have proceeded."

According to this belief, the whole universe has the form of an egg, and everything in it strives to attain that form. The Orphean concept of an universal soul permeating the whole of nature has some relationship to animal magnetism as well as other pantheistic beliefs (see Pantheism). A.G.H.