1nCnVqgFI

SECTION VI.
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 of its inner mystery. From
the earliest mental conceptions of man, it has been 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 naught save heat ; and
which, having gradually evolved into
a concrete, living creature, broke its shell, appearing to the outward
senses of all as a self-generated and self-created being; all this 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. In the beginnings, the "First
Cause" had no name. 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
Kalahansa, the "Swan in [Space and] Time." Becoming the Swan of
Eternity, Brahma, at the beginning of each Mahamanvantara, laj^s a
Golden Egg, which typifies the great Circle, or O) itself a symbol for
the Universe and its spherical bodies.
A second reason for the Egg having been chosen as the s5^mbolical
representation of the Universe, and of our Earth, was its form. It was
a Circle and a Sphere; and the ovi-form shape of our Globe must have
been known from the beginning of symbolog)'', since it was so universall}'
adopted. The first manifestation of the Kosmos in the form
of an Egg was the most widely diffused belief of Antiquity.
As Br3^ant