The egg is a germ of life with a lofty symbolical significance. It is not just a cosmogonic symbol -- it is also a "philosophical one". As the former it is the Orphic Egg, the world's beginning; as the latter, the philosphical egg of the medieval natural philosphers, the vessel from which, at the end of the opus alchymicum, the homunculus emerges... the spiritual, inner, and complete man.
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Jung, Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious
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When I first was in college, in a used book store in an out-of-the-way place, I came across a thick, black book titled, The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious. I had absolutely no idea what the title meant, nor had I heard of Carl Jung except in passing, but it sure felt like I should purchase the book. After buying it, I found the ideas in the book and Jung's way of writing very hard to understand.
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When I read this passage in Jung’s book last night, forty years after I bought it, it gave me goose bumps.
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It doesn’t take an alchemist to recognize that the drawing an egg is a symbol of hope, of new beginnings. Somehow, though, Jung and the alchemists added an ancient dimension to the idea of the egg for me, one that deepened my sense of connection with them.
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When I read this passage in Jung’s book last night, forty years after I bought it, it gave me goose bumps.
. .
. .
It doesn’t take an alchemist to recognize that the drawing an egg is a symbol of hope, of new beginnings. Somehow, though, Jung and the alchemists added an ancient dimension to the idea of the egg for me, one that deepened my sense of connection with them.
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In this out-of-the-way bookstore I had my first close encounter with the ideas of Jung. Perhaps the Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious had appeared out of The Twilight Zone.
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