Saturday, March 17, 2007

The Great Cackler


The ancient Egyptians imagined that in the beginning the universe was nothing more than a vast ocean. …It completely filled the universe… The World was said to have originated in a cosmic egg that had been laid by the celestial goose, which had first broken the silence of the world and was called the Great Cackler. This egg, laid upon a primeval hill, contained the bird of light, Re.

Archives of Archetypal Symbolism, The God Thoth as an Ibis
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This was the first drawing made with perspective: was I finally getting a perspective on things? Had my red tears from an earlier drawing turned into red eggs?
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I continue to be surprised by at how helpful the alchemical viewpoint is in the way it adds the dimensions of history and mythology to psychological processes. I had never heard of the Great Cackler until yesterday, yet somehow hearing this myth about cosmic eggs laid in an immense ocean by a cackling goose makes me feel connected to something bigger, and makes me laugh at the same time.
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Jungians and alchemists get excited about the symbolic nature of numbers. So why seven eggs? Seven days in a week? The moon, with four lunar cycles of seven days each? The seven islands of Atlantis? The seven chakras?
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However you count them, there do seem be a lot of eggs. Perhaps something was about to hatch?
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