World egg
The world egg ( world egg ) or world egg is in various legends of the origins of the world the egg from which the world emerged in the form of a primordial being. It occurs in the cosmogonic myths of many cultures and apparently belongs to the general treasure trove of myths. In the legends of the origins of the world in many Indo-European cultures, it symbolizes the absolute primal state of the universe, including the Indian, Greek, Persian and the Baltic . Outside the Indo-European language area , it occurs on the European continent in Finnish mythology , on the African continent in the ancient Egyptian Hermopolitan cosmogony and in the mythologies of the Bambara and Dogon in Mali . In Asia it is part of the mythology of the Dayak on Borneo and of Chinese and Japanese mythology , in Oceania it appears in the Polynesian mythology and in North America in the mythology of the Cupeño in California .
In the mythologies, the cosmic egg corresponds to the absolute primordial state of the universe from which a primordial being developed, which was often a twin or hermaphrodite, or which symbolized the union of two complementary principles in another way .
Hinduism
The “Law of Manus ” (the first Indian legislator, cf. Manusmriti ) begins with a creation myth: “He ( Prajapati ) had the desire to let beings of all kinds emerge from his own body. To this end, by a mere thought, he created the water and placed his seed in it. The seed became a golden egg ( Hiranyagarbha ), shining like the sun, and in this egg he himself was born as Brahman, the creator of the world ... The divine lived in this egg for a year, then he divided it into by power of his thought two halves, and from the two halves he formed heaven and earth ... By dividing his own body, he became half male and half female ... "
Chinese mythology
In a Chinese myth of the origins of the world, the primeval chaos in the form of a hen's egg contained the cosmic principle of yin and yang (two complementary poles that are both the origin and the essence of all things). From this egg Pangu was born.
As a world axis, Pangu is at the center of heaven and earth. His figure must have been dwarfish at first. After 18,000 years, the chaos cleared and split into Yin and Yang (earth and sky). Every day the sky grew upwards and the earth solidified and sank downwards. Pangu grew at the same rate, until after another 18,000 years it had become a giant whose body reached from earth to heaven.
He ended his life through self-sacrifice and formed the universe out of his body in a cosmogony . His breath became the wind, his voice became thunder, the left eye the sun, the right eye formed the moon, the four poles and the five holy mountains were formed from his body , his blood gave the rivers, teeth and bones made the metals, his hair the plants, his saliva the rain and the vermin clinging to him humanity. Seed and bone marrow turned into pearls and jade .
Japanese mythology
The Japanese myth of the origins of the world is recorded in the earliest Japanese chronicles Kojiki (712) and Nihonshoki (720) and has Chinese roots that go back to the introduction of Chinese culture as well as to immigrants. According to Nihonshoki , the world was initially a chaos in the form of a primordial egg in which heaven and earth (or yin and yang ) did not yet exist separately from one another. After this separation was completed, fish-like or jellyfish-like structures floated about on the water; from these reed-like shoots arose and these became the first deities. There were six generations of very vaguely described primordial gods and only with the seventh generation, the Izanagi and Izanami siblings , does the actual mythological story begin .
Zoroastrianism
Plutarch gives the teaching of the Persians about the origin of the world. Then the god of light, Ahura Mazda , created the stars and 30 good gods and put them in an egg. But the god of darkness, Ahriman , created just as many evil gods who pierced the egg on all sides and slipped into it, “whereby evil was and is still mixed with good. But there will come a time determined by fate when Ahriman will be completely destroyed by the plague and hunger that he himself caused and will disappear and the earth will become smooth and even, while a single way of life, a single state and a single language embraces all happy people ". It is not explicitly said, but one has the impression that the God of light and the God of darkness both sit in the cosmic egg. Both are sons of the god Zurvan Akarana, the “god of endless time”, who is evidently related to the cosmic egg like Brahman and like Amun and Protogonos.
Egypt
According to the teaching of the Egyptians (although there were several different creation stories in ancient Egypt) the world emerged from a goose egg as Amun , "the great cackling". Hymns praise him as the universal god "who (at the beginning of the world) combined his seed with his body in order to let his egg arise in his secret interior". "He formed his egg himself, the mighty one ... all gods came into being after he had made the beginning with himself." He is the "Lord of the All, who began with existence". As an uncreated creator himself, he brought the world out through "self-mating". Like Brahman, he is male and female at the same time. Amun is considered a particularly mysterious, hidden god. “It's too big to… be known. Whoever pronounces his secret name immediately falls down as if he were dead by a blow. "
Greek and Roman antiquity
In Greece, the myth of the world egg is part of the Dionysus cult . The sacred stories of this cult report that the creator god - more or less identical to Dionysus - hatched from an egg. As mysterious as his nature is, his name is also uncertain; his name is Phanes , Protogonos , Eros or Kronos . Since he himself is ungenerated and rather generates everything, he is - like Brahman and like Amun - male-female. As an egg-born he has wings. In an Orphic hymn, he is called upon: “Primordial being, double-shaped, ethereal-flying giant, / who you slipped from the egg, gleaming with golden wings, / roaring as loud as a bull, you origin of gods and men ... / happier, cleverer, on seeds Richer, visit full of joy / us, the connoisseurs of the celebrations, for the holy, shining consecration ”Similar to the Egyptian Amun, the Orphic Protogonos / Phanes is also considered a particularly“ mysterious deity ”. He pulls the “veil of misty darkness away from the eyes of those who know about the celebration”.
In the Roman Mithras cult , Mithras appears in the form of the Orphic Phanes . Winged and wrapped in snakes, surrounded by the twelve constellations of the zodiac and the winds blowing from the four cardinal directions, it stands between the lower and the upper half of the world egg. In his right hand he holds the stately thunderbolt , in his left the world axis.
Finland
In the Finnish national epic Kalevala it is said that a diving duck laid an egg in the lap of Ilmata , the goddess of the air. "The lower half changed / and became earth, / and its upper half changed / and became heaven. / The yolk became the sun ... / and the white became the moon."
Africa
The African cosmogony is more about the creation of the first humans and models of world creation are relatively rare. Exceptions are the complex creation myths of the Dogon in Mali with the world egg created by the creator god Amman and the Moroccan Gnawa , whose world arose from a snake egg that swam on the primordial ocean. Her cosmogonic imagination shapes the Derdeba healing ceremony .
Modern cosmology
The concept was rediscovered by modern science in the 1930s and analyzed over the following two decades. According to modern cosmological models, 13.8 billion years ago, the entire mass of the universe was compressed in a gravitational singularity , the so-called cosmic egg , from which the universe developed to its present state (through the Big Bang ).
Georges Lemaître published in 1927 that the cosmos developed from a primordial atom .
In the late 1940s, Ralph Alpher and George Gamow suggested the name ylem for the absolute primordial state of the universe that existed between the big crunch of the previous universe and the big bang of the present universe. Ylem is closely related to the concept of supersymmetry .
literature
- Johannes house manager: Egg. In: Reallexikon für Antike und Christianentum , Volume 4, Hiersemann, Stuttgart 1959, Sp. 731–745, here: 732–735
Individual evidence
- ^ David Adams Leeming: Creation Myths of the World: An Encyclopedia, Book 1 . ABC-CLIO, 2010, p. 144. (English)
- ^ David Adams Leeming: Creation Myths of the World: An Encyclopedia, Book 1 . ABC-CLIO, 2010, p. 12. , pp. 12-14
- ↑ Laws of Manu, translated by Max Müller , Article 8 ff.
- ^ David Adams Leeming: Creation Myths of the World: An Encyclopedia, Book 1 . ABC-CLIO, 2010, p. 313. (English)
- ↑ http://www.chinasage.info/deities.htm Chinese Deities (English) accessed on August 10, 2018
- ↑ In another version, the god Ame no minakanushi rises from a gelatinous mass and four other gods follow him. They represent the five primordial gods.
- ^ Plutarch, On Isis and Osiris, K. 47
- ^ Günther Roeder, Die ägyptische Götterwelt Vol. 1, Zurich 1959, pp. 289, 294/95
- ^ Greek poetry, translated by Dietrich Ebener, Bayreuth 1985, p. 456
- ↑ Ülo Valk: Ex Ovo Omnia: Where Does the Balto-Finnic Cosmogony Originate? The Etiology of an Etiology. Oral Tradition, 15/1, 2000, pp. 145–158 (PDF; 178 kB) On the egg in Finnish and Baltic cosmogony
- ↑ John Gribbin, In the beginning was ...: News from the Big Bang and the Evolution of the Cosmos, Springer-Verlag, November 11, 2013 - 294 pages, p. 36, ( online )
- ^ The Cosmos - Voyage Through the Universe series, New York: 1988 Time-Life Books, Page 75
- ^ Edward Harrison: Masks of the Universe: Changing Ideas on the Nature of the Cosmos, Cambridge University Press, May 8, 2003, p. 224 ( online )
- ↑ https://www.lsw.uni-heidelberg.de/users/mcamenzi/EarlyUniverse_SS2012.pdf