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 philosophical egg of the medieval natural philosophers, the vessel from which, at the end of the opus alchymicum, the homunculus emerges… the spiritual, inner, and complete man.

C. G Jung, Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious

___________________________________________________________    (31) Cracking the Egg   During my first weeks in college, I was browsing through a small shop selling used books in an out-of-the-way corner of town when I came across a thick black book titled, The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious. At the time, 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 that book. After buying it and trying to read through it, I found that the ideas in the book, as well as Jung’s way of writing, were very hard to comprehend. When I read this passage in Jung’s book last night, forty years after I bought it, the words made much more sense to me and gave me goose bumps. It doesn’t take an alchemist to recognize that the drawing of an egg is a symbol of hope, of new beginnings. Somehow, though, Jung and the alchemists added a significant ancient dimension to the idea of the egg for me, one that deepened my sense of connection with them. Long ago in this out-of-the-way bookstore I had my first close encounter with the ideas of Jung. In retrospect, I doubt that this was mere coincidence. Perhaps the Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious had emerged out of The Twilight Zone. March 16, 2007