The _Cosmos_ itself was an egg according to the conceptions of many of
the ancients; and few ideas were more widely spread, or can be traced
further back, than the one that the whole visible creation emerged from
the original Chaos or Darkness in the shape of an egg.

The egg also, and above all, signified the Sun-God, as the acknowledged
Giver of Life and Saviour of Life. Hence the prominent part which it
played in the various religious mysteries of the ancients, and also the
fact that the Egyptians represented the Sun-God Ra as giving forth such
utterances as "I am the Creative Soul of the celestial abyss. None sees
my nest, and none can break my egg." The egg referred to, was of course
the Sun itself.

Even our Christian custom of exchanging eggs at Easter is more or less
derived from Sun-God worship, being a survival from customs practised
long before our era at that particular period of the year, the time of
the Vernal Equinox or Pass-over of the Sun, when the Orient Light
crosses the Equator to rise once more in the Northern Hemisphere.

Nor are these the only facts connecting the egg with Sun-God worship,
for the Sun-God Apollo was of old represented as born from the egg of
Leda, and the Sun-God Osiris was also said to have been born from an
egg.

Moreover the Chinese believe that the first man was born from an egg,
the Orphic hymns speak of the "First-Begotten One" as "egg-born," and
the Greeks fabled that their Sun-God Dionysos sprang from the cosmic
egg.