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Mircea Eliade - Eggs and the Mysteries
Identifier
010979
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Patterns in Comparative Religion – Mircea Eliade
Clay eggs have been found in a great many tombs in Russia and Sweden; with good reason Arne sees them as emblems of immortality. In the ritual of Osiris, various ingredients – diamond dust, fig flour, aromatic spices and so on – are shaped into an egg – though we do not yet fully apprehend for what function. The statues of Dionysos found in Boeotian tombs all have an egg in one hand to symbolise a return to life. This explains the Orphic prohibition against eating eggs, for the prime object of Orphism was to escape from the unending cycle of reincarnation – to abolish, in other words, the periodic return to life