widely spread notion of a cosmic egg from Phoenicia, Babylon, Egypt
(where the goose-god Seb laid the egg), or whether the Orphic singer
originated so obvious an idea. Quaerere ludicrum est. The conception may
have been borrowed, but manifestly it is one of the earliest hypotheses
that occur to the rude imagination. We have now three primitive
generations, time, chaos, the egg, and in the fourth generation the egg
gave birth to Phanes, the great hero of the Orphic cosmogony.(1) The
earliest and rudest thinkers were puzzled, as many savage cosmogonic
myths have demonstrated, to account for the origin of life. The myths
frequently hit on the theory of a hermaphroditic being, both male and
female, who produces another being out of himself. Prajapati in the
Indian stories, and Hrimthursar in Scandinavian legend--"one of his feet
got a son on the other"--with Lox in the Algonquin tale are examples of
these double-sexed personages. In the Orphic poem, Phanes is both male
and female. This Phanes held within him "the seed of all the gods,"(2)
and his name is confused with the names of Metis and Ericapaeus in
a kind of trinity. All this part of the Orphic doctrine is greatly
obscured by the allegorical and theosophistic interpretations of the
late Platonists long after our era, who, as usual, insisted on finding
their own trinitarian ideas, commenta frigidissima, concealed under the
mythical narrative.(3)

(1) Clemens Alexan., p. 672.

(2) Damascius, ap. Lobeck, i. 481.

(3) Aglaoph., i. 483.

Another description by Hieronymus of the first being, the Orphic Phanes,
"as a serpent with bull's and lion's heads, with a human face in the
middle and wings on the shoulders," is sufficiently rude and senseless.
But these physical attributes could easily be explained away as types of
anything the Platonist pleased.(1) The Orphic Phanes, too, was almost as
many-headed as a giant in a fairy tale, or as Purusha in the Rig-Veda.
He had a ram's head, a bull's head, a snake's head and a lion's head,
and glanced around with four eyes, presumably human.(2) This remarkable
being was also provided with golden wings. The nature of the physical
arrangements by which Phanes became capable of originating life in the
world is described in a style so savage and crude that the reader must
be referred to Suidas for the original text.(3) The tale is worthy of
the Swift-like fancy of the Australian Narrinyeri.

(1) Damascius, 381, ap. Lobeck, i.