Blavatsky on the Pagan Origins of Easter and Egg Symbolism

 

The Pagan origins of Easter is still a popular topic of discussion nowadays, and back in the day, Blavatsky had her own take on this question in some brief, but suggestive remarks. For a full exposition on the world egg see The Secret Doctrince I, 2, ch. 6-The Mundane Egg. 

 

Easter. The word evidently comes from Ostara, the Scandinavian goddess of spring (1) She was the symbol of the resurrection of all nature and was worshipped in early spring. It was a custom with the pagan Norsemen at that time to exchange coloured eggs called the eggs of Ostara. These have now become Easter-Eggs. As expressed in Asgard and the Gods (WilhelmWagner, 1880) : “Christianity put another meaning on the old custom, by connecting it with the feast of the Resurrection of the Saviour, who, like the hidden life in the egg, slept in the grave for three days before he awakened to new life” . This was the more natural since Christ was identified with that same Spring Sun which awakens in all his glory, after the dreary and long death of winter (Asgard, p.114, 8th ed, 1917). (See “Eggs”.)

Eggs (Easter). Eggs were symbolical from an early time. There was the “Mundane Egg”, in which Brahmâ gestated, with the Hindus the Hiranya-Gharba, (2) and the Mundane Egg of the Egyptians, which proceeds from the mouth of the “unmade and eternal deity”, Kneph, (3) and which is the emblem of generative power. Then the Egg of Babylon, which hatched Ishtar, and was said to have fallen from heaven into the Euphrates. (4) Therefore coloured eggs were used yearly during spring in almost every country, and in Egypt were exchanged as sacred symbols in the spring-time, which was, is, and ever will be, the emblem of birth or rebirth, cosmic and human, celestial and terrestrial. They were hung up in Egyptian temples and are so suspended to this day in Mahometan mosques. (5) (Theosophical Glossary)

Orphic Egg

The Christians — especially the Greek and Latin Churches — have fully adopted the symbol, and see in it a commemoration of life eternal, of salvation and of resurrection. This is found in and corroborated by the time-honoured custom of exchanging “Easter Eggs.” From the anguinum, the “Egg” of the “pagan” Druid (6), whose name alone made Rome tremble with fear, to the red Easter Egg of the Slavonian peasant, a cycle has passed. And yet, whether in civilized Europe, or among the abject savages of Central America, we find the same archaic, primitive thought; if we only search for it and do not disfigure — in the haughtiness of our fancied mental and physical superiority — the original idea of the symbol. (The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1, Page  368)

 

Footnotes

(1) Bede. De temporum ratione ("The Reckoning of Time", Ch, 15:“Ēosturmōnaþ has a name which is now translated “Paschal month”, and which was once called after a goddess of theirs named Ēostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month. Now they designate that Paschal season by her name, calling the joys of the new rite by the time-honoured name of the old observance.”

Blavatsky is referring to the folklore speculations of the time. Very little historical evidence exists on the question. See

Ostara and the Hare: Not Ancient, but Not As Modern As Some Skeptics Think. Stephen Winick, April 28, 2016

(2) In classical Purāṇic Hinduism, Hiraṇyagarbha is the term used in the Vedanta for the "creator". Hiraṇyagarbha is also Brahmā, so called because it is said he was born in a golden egg (Manu Smṛti 1.9)

(3) Kneph (Eg.). Also Cneph and Nef, endowed with the same attributes as Khem. One of the gods of creative Force, for he is connected with the Mundane Egg. He is called by Porphyry “the creator of the world”; by Plutarch the “unmade and eternal deity”; by Eusebius he is identified with the Logos; and Jamblichus goes so far as almost to identify him with Brahmâ since he says of him that “this god is intellect itself, intellectually perceiving itself, and consecrating intellections to itself; and is to be worshipped in silence”. One form of him, adds Mr. Bonwick “was Av meaning flesh. He was criocephalus, with a solar disk on his head, and standing on the serpent Mehen. In his left hand was a viper, and a cross was in his right. He was actively engaged in the underworld upon a mission of creation.” Deveria writes: “His journey to the lower hemisphere appears to symbolise the evolutions of substances which are born to die and to be reborn”. (Catal. MSS. (1881), 49) Thousands of years before Kardec, Swedenborg, and Darwin appeared, the old Egyptians entertained their several philosophies. (James Bonwick, Egyptian Belief and Modern Thought C. Kegan Paul & Company, 1878., p. 105-106, 203)(Theosophical Glossary) (see also Chnoumis and Chnouphis)

Their God Kneph, out of whose mouth issued the Orphic egg, whence the author of the Clementine Recognitions makes a hermaphroditic figure to emerge, uniting in itself the two principles whereof Heaven and the earth are forms, and which enter into the organization of all beings which the heavens and the earth engender by their concourse, furnishes another emblem of the double power, active and passive, which the ancients saw in the Universe, and which they symbolized by the egg. (Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma, 1871, p. 654-656). See also W R. Cooper, The Serpent Myths of Ancient Egypt. 1873, p.17

For more about platonic sources of Kneph, see http://www.archaeologicalresource.com/Books_and_Articles/Iamblichus_Mysteries_3_Translations/Iamblichus_Mysteries.htm

(4) Pseudo-Hyginus’s Fabulae 197 reads as follows, as translated by R. Scott Smith:

“It is said that an egg of remarkable size once fell from the sky into the Euphrates River and that the fish pushed it out onto the bank. Doves came and alighted upon the egg, and after it grew warm, it hatched. Out came Venus [i.e. Ishtar], who afterward was called the Syrian Goddess. Since she was far more just and upright than the rest of the gods, Jupiter gave her choice, and she had the fish raised into the stars. Because of this the Syrians consider fish and doves to be gods and do not eat them.” Smith, R. Scott & Trzaskoma, Stephen M. (transl.), Apollodorus' Library and Hyginus' Fabulae: Two Handbooks of Greek Mythology

Nubian Egg

(5) "Colored eggs appear on the altars made for the new year known as Nowruz, which is celebrated at the vernal equinox. This tradition has ancient roots in Persia and Zoroastrianism, but is now practiced across Eurasia by Persian and Turkic peoples of various faiths.' Ancient Art of Decorating Eggs Stephanie Hall 2017 https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2017/04/decorating-eggs/

3,000 BC carved stone ball Aberdeenshire

 

(6) (Pliny, Natural History, 29, 3*) There is also a sort of egg, famous in the provinces of Gaul, but ignored by the Greeks. Innumerable snakes coil themselves into a ball in the summertime. Thus they make it so that it is held together by a bodily secretion and by their saliva. It is called an anguinum. The Druids say that [the snakes] hiss and cast it upwards, and that it is to be caught in a cloak so that it not touch the ground. One must immediately ride off on a horse with it, for the snakes will continue to pursue until the course of a stream blocks their way. If one tests it, the anguinum will float against the current of a river even when covered in gold. And, as the magi will throw a cloak of deception over their trickery, they make out as though the eggs are to be taken only on a particular point in the lunar cycle, as though it was up to human beings to determine the snakes’ role in this procedure. Nonetheless, I have seen one of these eggs myself. It was round the size of a small apple. The shell was cartilaginous, and mottled with cups like the tentacles of a squid. The Druids value it highly: it is praised as insuring success in litigation and in going to audiences with kings. However, this is nonsense; for once a man (a Roman knight and a tribesman of the Vocontii) held one of these eggs against his body during a trial, and was condemned to death by the Emperor Claudius, for that reason alone so far as I can tell.