Ross A. Laird

Following up from today’s class, here is an excerpt from my book on myth:

 The symbology of the cosmic egg is an integral aspect of almost every mythological tradition. In the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic, a duck lays its eggs on the knee of the goddess Ilmatar; the eggs break, and the world is formed from the shattered remnants. Similar tales are found in esoteric Judaism, in Hermetic philosophy, in modern physics. The Big Bang is the most recent version of the myth of the cosmic egg, shattering from nothing into everything. The mythological association between eggs and cosmogenesis is the source of at least one important technological innovation: the rendering of alum (a hydrated double salt, usually consisting of aluminum sulfate and the sulfate of either potassium or ammonia). Alum was a substance of profound alchemical and practical significance since before the time of Alexander. It was used as dye, as healing elixir, as transformer of metals. Its manufacture in England, from 1620 to 1870, involved burning the shales of the Yorkshire coast using brushwood fires on the beach. The rocks were heated for about nine months (though the main shale band at Boulby kept burning on its own for more than fifty years). The resulting powder, rich in sulfates, was doused with water, channeled into alum houses and mixed with kelp or urine (sources of potash and ammonia) to render a liquid called “the mothers.” This solution was heated until the alum salts crystallized. The secret of alum’s production lay in the precise duration of this process; too much heat, and the alum was ruined by the crystallization of ferrous sulfate. At some indistinct point in the history of alchemy, a moment of divine instinct led to the discovery that a hen’s egg placed in the solution would rise to the surface at the precise moment of the alum’s optimal concentration. No one knows who discovered this secret, but its emergence is undoubtedly a legacy of the mythological association between creation and eggs. Alchemists, the chemists of every age until the twentieth century, would have known about the various tales of a formative egg emerging from a sea of possibility. In the case of alum, their adaptation of myth into science is a miniature history of the evolution of the scientific method. This method derives not only from reason but from instinct grounded in ancestral myth.

For a robust exploration of alum production, see Roger Osborne, The Floating Egg: Episodes in the Making of Geology (London: Pimlico, 1990).

Modern science emerged from the alchemical (or Hermetic) tradition, which in turn was begun by the ancient Egyptians, the world’s first scientists. Hermetic philosophy is named for Hermes, the Greek version of the Egyptian god of wisdom, Thoth. Hermetic doctrines are the basis, among other things, of the sacred geometry employed in the cathedrals of Europe. This knowledge flowed first through the temples of Hermopolis along the Nile, arrived much later in Greek Alexandria, and spread from there across the Levant. It arrived in Europe, in the first centuries of the Common Era, as an obscure teaching with an archaic pedigree. As a path of wisdom, Hermeticism is also the source, at least in part, of the mythologies of the grail, the philosopher’s stone, the practices for refinement and transformation of the base self into illuminated gold.