Creativity is life
On the cosmic egg & the vital life force of our deep, creative nature.
A myth of normal we’re conditioned to take for true is that creativity is a gift only available to the few. But what we’re mostly not taught is that our in-born capacity to create is how we get to discover our gifts. In this month’s Dreaming Awake, I reflect on lessons in creativity from Carl Jung’s cosmic egg and explore how we can view our creative acts as a way of being in conversation with the world and of being in love with it.
Image: Phanes, Carl Jung, from The Red Book.
Behold the egg
The egg looks like it’s been dissected by the subtlest of knives. But, instead of a golden yolk floating inside a pool of albumen, inside is a red earth and a dark sky; twisting roots and twirling branches; thickening forests and swirling oceans; crawling reptiles and a blazing star - the whole radiant, excitable, vibrating, throbbing, trembling, quaking, agitating cosmos whirling like a primordial dervish inside the shell’s infinitely looping fractal interior.
The egg’s whorling, intensely coloured parts make it look like a cross between a medieval mosaic inserted in a dusty corner of an ancient cathedral for the practice of occult rituals and the 1960’s psychedelic poster art of The Grateful Dead. If I listen deeply enough, I can almost hear the electric glissando and trembling organ. And if I close my eyes I can smell ash, smoke, sulphur, sea mist, dew.
The sand-coloured snake uncoiling its long tail in the base of this egg stares out with its wide, lidless eyes daring me to cross the threshold into its wild inside-out world. Just looking at the egg is making me feel dizzy, as if wave after wave of highly charged frequencies are emanating from the star at its centre and passing right through me in a ghost shower of subatomic neutrinos.
This egg was, in fact, painted by Carl Jung somewhere between 1915 and 1916 while most of the world was at war. It’s one of the many paintings Jung produced over an extended period, collected in his mystical, visionary opus, The Red Book. In the margins of the painting, Jung has scrawled a handwritten invocation which reads;
I. “Set the egg before you, the God in his beginning.
And behold it.
And incubate it with the magical warmth of your gaze.”
II. “And I am the egg that surrounds and nurtures the seed of the God in me.”
The painting is Jung’s interpretation of the ancient cosmic egg motif which features in many creation myths from around the world. In Hindu culture, the “golden womb” of the cosmic egg is birthed from the watery womb of the first ocean. In the ancient Greek Orphic tradition, it is Eros (also known as Phanes, hence the title of Jung’s painting) - primordial god of love, lust and desire - who hatches, sui generis, from the first egg.
The sacred symbol of the cosmic egg holds the mystery of the thousand year old riddle; which came first, chicken or…? Life or the means to create it? Cosmos or creator? Something or nothing? In the old stories, the cosmic egg appears to answer the riddle with the paradox that life creates life in an ever-unfolding dance of beginnings and endings, chaos and order, above and below, snakes and stars. So when I behold Jung’s psychedelic re-imagination of this ancient of symbols in the magical warmth of my gaze, what I see is the wild, ever-changing, life-force that pulls me to create in a myriad ways, not once, but over and over.
Image: Hiranyagarbha, Golden Cosmic Egg, c.1740
All that you change, changes you
Although in Western end-of-life capitalism creativity is mostly minimised, it’s through the creative ‘seed of God’ implanted in us that we can find our deep purpose, invent reality and become change makers & artists of our own life. The visionary, sci-fi writer Octavia Butler illustrates the limitless potential of our capacity to create in her brilliant modern classic The Parable of the Sower. Set in a dystopian Los Angeles where the trees are dying, the water is running out and the state is in perpetual drought, the novel opens when Butler’s androgynous heroine, Lauren, is busy preparing for when she will need to leave home as a matter of survival.
While others choose to stay, Lauren makes change the god of the new religion. Created from the ‘seed of God’ implanted in her, Lauren names this new religion with change at its centre Earth Seed. She writes the Earth Seed: The Books of the Living while on the road in search of a new life on new terms. They read like a wisdom text, survival manual and manifesto on creativity all in one. As The Books proclaim;
“All that you touch/You change/All that you Change/Changes you/The only lasting truth/Is Change/God is change… All successful life is/adaptable/opportunistic/ tenacious/ interconnected/ fecund/ Understand this/Use it Shape God.”
It’s through Lauren and her new religion, Earth Seed, that Octavia explores how creativity is mutability, spontaneity, fluidity, evolutionary, revolutionary - a way of being in relationship with the world and of being in love with it, of shaping reality and being shaped by it.
In this way, creativity is life and life is creativity. To live creatively in all the many different forms this can take is to incubate, feed and give birth to the vital life force that’s our deep creative nature. And in an over-culture where creativity is radically undervalued, this remains a radical act.
There is no path
I trance-dance my way past the snake’s shifting coils and clamber up the slimy substrate of thick mud, hand over fist, by the long roots of the tree. Once at the surface, I slip through a gate in the tree’s wide, ancient trunk into the dense weave of forest in every shade of green beyond. A soft wind raises and drops fringed branches of spruce, releasing clouds of midges and, before I know it, my skin is burning all over with pin-prick sized bites. A blood initiation into the gently swaying, whispering world of finches and firs, dormice and deer, mites and moss, clover and cloud scented with fox glove and fern where it feels like no other human has ever trodden before.
In this virgin forest there is no path. I follow the bushy tail of a pine marten as it lopes into the dense knit of shadow and tree. Although I can sense the forest ripple and stir like a snoring dragon, in this sun-less interior I can see so little that I could equally be in a dripping underground labyrinth or cave. Although I can’t see them, I can hear the silvery bell-like tinkle of the forest’s hidden streams. Following their sound, I wade through great balls of moss up to my knees, making my own track through the forest’s damp, waving fronds and plush, velvety ground.
It’s when I become afraid I’ll never find my way out that I stumble into a pool of green light surrounded by a circle of tall spruce. The loud creak of a door opening on hinges in need of a good oil rips through the air as the shaggy silhouette of an osprey calls from somewhere inside the ring of trees and an egg, loosed from its nest, lands at my feet like a pebble sized meteorite. The egg tumbles and rolls in the moss before splitting in two. A radiant light pours from its shell and when I bend down to look, there are the glassy eyes of a snake, swirling waters and sky, a shining tree. And in the darkness all the midges have turned to star dust.
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Creativity as a radical act! Absolutely!!! Thank you once again, Rachel!
Thank you this was beautiful to read.