The egg splits into two, and Phanes, the first of the Gods, appears.
In the Orphic theogony, Aither and Chaos are born from Chaos. Chronos makes an egg in Aither.
The egg splits into two, and Phanes, the first of the Gods, appears.
W. K. C. Guthrie ·writes, “He is imagined as marvelously beautiful, a figure of shining light, with golden wings on his shoulders, four eyes, and the heads of various animals. He is of both sexes, since he is to create the race of the gods unaided” (OrpheusandGreekReligion :AStudyoftheOrphicMove111ent [London: Methuen, 1935], p. 80).
In Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, while discussing mythological conceptions of creative force , Jung drew attention to the “Orphic figure of Phanes, the’ Shining One,’ the first-born, the ‘Father of Eros.’
In Orphic terms, Phanes also denotes Priapos, a god of love, androgynous, and equal to the Theban Dionysus Lysios.
The Orphic meaning of Phanes is the same as that of the Indian Kama, the God of love, which is also a cosmogonic principle” (CW B, § 223).
Jung also noted here that “Agni, the fire, was worshipped as a golden-winged bird”(§ 295).
The attributes of Phanes here match the classical depictions, and he is described as the brilliant one, a God of beauty and light.
Jung’s copy of Isaac Cory’s Ancient fragments of the Phoenician, Chaldean, Egyptian, Tyiian , Carthaginian, Indian, Persian, and Other writers; ·with an Introductory Dissertation; And an Inquiry}’ into the Philosophy and Trinity of the Ancients, has underlinings in the section containing the Orphic theogony, and a slip of paper and mark by the following statement:
“They imagine as the god a conceiving and conceived egg, or a white garment, or a cloud, because Phanes springs forth from these” (London: William Pickering, 1832, p. 310) .
Jung titled his first mandala sketch, dated August 2 , 1917, “<l>ANHI” [Phanes] (LN , appendix A) . In April 1919 he painted a portrait of Phanes in LN (Image u3; see appendix, p. 141).
In his inscription to the image,
he described Phanes as “image of the divine child …. I called him <l>ANHI [Phanes], because he is the newly appearing God” (p. 358).
Jung also painted two portraits of Phanes, giving one to Emma Jung and one to Toni Wolff (The Art of C. G. Jung, cats. 50, 51, pp. 122- 23).
Phanes also figures in two further paintings (Ibid., cats. 52, 53, pp. 124- 25).
In cat. 53, the background figures on the left and right respectively are Ka and Philemon. ~The Red Books, Vol. VI, Page 260, fn 267
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