© samantha krukowski Chalazae 2003 text from a talk given at the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts Conference, 2003

When I was eight, I called this the “thingy.” It is more formally known as the chalazae, the anchor that holds down the yolk membrane and keeps the yolk and white of an egg separate. Throughout my childhood, I refused to eat any egg that still had a thingy. My mother obliged me and removed the thingies of all the eggs she managed to feed me. I was convinced that the thingy (the chalazae) was a baby chicken, or at least the starting point for one. My mother took me to her biology lab a lot, and there were always eggs and chickens in various stages of development. I saw chicken embryos on yolks and thingies nearby. That was enough to empower the chalazae and invest in it a series of meanings and capacities that were largely imagined.

An egg is an oval filled with both fat (the yolk) and water (the white), opposites that coexist within the confines of an eggshell. Cooking can render an egg dense, light, brittle, rich. Together the yolks and whites of an egg provide protein, fat, moisture and substance; separately they work culinary alchemy by binding, lightening, coloring and flavoring other ingredients.

The egg is a common alchemical symbol. The retort, the alchemists’ bulb-shaped vessel, was called the Philosopher’s egg. It was used for gentle distillation and cohobation and could be hermetically sealed, so that the various materials inside could incubate. The egg was, more importantly, perceived as an image of the universe, the macrocosmos.

John Dee, a British alchemist and mathematician who wrote the Monas hieroglyphica in 1564, wrote about the monad (unity) underlying the universe as expressed in a hieroglyph or symbol. He connected the symbol of the monad to the process of alchemical transmutation and found elements of transformation arranged along orbital lines in the egg, according to the corresponding placement of their ruling planets. He delineated the egg into a central “yolk” made up of the Sun, Mars and Venus (the metals gold, iron and copper) and a “white” made up of Jupiter, Saturn, Luna and Mercury (the metals tin, lead, silver and quicksilver)…Material tranformation took place when the “yolk” enveloped the “white” through a process of “rotation.”

Dee further symbolized this process with a spiral derived from Arabic alchemy, where “turning the screw” was used to describe transformation. The spiral described and contained circles, and the circle was conceived as a hermetically sealed space in which transformation could take place.

The circle was, for Dee and other alchemists, a symbol of original perfection. It was associated with the sphere, the egg and the rotundum—the “round” of alchemy. The circle, sphere and round were all aspects of the self-contained. When closed, Heironymous Bosch’s panel painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights, offers an image of this formal alliance. The circle is without beginning and end, in its roundness there is no before and no after, no time, no above and no below, no space.

Egg imagery is pervasive in Bosch’s painting. The egg was considered part of a binary pair, egg and sperm, which was associated with the pair of sun and moon. The philosopher’s egg was the birthplace of and the container for the union of opposites, male and female. Inside, a third thing was born of these opposites, and emerged when the vessel was opened or cracked.

A few months ago, I trained my video camera on some glass. I positioned my camera below the glass, and began to crack eggs onto it. Some of the eggs were frozen, like this one. Some of the yolks broke, some stayed intact. While working on the video, I recalled some writing by Simone de Beauvoir: “With her fire going, woman becomes a sorceress; by a simple movement, as in beating eggs or through the magic of fire, she effects the transmutation of substances...”

Michael Maier’s, a German alchemist, wrote in his Scrutinium Chymicum of 1687: “Learn about the egg and cut it with a flaming sword. In our world there is a bird more sublime than all others. To search for his egg be thy only concern. The egg of alchemy is a symbol for magical realization.”

There is something in these alchemical descriptions that parallels the process of embryogenesis, which metaphorically might be considered the birthplace of all works. The blastocyst is a universal subanimal formed by simple cell division, a volvox-like ball. Its organization is ancient, primary, and panspecific, affecting all eggs in much the same way. Regardless of their ultimate destiny, the component cells of a blastocyst first arrange themselves in a hive of sibling balls, a mold from which individual animals can be shaped. Blastulation is a cosmic event…it denotes the creation of primal matter—an ushering of one into many, unity into multiplicity, timelessness into time, inertia into mutability, information into form.