The Egg 🥚
part one of my new Symbols of (Our) Time series
What’s up, swimmers?! I’m so psyched to kick off a brand-new series called Symbols of (Our) Time, which will look into iconography showing up in our present moment that also have rich histories throughout various cultural traditions, religious practices, folklore and myths.
But first, Meg Jones Wall and I have cooked up an offering for anyone who needs to check in with their 2025 intentions, or who couldn’t even fathom setting New Year’s goals in January and feels like their year is just now picking up clarity and speed. (Hint: That’s me!)
Introducing—
SPIRALING THROUGH THE WISDOM YEAR
Co-hosted by bee scolnick & meg jones wall, this lecture teaches you how to utilize birth cards, life path numbers, yearly cycles, and archetypes to move through 2025 with courage, strength, and intentionality.
With your one-time purchase of $99, you'll receive:
A downloadable, 90-minute video lecture
Access to the slides that we use in the workshop
A downloadable PDF with bonus activities, information, and journaling questions.
Ready to dig into your own 2025 story?
The Egg 🥚
It’s almost 4/20, and this year, the highest of High Holy Days overlaps with the religious holiday of Easter, which has morphed into the secular celebration of bunnies, chicks, and hiding eggs (hard-boiled or candy-filled plastic) for kids to hunt for! But in the year of our Lord 2025, a recent nationally-representative WalletHub survey found that “47% of Americans will skip dyeing eggs this Easter due to the price of eggs.”1
In a surprising turn of events, eggs have become a hot button, political topic in the United States. In late 2024, President Donald J. Trump began to include campaign promises like bringing down the price of eggs to appeal to financially-strapped voters who believed he could deliver. Almost 100 days into his second-term, not only has Trump failed to bring down egg prices, but his implemented tariffs, along with rising inflation and a run-in with Bird Flu, have made the economical (and agricultural) situation worse. Not to mention, eggs crimes are at an all-time high! In February 2025, 100,000 eggs were stolen in Pennsylvania in a wacky heist police have still yet to solve.2
Another present-tense tie in: In the Chinese zodiac, 2025 is the Year of the Snake, a shape-shifting, slithering creature that hatches from—you guessed it—eggs!
The egg is one of the oldest symbols seen across cultures and traditions, representing fertility, creation, transformation, vitality and the hope of new life. It holds the entire cycle of life, death, and rebirth within it, naturally embodying the process of what’s grown in the darkness coming into the light.
Its gooey, yellow yolk invokes the creative power of the sun, as well as joy, happiness, energy, and more, and the bright white albumen (egg whites), as well as the shell-casing, symbolizes cleanliness, purity, and new beginnings. Many creation stories and myths begin in some form of Cosmic Egg (named Hiranyagarbha in Hinduism), representing the womb space from which the world, and its various creators were born.
Eggs are also a prominent item used or eaten during cultural or religious ritual. Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and Maori, buried their dead alongside eggs as a token of life after death. The Iranian and Persian New Year of Nowruz, the Jewish Passover Seder, and celebrations of the Vernal (Spring) Equinox in the Northern Hemisphere, all include eggs as symbols of new life and rebirth. Some African countries use eggshells decoratively to denote breaking through the winter freeze and into the warmth of the spring season. And of course, Christianity adopted the egg to symbolize the resurrection of Christ on Easter.
There have also been more mundane uses of the egg throughout the ages. In her essay, The Folklore of Eggs: Their Mystical, Powerful Symbolism, avian-expert Rachel Warren Chadd writes:
“Well before the advent of Christianity, eggs were also used ritually to encourage human and agricultural fecundity. Such practices continued so that, for instance, in 17th-century France, a bride would break an egg to ensure fertility when she entered her new home, while German farmers smeared eggs, bread and flour on their ploughs in spring as they sowed their fields.”3
Speaking of fertility and reproduction, it will be interesting to track the modern symbolism of the egg, especially as countries like the United States and the United Kingdom pare back their official recognition of sex and gender to the binary of male and female. While few are debating the “one true pairing” of sperm and egg to create new biological life, nature is incredibly queer and expansive, and even human beings are born intersex, an term denoting a wide range of variations in sex characteristics that may or may not match the person’s assigned sex at birth.
As conservative, right-wing, and even fascist governments grab at power around the world, the symbol of the egg, and its connection to the female reproductive system, could start to see use in further defining gender roles and identities within the house, family, and community structure.
So we’re not left with a trad-wife horror show, let’s wrap up by looking at the egg as a symbol in art and magic.
Artist Leonora Carrington regularly used egg imagery in her work. Her 1947 painting “The Giantess,” also knows as “The Guardian of the Egg,” would become a recurring motif throughout her life and career.
“In Down Below, a short book by Carrington recalling her memoirs from time spent in a mental institution, she describes the conception of her egg motif. ‘This morning, the idea of the egg came again to my mind and I thought that I could use it as a crystal to look at Madrid in those days of July and August 1940—for why should it not enclose my own experiences as well as the past and future history of the Universe? The egg is the macrocosm and the microcosm, the dividing line between the Big and the Small which makes it impossible to see the whole.’”4
Fellow surrealist painter Salvador Dalí also used egg imagery throughout his work to explore birth, as well as the sun and the overall cosmogony of the world.
Or perhaps you’ve also seen Fabergé Easter eggs, ornate pieces of collectible art that can hold both universal and personal memorabilia within. “Tsar Alexander III (1845-1894) began the Imperial tradition of commissioning Fabergé Easter eggs in the 1880s,” which continued at a speed of two a year until 1917.5 Or Pysanky eggs, which are Ukrainian-made, and “created using a wax-resist method, in which intricate designs are drawn on the eggshell with melted beeswax, and then dyed multiple times to create vibrant and striking patterns.”6
When it comes to magical crafts, eggs were a common symbol in the art of alchemy, symbolizing the transformation and purification of base metals into something more valuable. Eggs and eggshells are key ingredients in many spells, especially in African traditions carried out by Black practitioners in the American South. Oomancy, or divination by egg, has also been used by various spiritual practitioners. An egg is cracked and the albumen (egg whites) is dropped into water. Interpretations are then made from the shapes the egg whites form.7
If you’d like to read a beautiful and poetic look at the egg’s journey through the lines of the tarot, check out The Alchemical 8: Visiting the Site of So Many Ontological Cave-Ins by
.The egg is a symbol that has meant a great deal to both ancient and modern cultures, and will likely continue to grace art, magic, mystery, religion, ritual, myth, and story for years to come! No matter how you move through this spring season and its many holidays, keep an eye out for eggs!
How have you seen the egg show up? In art, culture, or even your own life? Do eggs, or any of their colors or mythic meanings, symbolize anything for you personally?
And don’t forget to check out SPIRALING THROUGH THE WISDOM YEAR, a new work-at-your-own-pace offering for 2025, from Meg Jones Wall and me!
Until next time, just keep swimming!
xx, bee
Kiernan, John S. “Easter Survey 2025.” WalletHub. 15 April 2025.
“The heist of 100,000 eggs in Pennsylvania becomes a whodunit that police have yet to crack.” AP News. 5 February 2025.
Chadd, Rachel Warren. “The Folklore of Eggs: Their Mystical, Powerful Symbolism.” FolkloreThursday.com. 6 October 2016.
“The Giantess (The Guardian of the Egg).” Wikiwand.com.
Kiely, Alexandra. “What You Need to Know About Fabergé Easter Eggs.” Daily Art Magazine. 17 April 2022.
Chadd, Rachel Warren. “The Folklore of Eggs: Their Mystical, Powerful Symbolism.” FolkloreThursday.com. 6 October 2016.
this is gorgeous and also AHH thank u for the mention 💕💕🥹🥹🥰🥰
A clutch of 6 eggs hatched out 5 healthy goslings for resident Cotton Patch geese on 4/20. Amazing family unit bonding, incredible connectivity and guardianship from both parents. This animal is a deep dive into some archetypes- note a woman and her goose, often traveling together. I'm just starting the learning, appreciate egg cycles, the hens are laying a dozen each day now, summer approaches. How do we maintain egg production commercially during the winter? Should we pay more for this delicate protein miracle? Not cheap by any stretch of imagination; especially a survivalist mindset.