Phanes

Before anything could be seen, there was an egg turning slowly in the cold upper air. Time had fashioned it out of the shining aether, a bright shell with no ground beneath it and no sky above, and inside it something was folding and unfolding in the dark. Then the shell split. Light poured out of the break, the first light there had ever been, and riding it came a god with wings of beaten gold, laughing in a voice that was also the bellow of a bull. He was called Phanes, which means the one who shines forth, because with him the world became visible for the first time.

The Orphics, who kept his story, gave him other names as well. He was Protogonos, the First-Born, and Erikepaios, a title no one could quite translate, and Metis, which is cunning or wise counsel, and they set him level with Eros, the desire that makes things couple and multiply. One god, many masks, because he was the point before which there was nothing to name and after which there was everything. Poets called on him at the start of their theogonies the way a builder tests the ground before laying a stone.

He was not shaped like the gods who came later. Golden wings grew from his shoulders and beat without tiring. A serpent coiled about him, or grew from his head, and out of his sides pushed the heads of a bull and a lion, so that anyone who looked at him saw a beast and a man at once and could not settle on either. The fragments say he had four eyes, and that within his body waited the faces of every creature not yet born, cattle and birds and things of the sea all latent in him like seeds in a pod. He was male and female together, complete in himself, needing no partner to bring forth the next generation.

The accounts of how he came to be do not agree, and the Orphics seem to have liked it that way. In one telling, unaging Time, a winged serpent with the faces of a bull and a lion, twined together with Necessity and brooded over the aether until an egg formed and cracked. In another, older still, there was only water and mud at the beginning, and from the mud the earth hardened, and from earth and water the serpent Time was born, and Time made the egg. Aristophanes, poking fun at all of this on the Athenian stage, had black-winged Night lay a wind-egg in the vast lap of darkness, and out of it hatch a golden Eros swift as a whirlwind, grandfather of the birds. The joke worked because the audience already knew the solemn version.

Whatever the route, the result was the same. The egg broke into two halves, and its crown became the sky and its lower part the earth, and Phanes stood in the gap he had opened. He made the first gods. He set the sceptre of the cosmos in the hands of his own daughter, Nyx, the Night, and she passed it to Uranus, and Uranus lost it to Cronus, and Cronus at last to Zeus, so that every king who ever ruled the sky held an office that began in Phanes’s hand. In the ordinary run of things he simply generated, without stopping, turning the seeds inside him into the shapes of the living world, and the light he carried spread outward and did not go back.

Then Zeus swallowed him. Warned by a prophecy and hungry for the whole of creation at once, Zeus took the reverend firstborn down into his own belly, and with him took the sea and the sky and the rivers and every god and goddess that had come after, until only Zeus existed and all the world lay folded up inside one body. After a while he brought it back out into the glad light and made it a second time. This is the Orphic answer to an old riddle: the world is new and also very old, because it has been made twice, once by Phanes and once by the god who ate him. A creator you can swallow is a strange kind of creator. That is rather the point.

His powers were the powers of a beginning. He held the pattern of everything and the will to bring it forth, he carried the first light, and on tablets he engraved the fates of the world, so that even the seasons could go and read what was coming. When Hermes needed to smuggle the infant Dionysus past a furious Hera, he put on the shape of Phanes, and Hera, out of respect for the most ancient of the gods, bowed and stepped aside. But a beginning is also a thing meant to be surpassed. His strength was portable, which is exactly why it could be seized and eaten; his kingship was the first in a line that led away from him; and he lives now mostly as doctrine and hymn rather than as a god with a long career of adventures. Most of the poems that told him are lost. What is left is an egg, a burst of gold, and a name that means the light coming on.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Phanes in Greek mythology?

Phanes is the first-born god of the Orphic creation tradition, hatched from the cosmic egg at the very beginning of time. Also called Protogonos and Erikepaios, he generated the first gods and the living world and reigned as the universe’s first king. The Orphics identified him with the primordial Eros and with the light by which the cosmos became visible.

What did Phanes look like?

The Orphic sources describe Phanes as a golden-winged deity of both sexes, wrapped in or crowned by a serpent, with the heads of a bull and a lion growing from his body. The fragments add that he had four eyes and held the faces of all creatures not yet born within him. His appearance is deliberately composite, suggesting a being who contains every future form at once.

How was Phanes born?

Phanes hatched from a cosmic egg that the god Chronos (Time) fashioned from the shining aether, in some versions with Ananke (Necessity) coiled around it. Other Orphic accounts begin with primal water and mud, from which the serpent Time arose and produced the egg. When the shell split, its halves became the sky and the earth, and Phanes stepped out into the gap.

Why did Zeus swallow Phanes?

According to the Orphic Rhapsodies and the Derveni papyrus, Zeus swallowed Phanes to absorb the whole of creation into himself and then bring it forth again. By consuming the firstborn god, Zeus took in the sea, sky, rivers, and every earlier deity, becoming for a moment the only thing that existed. He then remade the world a second time, which is how the Orphics explained a cosmos that is at once ancient and renewed.

What is the Orphic egg?

The Orphic egg, or cosmic egg, is the shell from which Phanes was born and one of the central images of Orphic cosmology. It is often shown entwined by a serpent representing Time or Necessity encircling the primordial matter before creation. The famous Modena relief of the second century AD depicts Phanes stepping from the egg surrounded by the twelve signs of the zodiac.

Related Entries

Nyx, Chaos, Erebus, Aether, Gaia, Uranus, Cronus, Zeus, Metis, Ananke, Ophion, Dionysus, Ouroboros