page_title: World egg
section_title: Finnish mythology
hierarchical_section_title: World egg / Finnish mythology
context_page_description: The world egg, cosmic egg or mundane egg is a mythological motif found in the cosmogonies of many cultures that descends from the proto-Indo-European culture and other cultures and civilizations. Typically, the world egg is a beginning of some sort, and the universe or some primordial being comes into existence by "hatching" from the egg, sometimes lain on the primordial waters of the Earth.
  Eggs symbolize the unification of two complementary principles from that life or existence, in its most fundamental philosophical sense, emerges.
context_section_description: In the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic, there is a myth of the world being created from the fragments of an egg laid by a goldeneye on the knee of Ilmatar, goddess of the air:
  One egg's lower half transformed
  And became the earth below,
  And its upper half transmuted
  And became the sky above;
  From the yolk the sun was made,
  Light of day to shine upon us;
  From the white the moon was formed,
  Light of night to gleam above us;
  All the colored brighter bits
  Rose to be the stars of heaven
  And the darker crumbs changed into
  Clouds and cloudlets in the sky.
  In many original folk poems, the duck - or sometimes an eagle - laid its eggs on the knee of Väinämöinen.
caption: The statue Ilmatar and Sotka by Aarre Aaltonen [fi] in Helsinki
exif: {"Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Artist": "b'Dil\\xe9n B\\xf6rje'", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Centered", "Image Copyright": "b'\\xa9Helsingin kaupungin, ... ]"}