Eggs & Serpents

♥ ♥ ♥ Happy Easter friends! ♥ ♥ ♥

Two egg tales for you today ...
First a few pysanky ~ Ukrainian easter eggs, decorated beautifully using the wax resist (batik) method. The name comes from the verb pysaty ~ to write as the designs are written on with beeswax rather than painted.
So long as pysanky are decorated every year, the world will continue to turn. If, however, the custom is abandoned for any reason, evil, in the shape of a horrible serpent chained to a cliff, will overrun the world. Each year this serpent sends out his minions to investigate how many pysanky have been made.
Another old Ukrainian myth tells of giving highly decorated, intricate and dark coloured eggs to the elderly because their life is rich and full of experiences. In the same way, the young are given eggs with more white space on them for their life is a blank page.
Girls should never give their boyfriends eggs which are undecorated at either end as this can foretell baldness!
Have a look at this etsy seller who is making and selling some beautiful pysanky.





Second, the English folk belief surrounding abnormally small yolkless eggs sometimes produced by old hens. These eggs were thought to be cockerel's eggs; they were extremely unlucky and were thrown over the roof because if hatched they would produce a cockatrice ~ a legendary creature with the head and legs of a cockerel and the body and tail of a dragon or serpent. The cockatrice (often interchangeable with the basilisk) was venomous and could kill people with its deadly glance. It was often said that this creature had come from a cockerel's egg hatched out by a toad.
According to legend it could only be killed by a weasel (see picture below right) or by tricking it into seeing itself. At Saffron Walden (Essex), a knight is said to have donned crystal armour to destroy a cockatrice; and at Wherwell (Hampshire), where a man lowered a mirror of polished steel into the creature's den, it fought its reflection till exhausted.

"The Bazeliske the Serpents King I find,
Yet Weasels him do overcome in warre,
The Cyren land him breedes of Lernaes kind,
They to all other a destruction are:
And if we may beleeve, that through the heat of Sunne,
In old Cockes Egges this beast is raised first,
Or beastes by sight or smell thereof are all undone,
Then ist not good, but of his kind the worst."