LOTUS. The LOTUS is important in both Tibetan and Egyptian cultures and religion, where it appears as the matrix from which the God is born. e.g. Padmasambhava and Hippocrates.

"Like the Indians, the Egyptians sometimes symbolized the appearance on the great Life Spirit out of the waters as a lotus - a water-lily - rising and opening its flower. The petals bent back to reveal the rising God of Light and Movement. In Plate 10 the soul is emerging, reborn, from the interior of the flower. By the side are buds in various stages of growth. Sometimesw the flower discloses a young child, the morning sun. The lotus is itself a form of the High God and is mythical in that there must have been a belief that the origin of life could be expressed in terms of a flower symbol. There is, however, another version, based on the way water-lily flowers blossom in the rays of the morning sun. They open to give up their scent to the Sun God. So the text appended to this vignette begins:

"I am the pure Lotus that rises in the glorious

light

to be the peculiar delight of Re." (see note 30.)

Rundle Clark on the Lotus, p.239 and Plate 10.