The origin of things, in Roberto Calasso's The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony.

Zeus had been born into a world already old, dangerous and full fo divine beings. In his life he had performed only one exploit truly worthy of the name of Living Being for every living being. He was still hidden in night's cave. Night was the wet nurse of the gods; her very substance was ambrosia. She advised Zeus to swallow up Phanes, the Protogonos, firstborn of the sovereigns of the world, and then to swallow the other gods and goddesses born from him, and the universe too. Thus gods, goddesses, earth and starry splendor, Ocean, rivers, and the deep cavern of the underworld all wound up in Zeus's sacred belly, which now contained everything that had been and would ever be.

Everything grew together inside him, clutching his innards as a bat clutches to a tree or a bloodsucker to flesh. Then Zeus, who had been just another of the Titan's children, became, alone, the beginning, the middle, and the end. Then, in his overflowing solitude, he saw the life that had come before his birth as a child of Kronos, the father who had immediately threatened him and wanted to swallow him up. And he understood why his father has been so fierce. In the end, Kronos had only tried to do what Zeus alone how now succeeded in doing. But everything seemed luminous and clear to him now, because everything was in him. With amazement he realized he had become the only one. He lived in a state of perfect wakefulness. He went back to the times preceeding his father, Kronos, further and further back until he reached a point that was furthest, because it had been the first.

Space no longer existed. In its place was a convex surface clad with thousands upon thousands of scales. It extended beyond anything the eye could see. Looking downward along the scales, he realized that they were attached to other scales, the same color, interwoven with them in knot after knot, each one tighter than the one before. The eye became confused, could no longer tell which of the two coiling bodies the scales belonged to. As he looked up again, toward the heads of the two knotted snakes, the body of the first snake rose, and its scales merged into something that no longer partook of the nature of a snake: it was the face of a god, the first face to reveal what a god's face was, and on either side of it were two other huge heads, one a lion and one a bull, while from the shoulders opened immense, airy wings. The white arm of a woman was twined to the arm of the god, just as below the tails of the two snakes were knotted together. The woman's face gazed steadily at the god's, while with her other arm, behind which trembled an immense wing, she stretched out toward the farthest extremity of everything: and where the tips of her fingernails reached, there Everything ended. They were a royal and motionless couple: They were Time-Without-Age and Ananke.

P. 198-200

I believe this story is from the Orphic hymns. Here's Phanes emerging from the Cosmic Egg, surrounded by the four winds and the twelve signs of the zodiac.Continued.  ¶ 7:40 PM