In Kabbalah, the ineffable ‘flow’ of creation or emanation manifests itself first as a ‘point.’ In the Zohar, the ‘point’ or ‘beginning’ is the second sefirah, Hokhmah, because it is ‘the first aspect of God that can be known’ (Matt 1995, 175). ‘Before’ that (as we might say ‘before time’) is the first sefirah, Kether; and ‘before’ that is Ein Sof, which (like the apeiron of Anaximander) could be translated ‘boundless’ or ‘infinite’. Here is the Zohar’s rendering of the proto-creation process represented by the opening phrase of Genesis, ‘In the beginning’:
A spark of impenetrable darkness flashed within the concealed of the concealed, from the head of Infinity — a cluster of vapor forming in formlessness, thrust in a ring, not white, not black, not red, not green, no color at all. As a cord surveyed, it yielded radiant colors. Deep within the spark gushed a flow, splaying colors below, concealed within the concealed of the mystery of Ein Sof. It split and did not split its aura, was not known at all, until under the impact of splitting, a single, concealed, supernal point shone. Beyond that point, nothing is known, so it is called Reshit, Beginning, first command of all.
— Zohar 1:15a (ZP I.107-9)
With this we might compare Peirce‘s speculations about the beginning of time, starting around 1888 with his ‘Guess at the Riddle’:
Our conceptions of the first stages of the development, before time yet existed, must be as vague and figurative as the expressions of the first chapter of Genesis. Out of the womb of indeterminacy we must say that there would have come something, by the principle of Firstness, which we may call a flash. Then by the principle of habit there would have been a second flash. Though time would not yet have been, this second flash was in some sense after the first, because resulting from it. Then there would have come other successions ever more and more closely connected, the habits and the tendency to take them ever strengthening themselves, until the events would have been bound together into something like a continuous flow.
W6:209
Ten years later, in his Cambridge Conferences Lectures, Peirce argued that if time is a continuum, its “beginning” or “end” can only be imagined as an ideal point infinitely distant from the present. If either actually occurred, it would be a secondness, a discontinuity; but a continuum
must be assumed to be devoid of all topical singularities. For any such singularity is a locus of discontinuity; and from the nature of the continuum there may be no room to suppose any such secondness. But now, a continuum which is without singularities must, in the first place, return into itself. Here is a remarkable consequence.
Take, for example, Time. It makes no difference what singularities you may see reason to impose upon this continuum. You may, for example, say that all evolution began at this instant, which you may call the infinite past, and comes to a close at that other instant, which you may call the infinite future. But all this is quite extrinsic to time itself. Let it be, if you please, that evolutionary time, our section of time, is contained between those limits. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that time itself, unless it be discontinuous, as we have every reason to suppose it is not, stretches on beyond those limits, infinite though they be, returns into itself, and begins again.
CP 6.210, RLT 264
Of course it does not return into itself at any determinate point in ‘evolutionary time’ – nothing that has actually happened can happen again – so it must ‘begin again’ continuously.