Ouroboros (Scriptonite Album)

The ouroboros or uroboros (; ) is an ancient symbol depicting a snake or dragon eating its own tail. The ouroboros entered Western tradition via ancient Egyptian iconography and the Greek magical tradition. It was adopted as a symbol in Gnosticism and Hermeticism and, most notably, in alchemy. Some snakes, such as rat snakes, have been known to consume themselves.

Name and interpretation

The term derives , from ''oura'' 'tail' plus ''-boros'' '-eating'.

The ''ouroboros'' is often interpreted as a symbol for eternal cyclic renewal or a cycle of life, death and rebirth; the snake's skin-sloughing symbolises the transmigration of souls. The snake biting its own tail is a fertility symbol in some religions: the tail is a phallic symbol and the mouth is a yonic or womb-like symbol.

Historical representations

Ancient Egypt

One of the earliest known ouroboros motifs is found in the ''Enigmatic Book of the Netherworld'', an ancient Egyptian funerary text in KV62, the tomb of Tutankhamun, in the 14th century BCE. The text concerns the actions of Ra and his union with Osiris in the underworld. The ouroboros is depicted twice on the figure: holding their tails in their mouths, one encircling the head and upper chest, the other surrounding the feet of a large figure, which may represent the unified Ra-Osiris (Osiris born again as Ra). Both serpents are manifestations of the deity Mehen, who in other funerary texts protects Ra in his underworld journey. The whole divine figure represents the beginning and the end of time.

The ouroboros appears elsewhere in Egyptian sources, where, like many Egyptian serpent deities, it represents the formless disorder that surrounds the orderly world and is involved in that world's periodic renewal. The symbol persisted from Egyptian into Roman times, when it frequently appeared on magical talismans, sometimes in combination with other magical emblems. The 4th-century CE Latin commentator Servius was aware of the Egyptian use of the symbol, noting that the image of a snake biting its tail represents the cyclical nature of the year.

Gnosticism and alchemy

In Gnosticism, a serpent biting its tail symbolised eternity and the soul of the world. The Gnostic ''Pistis Sophia'' (c. 400 CE) describes the ouroboros as a twelve-part dragon surrounding the world with its tail in its mouth.

The famous ouroboros drawing from the early alchemical text, ''The Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra'' (), probably originally dating to the 3rd century Alexandria, but first known in a 10th-century copy, encloses the words ''hen to pan'' (), "the all is one". Its black and white halves may perhaps represent a Gnostic duality of existence, analogous to the Taoist yin and yang symbol. The chrysopoeia ouroboros of Cleopatra the Alchemist is one of the oldest images of the ouroboros to be linked with the legendary ''opus'' of the alchemists, the philosopher's stone.

A 15th-century alchemical manuscript, ''The Aurora Consurgens'', features the ouroboros, where it is used among symbols of the sun, moon, and mercury.

File:KellsFol124rTuncCrucifixerant.jpg, A highly stylised ouroboros from '' The Book of Kells'', an illuminated Gospel Book (c. 800 CE)
File:Ouroboros 1.jpg, Engraving of a wyvern-type ouroboros by Lucas Jennis, in the 1625 alchemical tract ''De Lapide Philosophico''. The figure serves as a symbol for mercury.
File:Tractat von dem Kauen und Schmatzen der Todten in Gräbern 001.jpg, An engraving of a woman holding an ouroboros in Michael Ranft's 1734 treatise on vampires
File:Transylvanian Thaler of Gabriel Bethlen 1621.jpg, Transylvanian Thaler of Gabriel Bethlen showing his portrait and coat of arms including an ouroboros in the center of the shield (1621)
File:Theosophicalsealfrench.svg, Seal of the Theosophical Society, founded 1875
File:Labaro Reggenza Italiana del Carnaro.svg, Flag of the short-lived Italian Regency of Carnaro at Fiume, bearing the snake Ouroborus

World serpent in mythology

In Norse mythology, the ouroboros appears as the serpent Jörmungandr, one of the three children of Loki and Angrboda, which grew so large that it could encircle the world and grasp its tail in its teeth. In the legends of Ragnar Lodbrok'', the Geatish king Herraud gives a small lindworm as a gift to his daughter Þóra Town-Hart after which it grows into a large serpent which encircles the girl's bower and bites itself in the tail. The serpent is slain by Ragnar Lodbrok who marries Þóra. Ragnar later has a son with another woman named Kráka and this son is born with the image of a white snake in one eye. This snake encircled the iris and bit itself in the tail, and the son was named Sigurd Snake-in-the-Eye.

It is a common belief among indigenous people of the tropical lowlands of South America that waters at the edge of the world-disc are encircled by a snake, often an anaconda, biting its own tail.

The ouroboros has certain features in common with the Biblical Leviathan. According to the Zohar, the Leviathan is a singular creature with no mate, "its tail is placed in its mouth", while Rashi on Baba Batra 74b describes it as "twisting around and encompassing the entire world". The identification appears to go back as far as the poems of Kalir in the 6th–7th centuries.

Connection to Indian thought

In the ''Aitareya Brahmana'', a Vedic text of the early 1st millennium BCE, the nature of the Vedic rituals is compared to "a snake biting its own tail."

Ouroboros symbolism has been used to describe the Kundalini. According to the medieval ''Yoga-kundalini Upanishad'': "The divine power, Kundalini, shines like the stem of a young lotus; like a snake, coiled round upon herself she holds her tail in her mouth and lies resting half asleep as the base of the body" (1.82).

Storl (2004) also refers to the ouroboros image in reference to the "cycle of samsara"."When Shakti is united with Shiva, she is a radiant, gentle goddess; but when she is separated from him, she turns into a terrible, destructive fury. She is the endless Ouroboros, the dragon biting its own tail, symbolizing the cycle of samsara."

Modern references

Jungian psychology

Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung saw the ouroboros as an archetype and the basic mandala of alchemy. Jung also defined the relationship of the ouroboros to alchemy: Carl Jung, ''Collected Works'', Vol. 14 para. 513.

The Jungian psychologist Erich Neumann writes of it as a representation of the pre-ego "dawn state", depicting the undifferentiated infancy experience of both humankind and the individual child.

Kekulé's dream

The German organic chemist August Kekulé described the eureka moment when he realised the structure of benzene, after he saw a vision of Ouroboros:

I was sitting, writing at my text-book; but the work did not progress; my thoughts were elsewhere. I turned my chair to the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were gamboling before my eyes. This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by the repeated visions of the kind, could now distinguish larger structures of manifold conformation: long rows, sometimes more closely fitted together; all twining and twisting in snake-like motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke; and this time also I spent the rest of the night in working out the consequences of the hypothesis.

Cosmos

Martin Rees