Today’s post is about the history of a symbol — one which appeared in numerous civilizations across time and whose meaning reflected the concerns of each culture it appeared in. I’m talking about the snake that eats its own tail — the ouroboros.
In Ancient Egypt the ouroboros appeared in the 13th-century tomb of “King Tut” Tutankhamen (image two), where it referenced the cyclical nature of time. The days and nights, like the changes of the seasons that brought forth the ebbing and flowing of the Nile, represented eternity.
Over time, the ouroboros took on additional meanings. The first image here shows a 10th-century rendering of a third-century CE work on alchemy — the black- and- white ouroboros devours its tail around the Greek words that translate “all is one.” It definitely resonates with Daoist traditions in its emphasis of the union of opposites to make up a whole.
The example of a very abstracted ouroboros from the Book of Kells (c. 800 CE) demonstrates the way that this Ancient symbol was coopted by those with different belief systems– in this case, by Christians. It is fitting the way that this blocky image of the self-eating snake appears in the Gospel — it stresses the eternal nature of the word of God.
For much of Medieval and Early Modern European history, the ouroboros was one of the most significant symbols of the study of alchemy. The alchemists were trying to turn lead to gold and thought it could be done with the proper mixture of substances of opposing natures — the union of opposites. The grandest goal was of course the Philosopher’s stone, thought to give immortal life. The ouroboros became associated with this quest for eternity, as you can see in the last image of a 15th-century alchemical text called the _Aurora Consurgens_. The ouroboros is contained inside a glass vial used by alchemists.
And the influence of the oroboros continued as recently as 1872, when the German chemist August Kekulé had a vision of an ouroboros that inspired him to figure out the molecular structure of benzene.
Source(s): _BBC_, “The ancient symbol that spanned millennia,” Joobin Bekhrad Dec 4, 2017. _Gizmodo_, “The ouroboros, from Antiquity to AI,” Sarah Durn, 3/4/2020. Wikipedia.
