The Ouroboros
The Ouroboros, one of the oldest mystical symbols in the world [1], is an ancient symbol of a serpent or dragon eating its own tail. With no beginning nor end, it represents the cyclical nature of reality, self-sustaining, making it immortal and infinite, continual renewal symbolized by the sloughing of its skin.
Plato invoked the image of the Ouroboros as the first living creature in existence. From Plato’s Timaeus:
For the Creator conceived that a being which was self-sufficient would be far more excellent than one which lacked anything; […] and he was made to move in the same manner and on the same spot, within his own limits revolving in a circle[.]
Such was the whole plan of the eternal God about the god that was […] in every direction equidistant from the centre, a body entire and perfect, and formed out of perfect bodies. And in the centre he put the soul, which he diffused throughout the body, making it also to be the exterior environment of it; and he made the universe a circle moving in a circle, one and solitary[.]
The Mayans too had Mixcoatl, the “cloud serpent”, Father of Quetzalcóatl, the creator of the world and mankind, whose shape was manifest in the Milky Way, with the inner mass of stars resembling the snake’s head consuming its tail. Captured therein is also the womb of the Great Mother, the cauldron of Creation. Thus symbolizing both creation and destruction, the Great Mother and Serpent, suspended in the galaxy above [2].
The earliest representations of Ouroboros are Egyptian and represent the union of Ra and Osiris the Egyptian Gods of the Sun and Underworld respectively. From The Duality of Ra and Osiris:
The perpetual cycle of existence — the cycle of life and death — is symbolized by Ra (Re) and Ausar (Osiris). Ra is the living neter who descends into death to become Ausar, the neter of the dead. Ausar ascends and comes to life again as Ra. The creation is continuous: it is a flow of life progressing towards death. But out of death, a new Ra is to be born, sprouting new life. Ra is the cosmic principle of energy that moves toward death, and Ausar represents the process of rebirth. Thus, the terms of life and death become interchangeable: life means slow dying, and death means resurrection to new life.
Throughout the mythologies, the Ouroboros acts as a unifying force across multiple dualisms. Those of male or female, birth or death, light or darkness all manifest within the symbol or mythologies of the Ouroboros. Each extreme yielding to the other, anchoring the cyclic processes embodied in the Myth itself. Each cycle a new layer of skin to be shed, or burned with a purifying fire, yielding not ash, but a rising Phoenix.
The Yin Yang symbol may be the most distilled version of the Ouroboros. Here too, the symbol unifies an interplay of opposites, with black and white representing each dualistic extreme, each yielding to the other via a ‘seed’ of the other planted at its most dominant portion of the cycle. Here, it is darkest before the dawn, and within this darkness, the faintest glimmer of light cracks, broadening until the noonday sun radiates the world, just before fading into obscured darkness once again.
There are a lot of similarities, regardless of the cultures, eras, or forms that the ouroboros manifest. It embodies the eternal, consuming only itself, requiring no other sustenance.
Its various manifestations balance multiple dichotomies. These dichotomies, wether they represent the extremes of masculine and feminine, or of light and dark, are projections from this underlying Myth onto the material plane.
Finally, its circular shape implies the infinite, cyclical, unbroken chain of causation [3], making it a symbol which gives rise to not just the universe itself and its dichotomies, but also the very forces of transmutation between them.
Time and space have always been intertwined. Whether in the form of recent scientific discoveries, or the mythical Ouroboros, it is, like the myth itself, a concept humanity returns to over and over again.
[1] https://mythology.net/others/concepts/ouroboros/
[2] Maya Cosmogenesis 2012 p271
[3] See Dali’s interpretation to see the Ouroboros’ immortality interrupted.
