Ouroboros

Also Known As: Greek οὐροβόρος, ouroboros, “tail-devouring”, from οὐρά, tail, and βορά, food; also spelled Uroboros, Uroborus
Region/Culture: Global
Mythos: Egyptian Mythology, Greek Mythology, Global Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Objects
Mythical Attributes: A serpent bent into a closed ring by swallowing its own tail, standing for a system that consumes itself and is thereby continually renewed.
Role in Mythos: It marks the boundary and the turning point of cyclical time, first as the enclosure around the united sun god and the dead god in the Egyptian underworld books, later as the governing emblem of Greek and European alchemy.
Relation to Humans: No one made offerings to it, because it was never a being that could receive them; it was a sign that scribes, engravers and alchemists drew in order to think with. Its reach into ordinary life came through the objects it was put on, from funerary shrines and magical gems to printed alchemical plates and, much later, a chemist’s account of how he worked out the shape of a molecule.

On a sheet of gilded wood that spent thirty-two centuries in the dark of a tomb in the Valley of the Kings, a huge standing figure is clamped between two snakes. One coils around his head and shoulders. One coils around his feet. Each has taken the tip of its own tail into its mouth, so that both are closed rings, and the figure stands inside them the way a man stands inside a doorway. The gold has the soft dull sheen of leaf laid over wood rather than the hard glitter of solid metal, and the text running beside the drawing is written in a deliberately obstructed script that Egyptian scribes reserved for the most dangerous hours of the night. The figure is almost certainly Ra and Osiris in a single body, the sun and the buried god fused for one hour at the bottom of the darkness. The ring above him is the sky. The ring below him is the underworld. What the panel shows is the universe closing on itself and starting again.

That shrine belonged to Tutankhamun, and the composition on it, known now as the Enigmatic Book of the Netherworld, is the oldest surviving image of the tail-eating serpent anywhere in the world. It dates to the fourteenth century BCE. The Egyptians who drew it had no name for the figure that has come down to us; the word ouroboros is Greek, tail-devouring, and it was applied to the image centuries later by writers working in Greek in Egypt, who inherited the picture without inheriting the funerary machinery that produced it.

The machinery matters, because it explains why a serpent and not something else. Egyptian cosmology already had a great encircling snake in Mehen, the Coiled One, who wraps himself around the sun god’s boat through every hour of the night journey and keeps out whatever is waiting in the water. A protective serpent that surrounds a thing was a form the Egyptians had used for a long time. Bending that serpent’s head back to its own tail did one further thing: it removed every seam. There is no gap in a mouth-to-tail circle, nothing to enter through, no beginning to attack.

By late antiquity the sign had come loose from the tomb and become a piece of general intellectual property. The Latin commentator Servius, writing on a line of the Aeneid in the fourth century CE, reports that before the alphabet the Egyptians drew the year as a serpent biting its own tail, because the year runs back into itself. A century later Horapollo, compiling explanations of hieroglyphs, drew a careful distinction that later readers mostly ignored: a serpent hiding its tail beneath its body signifies Aion, unbounded time, while the serpent actually devouring its tail signifies the kosmos, the ordered world.

The alchemists took the second reading and never gave it back. The oldest surviving Greek alchemical codex, Marcianus graecus Z. 299 in the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice, copied in the tenth or eleventh century, carries on a single leaf a short work attributed to Cleopatra the Alchemist, the Chrysopoeia, or gold-making. Its central drawing is a hand-inked ring: a serpent with one half of its body shaded black and the other left pale, tail in mouth, with three Greek words written inside the circle. The all is one. Picture the copyist at that leaf, lamp close enough that the smoke stings, drawing a shape he probably did not fully understand from an exemplar already half a millennium old, and getting the black and the pale halves in the right order anyway. Everything the ouroboros would mean in Europe for the next eight hundred years is packed into that one small circle: matter destroyed and recovered without loss, opposites folded into a single body, an operation that ends where it began.

Meanwhile the same shape had grown independently in the far north, which is worth saying plainly because it is often reported as borrowing and there is no evidence that it was. Snorri Sturluson, writing in thirteenth-century Iceland, describes Jörmungandr, the serpent thrown into the sea by Odin, growing until it lies around every land with its tail in its own mouth. That version comes with an ending the Egyptian one does not have. At Ragnarök the serpent lets go, comes ashore in a fury and floods the land behind it, and the world it had been holding shut comes apart. The Norse understood perfectly well what the circle was for. They also understood what happens when the mouth opens.

Its powers are entirely the powers of a diagram. It grants closure: a cosmos with no outside, a year with no loose end, a process that recovers its own materials. Because it is fed on itself it needs nothing from outside, which is precisely why the alchemists liked it, since that is exactly what they claimed their sealed vessel could do. Its limits are equally structural. It has no myths of its own. No one prayed to it, no temple held it, no festival marked its day, and it survives only by being lent to gods and operations that do have stories. Break the ring and there is nothing left but a snake. That fragility is arguably its most honest feature, and it is why the image kept finding new work: the German chemist August Kekulé, in an after-dinner speech in 1890, described a drowsing vision of chains of atoms twisting like snakes until one seized its own tail, which was how he said he arrived at the closed ring of the benzene molecule; and Carl Jung, in Psychology and Alchemy in 1944, took the same circle as a picture of the self feeding on itself in order to remake itself. Neither man was doing mythology. Both reached for a shape that had been designed, in a dark chamber in Egypt, to say that the end and the beginning are the same place.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Ouroboros?

The Ouroboros is the image of a serpent, or in later European art a dragon, curved into a closed ring by swallowing its own tail. It is not a creature with a myth of its own but an emblem, used to represent cyclical time, the enclosed cosmos, and processes that renew themselves without any input from outside. The name is Greek and means tail-devouring.

Where does the Ouroboros come from?

The earliest known Ouroboros is Egyptian, on a gilded shrine from the tomb of Tutankhamun in the fourteenth century BCE, in the funerary composition called the Enigmatic Book of the Netherworld. Two tail-eating serpents encircle the head and the feet of a large figure, understood as the sun god Ra united with Osiris. The Greek name was attached to the image only much later.

What does the Ouroboros symbolize?

It symbolizes closure and self-renewal: time that returns to its own starting point, a world with no outside, and matter that can be broken down and recovered without loss. The Latin commentator Servius records that Egyptians drew the year as a snake biting its tail because the year runs back into itself, while Horapollo assigned the tail-devouring serpent to the kosmos, the ordered world.

Why is the Ouroboros associated with alchemy?

The oldest surviving Greek alchemical manuscript, Marcianus graecus Z. 299 in Venice, contains a drawing of the Ouroboros with one half of its body black and the other pale, inscribed inside with the words “the all is one.” For alchemists the sealed, self-consuming circle was an exact picture of what they claimed happened in a closed vessel, so the Ouroboros became the standard emblem of the work.

Is Jörmungandr an Ouroboros?

Jörmungandr, the Midgard Serpent of Norse myth, is described by Snorri Sturluson as lying around all the lands with its tail in its own mouth, which makes it the same shape. There is no evidence that the Norse took the image from Egypt or from the alchemists. In the Norse version the circle also breaks: at Ragnarök the serpent releases its tail, comes ashore, and the world it enclosed is destroyed.