The Ouroboros, the Serpent Biting Its Tail from Egypt to Alchemy
The serpent devouring its own tail, from Egyptian tombs to the Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra, from Horapollo to Jörmungandr: history of a symbol of eternity.
A serpent arranged in a circle, gripping the end of its own tail in its jaws: few images are as simple and at the same time as rich in meaning. The Greeks called it ouroborós, “tail-devourer”, and in Italian it is called uroboro. It is not a creature with a precise story or myth, but a symbol that crosses different cultures, from pharaonic Egypt to alchemy, and expresses the idea of a cycle with neither beginning nor end.
Egyptian Origins
One of the oldest attestations is found in the tomb of Tutankhamun, the pharaoh who died around 1323 BC. On one of the gilded shrines that enclosed the sarcophagus a large mummiform figure is depicted, whose head and feet are encircled by two serpents biting their tails. The scene belongs to a funerary text known as the Enigmatic Book of the Netherworld and seems to allude to the regeneration of the sun during its night journey.
In Egyptian religion the serpent Mehen wrapped the sun god in its coils in the night barque, protecting him from the forces of chaos. In a later period the circular serpent became an image of the world and of time. Horapollo, author of a Greek treatise on hieroglyphs that has come down to us from late antiquity, states that the Egyptians represented the universe by a serpent with multicoloured scales devouring its own tail.
One Is the All: the Alchemical Ouroboros
It was the Graeco-Egyptian alchemists who made the ouroboros a central emblem. In a Byzantine manuscript kept in Venice, the Codex Marcianus Graecus 299, there is a leaf known as the Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra, that is the “making of gold”, attributed to an alchemist named Cleopatra about whom we know very little. On it a circular serpent can be seen enclosing the Greek words hen to pan, “one the all”.
For the alchemists the image expressed the unity of matter and the circular process of the work, in which substances are continually dissolved and recomposed. The serpent feeding on itself signified a transformation that needs nothing from outside. The ouroboros returned strongly in the illustrated treatises of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, sometimes doubled into two dragons, one winged and one wingless, biting each other's tails.
The World Serpent and Other Interpretations
A similar image belongs to Norse mythology. Jörmungandr, the Midgard Serpent, son of the god Loki, was thrown by Odin into the ocean that surrounds the inhabited earth, and grew so large that it encircled the whole world and bit its own tail. According to Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda, at Ragnarök the serpent will rise from the sea and fight Thor, and the two will bring death to each other.
The ouroboros also appears on magical gems of the Roman period and in some Gnostic texts, where the serpent sometimes surrounds divine figures or formulas. In the nineteenth century the German chemist August Kekulé recounted, many years after the event, that he had grasped the ring structure of benzene by dreaming of a serpent biting its tail. The story, told in a speech of 1890, is famous, although some historians of science have questioned its reliability.
The fascination of the ouroboros lies in its ability to say many things with a single sign: eternity, the return of the seasons, the unity of opposites, life feeding on death. Unlike other fantastic creatures it needs no story. It is a form that closes upon itself and which, for that very reason, continues to suggest the presence of a deep order behind the changing of things.