Ouroboros meaning: the snake that eats its own tail

The ouroboros (also spelled uroboros) is the image of a snake, or a dragon, biting or eating its own tail so that it forms a circle. The word is Greek: ourá, “tail”, and ‑bóros, “eating”.¹ It has no single meaning. Depending on the source, the snake is the universe, the year, “one is the all”, an alchemical operation, the beginning that lies in the end, a prison for souls or a monster to be slain. The previous article told how The Kybalion presents itself as Egyptian wisdom and dates from 1908. This symbol really does have its earliest known image in Egypt, and here is what each text I could read says about it, with its date.

What does the ouroboros mean?

The short answer is that it depends on whom you ask, and the answers do not always agree. The snake of the Greek alchemists is not the snake of the Gnostics, and neither is the snake of the Norse world. What they share is the shape: something that turns back on itself, with no visible beginning or end. What each source puts inside that shape is in this piece, from the oldest to the most recent:

The oldest image: Egypt

According to Wikipedia, one of the oldest known ouroboroi is in the tomb of Tutankhamun, from the 14th century BCE, in a funerary text now called the Enigmatic Book of the Netherworld: two snakes with their tails in their mouths surround a large figure, one around the head and one around the feet, and they may be forms of the god Mehen, who protects Ra on his journey through the world of the dead.¹ No sentence explains it: it is an image. What it is said to mean comes much later, and in Greek.

Horapollo, a 5th-century author who wrote in Greek about hieroglyphs, says that to represent the universe “they delineate a serpent bespeckled with variegated scales, devouring its own tail”: the scales are the stars; the snake is heavy like the earth and slippery like water; every year it sheds its old age with its skin, as the year renews itself; and its feeding on its own body means that everything born in the world dissolves back into it.² It should be read with care: Horapollo wrote when nobody could read hieroglyphs any more, and much of his book does not match what is known today about Egyptian writing. His 1840 translator adds that on Egyptian monuments there are figures of the god Atum surrounded by a snake with its tail in its mouth.²

“One is the all”: the Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra

The most reproduced image comes from Greek alchemy. In a manuscript of the library of St Mark's in Venice, from the end of the 10th or the start of the 11th century according to Marcellin Berthelot, who edited it in 1887, there is a page titled Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra, “Cleopatra's gold-making”.³ At the top are three concentric circles; the outer one ends in a sort of tail, and Berthelot reads the whole as the figure of “the mystic serpent”. The inner ring reads: Εἷς ἐστιν ὁ ὄφις ὁ ἔχων τὸν ἰόν, “one is the serpent, the one that has the venom”. The outer ring: Ἓν τὸ πᾶν, “one is the all”, “and through it the all, and towards it the all; and if the all does not contain the all, the all is nothing”. Lower down, on the left, a snake biting its tail with the same phrase in the middle: ἓν τὸ πᾶν.³ I read it in the image of the printed page, because the digitised text mangles the Greek.

What did this snake mean to someone working with metals? A short text in the same collection, which Berthelot titles “The serpent Ouroboros”, says it plainly: “This is the mystery: the serpent Ouroboros is the composition which, as a whole, is devoured and melted, dissolved and transformed by fermentation.” It turns dark green, the colour of gold comes from it, and then the red “called the colour of cinnabar”.³ Its four feet are the four imperfect metals (Berthelot notes: lead, copper, tin, iron) and its three ears “the three sublimed vapours”. And it adds: “Nature rejoices in nature, nature charms nature, nature masters nature.”³ Here the snake that eats itself is not a spiritual message: it is matter coming apart in order to change. Berthelot admits that it is hard to know which chemical reactions these formulas refer to.³

The beginning in the end

Olympiodorus, a Greek commentator on alchemy, gives another reading in the same collection: Agathodaimon “placed the beginning in the end and the end in the beginning”, and that is the serpent Ouroboros. And more: some call it Heaven, “perhaps because the serpent is the image of the world”; the Egyptian sacred scribes who wanted to draw the world on obelisks engraved the serpent Ouroboros, “and its body is spangled with stars”.³ It is Horapollo's idea again: scales as stars. I read it in Berthelot's French translation, not in Greek.

A world that feeds on itself

Plato mentions no snake, but in the Timaeus he describes a body that does the same thing. The body of the world is a smooth sphere, with no eyes or ears because there is nothing outside to see or hear, and no organs to take in food or expel it, because nothing leaves it or reaches it: “it was so designed as to supply its own wastage as food for itself” (αὐτὸ γὰρ ἑαυτῷ τροφὴν τὴν ἑαυτοῦ φθίσιν παρέχον), and it does and suffers everything in itself and by itself.⁴ It is the same passage on the soul of the world with which this Diary began, in the first article on the reading path.

Some seven centuries later, Macrobius, a Latin author writing around the year 430, joins the two. Discussing Janus, he says that some identified him with the world, and that this is why “the Phoenicians, representing him in their rites, imagined a dragon coiled in a circle devouring its tail, so that it may be seen that the world both feeds on itself and turns back on itself” (ut appareat mundum et ex se ipso ali et in se revolvi).⁵ That Macrobius states what the snake means in almost the words of the Timaeus is my own observation; I do not know whether he took it from Plato, nor whether the Phoenicians drew it that way: it is what Macrobius says.

A prison: the Pistis Sophia

In the Pistis Sophia, a Gnostic text in Coptic usually dated to around the year 400, the snake means almost the opposite. Mary asks what the outer darkness is like, and Jesus answers: “The outer darkness is a great dragon, whose tail is in his mouth, outside the whole world and surrounding the whole world.” Inside are twelve dungeons of chastisement, each with a ruler; the first has a crocodile's face and also has its tail in its mouth.⁶ A few pages later the text says that if one prays for a soul that is in the dragon, it “will draw his tail out of his mouth and let go that soul”.⁶ Wikipedia says that for the Gnostics the snake biting its tail symbolised eternity and the soul of the world.¹ In the passage I read it is something else: a circle that encloses, and opens so that the soul can leave. I read G. R. S. Mead's English translation (1921), not the Coptic.

The serpent of the Norse world

In Snorri Sturluson's Edda, from the 13th century, Odin throws the serpent Jörmungandr, a child of Loki, into the deep sea that surrounds all lands, and the serpent grows so large “that he lies in the midst of the ocean, surrounds all the earth, and bites his own tail” (ok bítr í sporð sér).⁷ It is not a symbol of wholeness: it is a monster, and at Ragnarök, the end of the world, Thor kills it, steps back “nine paces” and falls dead from the venom the serpent blows on him.⁷ Snorri does not call it an “ouroboros”; the shape is the same and I have no evidence that one comes from the other.

Is it in the Bible?

No. I searched the King James Bible for every mention of Leviathan (Job 41, Psalms 74 and 104, Isaiah 27) and of a tail, and no creature bites its own.⁸ The link comes later: according to Wikipedia, the Zohar, a 13th-century book of Kabbalah, says of Leviathan that “its tail is placed in its mouth”, and a commentary by Rashi describes it as coiled around the whole world.¹ I did not read either.

And the spiritual meaning?

The one most repeated today comes from Carl Jung, in the 20th century. According to the quotation Wikipedia gives from his Collected Works (vol. 14, §513), Jung saw the ouroboros as an archetype and wrote that it is “a dramatic symbol for the integration and assimilation of the opposite, i.e. of the shadow”, and that the alchemists knew that the prima materia of their art was the human being.¹ It is a psychological reading by a 20th-century psychiatrist, not what the Greek text said, which spoke of metals dissolving. I did not check it against the printed edition. “Life, death and rebirth”, “infinity” or “eternal return”, as tattoo pages put it, are modern readings: in the sources I read, the snake is the universe, the year, matter, darkness or a monster, depending on who draws it.

Kekulé's dream and the benzene ring

In 1890, at a celebration in his honour in Berlin, the chemist August Kekulé told how it occurred to him that the benzene molecule was a ring. In the English translation Francis Japp read in London in 1897: he was writing his textbook, the work did not progress, he turned his chair to the fire and dozed; the atoms were “gambolling” before his eyes, in long rows “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.” And he added: “Let us learn to dream, gentlemen, then perhaps we shall find the truth… but let us beware of publishing our dreams before they have been put to the proof by the waking understanding.”⁹

Two things are worth knowing. In that text Kekulé does not say “ouroboros” or mention alchemy: he says a snake. That it was “the alchemical symbol” is something others said later. And the story has its doubts: the chemist Miroslav Novák, in a 2020 study, argues that the dreams probably did not happen on the dates or in the places told, or did not happen at all, and recalls that Josef Loschmidt had already drawn benzene as a ring in 1861, four years before Kekulé.¹⁰ I did not read the speech in German.

What I could not read

I did not read the Enigmatic Book of the Netherworld or any Egyptological study: the Tutankhamun material comes from Wikipedia. Of Berthelot I read the description of the figures (pp. 132-133 and 157-159 of the Introduction), the two short texts on the serpent and the Olympiodorus passage, in French; of the Greek, only that of the Chrysopoeia, in the image of the page. Of the Pistis Sophia, chapter 126 and the prayer that follows it, in Mead's translation. Of Horapollo, only chapter I.2 in the 1840 English translation. I did not read Jung or the Zohar, nor the Vedic text (Aitareya Brahmana) that, according to Wikipedia, compares the ritual to “a snake biting its own tail”, nor Kekulé's speech in German. Of Novák's study, which is in Czech, I read the passages on the dreams and on Loschmidt.

What we do with this

This Diary began with the Timaeus and the soul of the world, and this article returns to it: the shape of the reading path turns back too. At Anima Mundis, the Observatory counts the voices that arrive in each UTC hour, and the day closes on itself every twenty-four hours. That is a clock, not a snake, and it means nothing more. The sources leave a useful warning: the same shape served to say “one is the all” and to say “prison”. Before getting a meaning tattooed, it is worth asking which text it comes from.