Symbolica
The Ouroboros on The Magician (I), the rest of the plate faded

The Ouroboros on The Magician (I). Tap the picture to open it.

powers

The Ouroboros

the tail-eater, serpens qui caudam devoravit

The serpent that eats its own tail. The one thing that feeds on itself and so never ends.

The ouroboros is older than alchemy and was borrowed into it. One of its earliest surviving appearances is in the Enigmatic Book of the Netherworld, on a gilded shrine in the tomb of Tutankhamun, fourteenth century BCE: two of them hold their tails in their mouths, one encircling the head and upper chest of a large figure and the other its feet. Who the figure is has not been settled; Erik Hornung reads it as the unified Ra and Osiris rather than the king. It reaches the alchemists through Greco-Egyptian Alexandria, and the earliest alchemical drawing of it is in the Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra, a text that probably goes back to third-century Alexandria but survives in a tenth-century Byzantine copy, where the circle it makes is inscribed hen to pan, the all is one.

What it means inside alchemy is more specific than the pop reading of eternity. It marks a closed system. The work happens in a sealed vessel, nothing enters and nothing leaves, and the matter inside is repeatedly dissolved and recongealed by its own action. The serpent feeding on itself is a picture of that operation, not a picture of infinity. When it is drawn half light and half dark it is making a further claim, that the destroying half and the generating half are one substance.

It is worth being careful about the reading you have probably met. Kekulé's dream of the benzene ring, told in 1890 at a celebration the German Chemical Society held in his own honour, is often given as evidence that the symbol carries some deep chemical truth. He told it twenty-five years after his first benzene paper, and historians of chemistry have treated it sceptically ever since; Alan J. Rocke has argued the 1890 telling may be an invention rather than a recollection.

Contested

Whether the ouroboros in Greco-Egyptian alchemy meant a closed vessel, cyclical time, or the unity of opposites is genuinely unsettled and the sources are thin. The Jungian reading, that it is the undifferentiated self before individuation, is a twentieth-century overlay on the material rather than a claim the alchemists made, and this page says so. Two details in the reading above are contested in the scholarship rather than by this archive. The identity of the figure the two serpents enclose on the Tutankhamun shrine is not agreed. And the Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra is a text of one date surviving in a copy of another, so any statement about what it looked like in the third century is an inference from a tenth-century page. This archive holds no work carrying an ouroboros. The entry was written before its plate, which is the wrong way round and is recorded here as such: the sources below have not been read against their originals here, and the entry will be revised when a plate arrives to test it against.

Sources

  1. Erik Hornung, The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife, 1999: For the two ouroboroi on the shrine in Tutankhamun's tomb and the identification of the enclosed figure as the unified Ra-Osiris. Cited at second hand; not read here.
  2. Mircea Eliade, Occultism, Witchcraft, and Cultural Fashions, 1976: For the Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra and the inscription hen to pan. Cited at second hand; not read here.
  3. Alan J. Rocke, On the scepticism of historians of chemistry toward Kekulé's 1890 account, : For the argument that the benzene dream as told in 1890 may be an invention rather than a recollection. Cited at second hand; not read here.
  4. Codex Marcianus graecus 299, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice, 10th to 11th c.: The manuscript in which the Chrysopoeia drawing survives. Named so a reader can go to the object rather than to a summary of it.

Where it appears

On the same plate