Attention from outside the frame. Note it is almost always placed at a boundary rather than at the centre.
a pale seated figure at a small round table in a dark room; above and behind, a shape of deeper black with two eyes shining out of it; the Eye as the central motif, by eye. The plate is the second of a portfolio, and the Met records the sentence as its title
The ouroboros is older than alchemy and was borrowed into it. Its earliest surviving appearance is on a shrine in the tomb of Tutankhamun, around 1323 BCE, where two of them enclose the head and feet of the king. It reaches the alchemists through Greco-Egyptian Alexandria, and the earliest alchemical drawing of it we have is in the Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra, a papyrus of perhaps the third century, where the circle it makes is inscribed hen to pan, one is the all.
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. Kekule's dream of the benzene ring, told at a Berlin ceremony in 1890, is often given as evidence that the symbol carries some deep chemical truth. He told it twenty-five years after the fact, at a celebration in his own honour, and historians of chemistry have treated it sceptically ever since.
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. Say so on the page.
Where it appears
Across the archive · 4
Plates that carry the symbol, tagged by eye and not yet decoded: first where it is the central motif, then where it plays a secondary part. Each opens in the viewer; the key and the notes come with the entry.
Central motif · 3
The Opening of the Third EyeMihran K. Serailian, colour plate, 1928the head of a woman in profile in a winged helmet, the skull shown as if transparent, the brain and the glands in blue, red and yellow, a beam of light passing to the brow; a five-pointed star drawn over the head and a serpent above it, all within a pale oval on violet; the Eye as the central motif by Hall's title, the Heavens by eyeHall, 1928 “This painting of the head of Minerva shows, in part, the activities of the pineal gland and the pituitary body at the time of the phenomenon commonly termed the opening of the Third Eye.”
Eyes ClosedOdilon Redon, 1890a head larger than life, drawn in soft crayon and rising as if out of water, the eyes closed and the face turned up; nothing else in the frame; the Eye as the central motif, closed
Below, I saw the vaporous contours of a human formOdilon Redon, 1896a pale seated figure at a small round table in a dark room; above and behind, a shape of deeper black with two eyes shining out of it; the Eye as the central motif, by eye. The plate is the second of a portfolio, and the Met records the sentence as its title
Secondary motif · 1
On the same plate
