Record #144
Uroboros
A serpent devouring its own tail in an eternal cycle of self-renewal.
Original Text
To us the ocean is a sea or a system of seas; to the Greeks it was a simple circular river that ringed the land mass. All streams flowed from it and it had neither outlets nor sources. It was also a god or a Titan, perhaps the most ancient of all Titans, since Sleep in Book XIV of the Iliad calls it the source from whom the gods are sprung. In Hesiod’s Theogony, it is the father of all the world’s rivers - three thousand in number - the leading of which are the Alpheus and the Nile. An old man with a flowing beard was the usual personification of the river-ocean; after centuries men found a better symbol.
Heraclitus had said that in the circumference the beginning and the end are a single point. A third-century Greek amulet, preserved in the British Museum, gives us the image which best illustrates this endlessness: the serpent that bites its own tail or, as the Argentine poet Martínez Estrada so beautifully put it, ‘that begins at the end of its tail’ . A story runs that Mary Queen of Scots had engraved on a gold ring the inscription ‘In my end is my beginning,’ meaning perhaps that real life begins after death. Uroboros (Greek for ‘the one that devours its tail’) is the learned name of this creature which became the symbol adopted by alchemists in the Middle Ages. The curious may read further in Jung’s study PsychologieundAlchemie.
A world-circling serpent is also found in Norse cosmology; it is called the Miogarosormr - literally, the middle-yard’sworm, middle-yard standing for the earth. In the Younger Edda, Snorri Sturluson recorded that Loki fathered a wolf and a serpent. An oracle warned the gods that these creatures would be the earth’s downfall. The wolf, Fenrir, was kept on a cord woven of six imaginary things: ‘the noise of a cat’s footfall, the beards of women, the roots of stones, the sinews of bears, the breath of fish, and the spittle of birds.’ The serpent,Jormungard, ‘was thrown into the sea surrounding the land and there it has grown so large that now it too surrounds the earth and bites its own tail.’
In Jotunnheim, the land of giants, Utgard-Loki challenges the god Thor to pick up a cat; Thor, using all his strength, barely manages to lift one of the cat’s paws off the ground. The cat is really the serpent. Thor has been tricked by magic.
At the Twilight of the Gods the serpent will devour the earth and the wolf the sun.
Heraclitus had said that in the circumference the beginning and the end are a single point. A third-century Greek amulet, preserved in the British Museum, gives us the image which best illustrates this endlessness: the serpent that bites its own tail or, as the Argentine poet Martínez Estrada so beautifully put it, ‘that begins at the end of its tail’ . A story runs that Mary Queen of Scots had engraved on a gold ring the inscription ‘In my end is my beginning,’ meaning perhaps that real life begins after death. Uroboros (Greek for ‘the one that devours its tail’) is the learned name of this creature which became the symbol adopted by alchemists in the Middle Ages. The curious may read further in Jung’s study PsychologieundAlchemie.
A world-circling serpent is also found in Norse cosmology; it is called the Miogarosormr - literally, the middle-yard’sworm, middle-yard standing for the earth. In the Younger Edda, Snorri Sturluson recorded that Loki fathered a wolf and a serpent. An oracle warned the gods that these creatures would be the earth’s downfall. The wolf, Fenrir, was kept on a cord woven of six imaginary things: ‘the noise of a cat’s footfall, the beards of women, the roots of stones, the sinews of bears, the breath of fish, and the spittle of birds.’ The serpent,Jormungard, ‘was thrown into the sea surrounding the land and there it has grown so large that now it too surrounds the earth and bites its own tail.’
In Jotunnheim, the land of giants, Utgard-Loki challenges the god Thor to pick up a cat; Thor, using all his strength, barely manages to lift one of the cat’s paws off the ground. The cat is really the serpent. Thor has been tricked by magic.
At the Twilight of the Gods the serpent will devour the earth and the wolf the sun.