Some Ouroborean Thoughts
Reading Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros (1922)—I’ll blog more on that, as an Eddisonian character would say, anon, forsooth [update: that blog is here] — I found myself interested in the titiular ‘ouroboros’ and went down a bit of a rabbit hole. The actual Ouroboros, the great serpent or dragon coiled round so that it is devouring its own tail, is not really a feature of Eddison’s eccentric but remarkable novel: the title refers more to the way the history of this realm, the war between the heroic Demons and the wicked Witches, goes through various ups-and-downs until, at the close of the story, it starts over. In other words Eddison styles history as such as an ouroboros.
Wikipedia has an interesting article on the topic, going into some detail on the way medieval and Renaissance alchemists and gnostics made use of the figure: ‘the famous ouroboros drawing from the early alchemical text, The Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra (Κλεοπάτρας χρυσοποιία) [10th century AD] … encloses the words hen to pan (ἓν τὸ πᾶν), “the all is one”. Its black and white halves may perhaps represent a Gnostic duality of existence, analogous to the Taoist yin and yang symbol’.
The article also covers the Norse world-serpent Jörmungandr, Indian and Chinese tail-biting-snakes, Jungian speculation and other things. The word itself is Ancient Greek: οὐροβόρος (ourobóros, “tail-devouring”), a compound of οὐρά (ourá, “tail”) + -βόρος (-bóros, “-devouring”). You can see how the term βόρος fed into the Latin voro “to swallow up, to eat greedily”, and so into modern English “devour” and “voracious”.
But wait a moment: devouring your own tail is different simply to biting it, or holding it in your mouth. The latter is an image of circularity — as with the Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra serpent above. Yin and yang are not devouring one another; on the contrary, they are working in balance, a dynamic tension, with one another. For a serpent actually to devour its tale would mean eating itself, and continuing to do so, curling up more tightly, until (I suppose) some vital organ was ingested and life-function failed. Or until, in more mythic terms, the serpent coiled inward and inward until it disappeared. Or something.
That Wikipedia article cites as its earliest example of an ouroboros a representation of the Egyptian snake-god Mehen biting its own tail: a motif on the wall of the tomb of Tutankhamun (so: 14th century BC). But that serpent is surely holding its tail, not ingesting it; and it wouldn’t have been called ouroboros, since the word, being Greek, comes much later.
How much later? I was curious and so took a look. First stop: Liddell and Scott.
… and that alternate spelling:
So: ouroboros is neither a common nor an early Greek word: it’s not in Homer, or the Attic tragedians; it’s not in Plato or Aristotle. It’s a rare word, in Ancient Greek (however popular the word became in medieval and later writing). From when, precisely, does it date?
L&S, God love ’em, aren’t always models of clarity with respect to their use of abbreviations. None of the above appear in the ‘List of Abbreviations’ in my copy of their huge book, and took a little tracking down, to be honest. ‘Lyd.Mens.3.4', it seems, is De Mensibus (Περὶ τῶν μηνῶν) by John the Lydian (AD 490 — ca. 565). So mid 6th-century AD. The other references took me quite a while to decipher, actually, but I got there eventually: ‘PMagLond’ = Greek papyri in the British Museum, London. These were edited into a huge book by F. G. Kenyon [Classical Texts from Papyri in the British Museum, 1891], and the appearance of this word is in Kenyon’s Papyrus 121, line 587 (the British Museum has digitised this text, handily). The papyrus itself dates to the early 4th century AD, and Kenyon tells us that its lines 579–90 are ‘a charm to secure the user against demons and apparitions, and all illness and suffering’, which sounds like a pretty dope charm, to be honest. Here’s the actual (earliest) appearance of the word:
You can see there that the ouroboros needs to have οἱ χᾰρᾰκτῆρες (the characters, the writing: itemised in the second line) placed inside (μέσος) of the δρᾰ́κων (drákōn, dragon, snake; δρᾰ́κοντος is the genitive). Here, from H. D. Betz’s The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation, including the Demotic Spells (Chigaco University Press 1986), is a translation of the whole charm:
That diagram is the same as the image at the head of this post, which I’ve taken from the British Library scan. Neat, no? [Incidentally, Morton Smith’s ‘let the snake be biting its tail…’ should really be ‘let the snake be eating its tail …’ for -βόρος really does mean devouring, not biting, which is δάκνω.]
What did the ‘ouroboros’ mean for this, earliest invocation of it? It’s hard to to be sure, but I suppose the point is that the magic snake actually devours itself, such that it disappears — and with it vanish the demons, or illnesses, or whatever else might be afflicting you. But this is a very different sense of the ouroboros than the way the term is used today. Finnegans Wake or Dhalgren both have a ouroborean shape, but only in the sense that their final lines feed-through to their opening lines, so that in a sense the text goes on forever: not in the sense that they devour themselves. German organic chemist August Kekulé had a dream of ouroboros after trying and failing to determine the structure of benzene (‘I turned my chair to the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were gamboling before my eyes … all 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. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke; and this time also I spent the rest of the night in working out the consequences of the hypothesis’). It’s a cool story, but the benzene molecule just is circular. It doesn’t devour itself.
So it seems to me that ouroboros now stands, simply, as a synonym for ‘circular’, a usage that avoids the mundanity of the ordinary word with a fancy mytho-Greek flourish. At a pinch we might say that ouroboros means ‘a curving line that connects with itself to form a circle’, which is perhaps a little different to ‘a circle’ — if we think of the latter as coming from the Platonic realm of the Forms already whole and circular, and at no point having to curl round and connect its head to its tail. But in all this what’s missing is the more aggressive idea of the snake actually devouring itself: the transcendent evanishment of ὁ δρᾰ́κων and all that that entails. Entails: heh. If ouroboros now means the first of these things, what word do we use for the second?
