Tok Thompson and Gregory Allen Schrempp cautiously allow that this new idea might "mark a bold new interdisciplinary venture made possible by modern science". That could have been the case during geomagnetic excursions, when the geomagnetic field weakens and the earth's magnetic poles shift places. Specifically, the ouroboros could have represented an auroral oval seen as a whole, at a time when it was smaller and located closer to the equator than now. The ouroboros as an auroral phenomenon įollowing an exhaustive survey, historical linguist Marinus van der Sluijs and plasma physicist Anthony Peratt suggested that the ouroboros has a specific origin in time, in the 5th or 4th millennium BCE, and was ultimately based on globally independent observations of an intense aurora, with somewhat different characteristics than the familiar aurora. The identification appears to go back as far as the poems of Kalir in the 6th–7th centuries. According to the Zohar, the Leviathan is a singular creature with no mate, "its tail is placed in its mouth", while Rashi on Baba Batra 74b describes it as "twisting around and encompassing the entire world". The ouroboros has certain features in common with the Biblical Leviathan. It is a common belief among indigenous people of the tropical lowlands of South America that waters at the edge of the world-disc are encircled by a snake, often an anaconda, biting its own tail. This snake encircled the iris and bit itself in the tail, and the son was named Sigurd Snake-in-the-Eye. Ragnar later has a son with another woman named Kráka and this son is born with the image of a white snake in one eye. The serpent is slain by Ragnar Lodbrok who marries Þóra. In the legends of Ragnar Lodbrok, such as Ragnarssona þáttr, the Geatish king Herraud gives a small lindworm as a gift to his daughter Þóra Town-Hart after which it grows into a large serpent which encircles the girl's bower and bites itself in the tail. In Norse mythology, the ouroboros appears as the serpent Jörmungandr, one of the three children of Loki and Angrboda, which grew so large that it could encircle the world and grasp its tail in its teeth. Seal of the Theosophical Society, founded 1875 Ī 15th-century alchemical manuscript, The Aurora Consurgens, features the ouroboros, where it is used among symbols of the sun, moon, and mercury. The chrysopoeia ouroboros of Cleopatra the Alchemist is one of the oldest images of the ouroboros to be linked with the legendary opus of the alchemists, the philosopher's stone. Its black and white halves may perhaps represent a Gnostic duality of existence, analogous to the Taoist yin and yang symbol. The famous ouroboros drawing from the early alchemical text, The Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra ( Κλεοπάτρας χρυσοποιία), probably originally dating to the 3rd century Alexandria, but first known in a 10th-century copy, encloses the words hen to pan ( ἓν τὸ πᾶν), "the all is one". 400 CE) describes the ouroboros as a twelve-part dragon surrounding the world with its tail in its mouth. In Gnosticism, a serpent biting its tail symbolised eternity and the soul of the world. Historical representations Įarly alchemical ouroboros illustration with the words ἓν τὸ πᾶν ("The All is One") from the work of Cleopatra the Alchemist in MS Marciana gr. The snake biting its own tail is a fertility symbol in some religions: the tail is a phallic symbol and the mouth is a yonic or womb-like symbol. The ouroboros is often interpreted as a symbol for eternal cyclic renewal or a cycle of life, death and rebirth the snake's skin-sloughing symbolises the transmigration of souls. The term derives from Ancient Greek οὐροβόρος, from οὐρά oura 'tail' plus -βορός -boros '-eating'. Another wild rat snake was found having swallowed about two-thirds of its body. One captive snake attempted to consume itself twice, dying in the second attempt. Some snakes, such as rat snakes, have been known to consume themselves. It was adopted as a symbol in Gnosticism and Hermeticism and most notably in alchemy. The ouroboros entered Western tradition via ancient Egyptian iconography and the Greek magical tradition. The ouroboros or uroboros ( / ˌ j ʊər ə ˈ b ɒr ə s/ ) is an ancient symbol depicting a serpent or dragon eating its own tail. An ouroboros in a 1478 drawing in an alchemical tract
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