An Ouroboros on a baroque castle wall in Ptuj, the oldest town in Slovenia, occupied since pre-Roman times.
Actress Alyssa Milano has one on her wrist. Singers Lynn Gunn and Sierra Kusterbeck received matching upper arm singers. And if you do a quick Pinterest search for the phrase “uroboros tattoo,” you’ll find a seemingly endless scroll of images depicting a self-eating snake on nearly every inch of skin imaginable. But what is an Ouroboros and how did it become such a popular choice for tattooers?
What is an Ouroboros and where did it come from?
“'Ouroboros' is a Greek word meaning 'tailed devourer,'” explains Richard P. Martin, Stanford University's Antony and Isabelle Raubitschek Professor of Classics, via email. Although the image of a snake with its tail in its mouth can be found in tomb paintings and on small objects dating back to the time of Tutankhamun, who reigned from 1333 to 1323 BC, Martin says that the Ouroboros gained strength in the era known as Late Antiquity. – in this case, approximately the 4th or 5th centuries AD
But even during this period there were only a few abbreviated allusions in Greek and Latin to the image. “Perhaps there was an ongoing tradition passed down over these thousands of years, a tradition passed down from Egypt to Greece and Rome,” says Martin. “Most likely, what happened was a kind of divination by much later ancient people, looking at much earlier images and speculating about what they meant. And the speculation still continues.”
Even the original Egyptian meaning of the Ouroboros is hotly debated in academia, according to Martin, with some scholars arguing that later interpretations were probably not what the original Egyptian contexts contained. So, in summary, the origin of the self-eating snake is still somewhat ambiguous.
Although the Ouroboros originated in ancient Greece, Martin says the symbol is not a significant part of any specific myth and is not directly associated with any particular god or goddess. “It exists as a floating symbol, with no known history (other than what we can surmise about Egyptian associations,” he says. “It happens, albeit very rarely, in the realm of mythology. It is closer to the type of transmission transmitted ore and allegories linked to the legendary phoenix (also a tale initially associated with Egypt).”
What does Ouroboros symbolize?
If the origin of the Ouroboros is a mystery, what it represents is even more of an enigma. “What it originally symbolized is basically a matter of reasoned reconstructions – we don’t know for sure,” says Martin. “Yet what is considered to symbolize now varies everywhere, from ideas of eternity to regeneration and destruction and even recycling.”
Martin says some speculate that the Ouroboros may have begun as a symbol of the Egyptian sun god Ra. “This complex of myths was extremely important because it connected with other beliefs about the nature of time and the cosmos, the rise and fall of the Nile, and the afterlife,” he says. But there are also theories that Ouroboros is linked to other Egyptian gods, such as the sky goddess Nut. “In some photos, where it is arched almost in a circle and shown giving birth to the sun in the East and then consuming it at the end of the day, it looks a little like the Ouroboros circling around the earth or around figures of deities. , in other representations”, says Martin. “But the Egyptian texts never explicitly say what is happening to this snake that consumes itself.”
In the Western world, Ouroboros gained popularity in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance thanks to two specific traditions, says Martin: alchemy and emblems. “The first was a set of semi-scientific knowledge and practices designed to transform inferior substances (like lead) into superior ones (like gold),” he says. “Alchemists adopted the Ouroboros as the symbol of the nature of the universe. One of his dogmas was 'one is all'; in other words, all of nature is interconnected and interchangeable. So the infinite, enveloping snake seemed appropriate.”
Martin says that many of the ideas of alchemy were based on semi-mystical interpretations of Plato's philosophy, while Renaissance scholars also drew on the Neoplatonic school of thought. “One of them, Marsilio Ficino of Florence in the 15th century, refers to the Egyptian ruaboros as a symbol of the nature of time itself,” says Martin. “Driving the boom of the Ouroboros, a few decades before the birth of Ficino, an Italian traveler discovered in a monastery on a Greek island a manuscript on Egyptian hieroglyphics that was a distant copy of a treatise written in Greek by an author named Horapollo, who lived in the 5th century AD in Egypt. The manuscript was brought back to Florence (where it still remains). Horapollo states that the Ouroboros it was one of those images in the Egyptian writing system and meant 'world'.
Symbolism played an important role in the Renaissance and Martin says that people “devoured so-called 'emblematic' books that had exactly these fragments of knowledge (and Aesop's fables and all sorts of other traditions) printed alongside woodcuts of the objects. or symbols being interpreted. ” Through these books, a much wider audience discovered the image of the Ouroboros, and centuries later, psychologists like CG Jung ended up discussing the Ouroboros like “some kind of archetype deep in human consciousness,” says Martin. “But many of these meanings were arbitrarily applied over those years of earlier reception of an enigmatic autophagous ('self-eating') snake.”
Although the symbol itself remains a mystery in many ways, the Ouroboros is still a modern star even outside the tattoo parlor. “The Ouroboros is big these days,” says Martin. “Cryptographers named a brand of eternally secure 'blockchain' protocols after him and it is the title of an award-winning play by Tom Jacobson from 2008.”
What about its popularity among the tattoo community? Oakland-based ink artist and owner of OTattoo Studio, Sirimontra (also known as @avantgarde.ink on Instagram), says she understands the allure. “It’s a frequent image that many have a connection with,” she says via email. “A symbol of renewal and rebirth much like moths or the Phoenix. I decided that instead of naming my studio, it would be a circle, to represent the cycle of life and faith in its process, there is nothing to climb if there is nothing to climb against. It is a world of chaos that needs all of its ever-changing personalities to constitute the physical experience. “
Now this is interesting
Although the Ouroboros is often depicted as a snake, it can also take the form of a dragon devouring its own tail. Artist MC Escher put his signature spin on this symbol in his 1952 piece “Dragon.”
