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 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.Ī 15th-century alchemical manuscript, The Aurora Consurgens, features the ouroboros, where it is used amongst symbols of the sun, moon, and mercury.
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 third century Alexandria but first known in a tenth-century copy, encloses the words hen to pan ( ἓν τὸ πᾶν), "the all is one".
400 AD) describes the ouroboros as a twelve-part dragon surrounding the world with its tail in its mouth. In Gnosticism, a serpent biting its tail symbolized eternity and the soul of the world. Gnosticism and alchemy 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 4th-century AD Latin commentator Servius was aware of the Egyptian use of the symbol, noting that the image of a snake biting its tail represents the cyclical nature of the year. The symbol persisted in Egypt into Roman times, when it frequently appeared on magical talismans, sometimes in combination with other magical emblems. The ouroboros appears elsewhere in Egyptian sources, where, like many Egyptian serpent deities, it represents the formless disorder that surrounds the orderly world and is involved in that world's periodic renewal. The whole divine figure represents the beginning and the end of time.
Both serpents are manifestations of the deity Mehen, who in other funerary texts protects Ra in his underworld journey. The ouroboros is depicted twice on the figure: holding their tails in their mouths, one encircling the head and upper chest, the other surrounding the feet of a large figure, which may represent the unified Ra-Osiris ( Osiris born again as Ra). The text concerns the actions of the god Ra and his union with Osiris in the underworld. One of the earliest known ouroboros motifs is found in the Enigmatic Book of the Netherworld, an ancient Egyptian funerary text in KV62, the tomb of Tutankhamun, in the 14th century BC. First known representation of the ouroboros, on one of the shrines enclosing the sarcophagus of Tutankhamun Ancient Egypt
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