The Ouroboros

The Ouroboros from Greek οὐροβόρος (οὐρά, “tail,” and -βορος, “devouring”) is an ancient symbolic illustration, of a serpent or dragon, eating its own tail.

Each moment we are changing, as a natural evolutionary process, our cells are continually regenerating, without us doing a thing. Our brains are changeable – we can actually change our brain by our will and our thoughts. This gives us the power to create a new reality – a new perspective, new thoughts, that can become new habits. How exciting :).

The Ouroboros

was adopted as a Hermetic symbol and used in alchemy, from the ancient Greek magic traditions – often taken to symbolise introspection, the eternal – especially in the sense of something constantly re-creating itself; what the new age refers to as rebirth – in transpersonal psychology and spiritual circles . It represents the infinite cycle of nature’s endless creation and destruction, life and death.

Ive used the early alchemical Ouroboros illustration which normally has the words ἓν τὸ πᾶν (“The All is One”) in the centre – from the work of Cleopatra the Alchemist (c. third century, Egypt), – as it is my favorite depiction of the Ouroboros.

This symbol is found in all traditions and religions either in the form of a snake or a dragon – In Yogic tradition the Ouroboros symbolism has been used to describe the Kundalini. In the medieval Yoga-kundalini Upanishad, “The divine power, Kundalini, shines like the stem of a young lotus; like a snake, coiled round upon herself she holds her tail in her mouth and lies resting half asleep as the base of the body” (1.82).

It seems the ancient mystics understood the cyclic nature of life and perhaps the brain without modern scientific instruments or the tiresome academic processes and they all seem to be consistently pointing to the same thing.

Warm Blessings

Megan