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The Ouroboros (or Uroborus)is an ancient symbol depicting a serpent or dragon eating its own tail. The name originates from within Greek language; οὐρά (oura) meaning “tail” and βόρος (boros) meaning “eating”, thus “he who eats the tail”.

The Ouroboros represents the perpetual cyclic renewal of life, and the ternal return, and represents the cycle of life, death and rebirth, leading to immortality, as in the phoenix.

Egypt

The Ouroboros is contained in the Egyptian Book of the Netherworld.The Ouroboros was popular after the Amarna period.

In the Book of the Dead, which was still current in the Graeco-Roman period, the self-begetting sun god Atum is said to have ascended from chaos-waters with the appearance of a snake, the animal renewing itself every morning, and the deceased wishes to turn into the shape of the snake Sato (“son of the earth”), the embodiment of Atum.

Greece

Plato described a self-eating, circular being as the first living thing in the universe—an immortal, mythologically constructed beast.
In Gnosticism, this serpent symbolized eternity and the soul of the world.

Alchemy

In alchemy, the Ouroboros is a sigil.
The famous Ouroboros drawing from the early alchemical text The Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra dating to 2nd century Alexandria encloses the words hen to pan, “one is the all”. Its black and white halves represent the Gnostic duality of existence. As such, the Ouroboros could be interpreted as the Western equivalent of the Taoist Yin-Yang symbol.

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