Ourobóros; Self Devouring Snake Across Cultures
by Haleigh Keane
The Ourobóros in Time
The Ourobóros, an ancient serpent that dances in an eternal spiral, transcends time and geography as its iconography appears globally. This ancient beast appears across cultures, a symbol spreading from the Near to the Far East, through Africa and the Mediterranean, and throughout the equatorial Americas and Oceania. In each depiction, the Ourobóros swallows its tail, as its Hellenistic name translates to “devour its tail.” The first appearance of the serpent is a terracotta amphora from Ancient China, around 5000 BCE, and the second appearance of the snake creature originates from 4500 BCE Iran.
The Egyptian Ouróboros
Snakes had curious cultural implications in Ancient Egypt. The treatments of snake and scorpion bites were treated by ‘snake charmers,’ scholars that found the favor of kings across different regions. Snakes were held in high reverence throughout all periods in both Upper and Lower Egypt. Serpents decorated tomb inscriptions, hieroglyphs, and even royalty, as the godly Crown of Osiris adorned the Pharoah’s head with snakes. The Ourobóros is a circular depiction of a snake, creating a circle with its body as it bends to swallow its own tail. Appearing visually across the world since 5000 BCE, the ‘first’ textual occurrence comes from Egypt. Called the sd-m-r3 (sed-em-ra), ‘tail-in-mouth,’ it is commonly known to symbolize eternity, unity, and endless time; however, these notions were all ascribed to serpent after the pharaonic periods and has no Egyptian evidence to support this ‘serpent of eternity.’ The absolute first textual appearance of sd-m-r3 comes from the First Intermediate Period (2200-2000 BCE), found at the quarries at Hatnub, which praises the king and the sd-m-r3 suggests the peoples support for him, as the phrase insinuates the King’s people are gathered together the same as confined animals in pens. The Egyptian words, sd-m-r3, never actually occurs in any names or texts for the Ourobóros, yet it was assumed to have the same associations on account of the Ancient Greek οὐροβόρος, “tail-devouring.” Textual appearances of similar phrases appear during the New Kingdom, including sd tp r3, ‘your tail is in your mouth,’ found in the Book of Amduat from the Early N. K.. Though the book includes images of serpents upon the papyrus, no snakes resemble the self-ingesting Ourobóros nor suggest time and eternity. Some have suggested that the circular creature symbolizes the unity of the chthonian and celestial, or the underworld and heavens. Several examples of the Egyptian Ourobóros have been found decorated in a split-colored design, half-white and half-black, perhaps representative of the pre and post-mortal worlds and other opposing concepts, day-night, male-female, summer-winter, black-white. The Ancient Egyptians fully endorsed the idea of pre- and post-mortal worlds, allowing the idea of eternity to fall through as the idea of equalized virtue becomes stronger and stronger.
The Mayan Ourobóros
The Ourobóros appears in communities and major empires across the world, from the Egyptian Empire all the way to the equatorial Americas, specifically to the Mayan Empire. The Mayans are often compared to the Egyptians, with similar pyramidal architecture, glyphic scripts, and worship of ancestors and royalty. To the Mayans, snakes were highly important in multiple areas of life, there were snake dances, the Snake Dynasty, and glyphs, imagery, and mythology of serpents. To the Maya, snakes were an important aspect of calendar and time keeping, representing the fifth day with serpent imagery. The goddess of birth is also the goddess of snakes, as they both represent a vessel for rebirth and transformation. Each anatomical section of the serpent corresponds to the natural world, the mouth is a cave, and the body is both simultaneously, yet separately, water and sky. The connectedness of snakes to time and the cosmos of the equatorial environment suggests that the misconception of the ‘eternal’ Egyptian Ourobóros is geographically misplaced. As the serpent ‘devours its tail,’ the ideals of the Mayan Empire most align with the Ourobóros’ conceptions of cyclical time and eternal rebirth.
Haleigh studied at the University of Minnesota in Art History, dissecting the intersectionality of religions, anthropology, and classical studies in relation to the Ancient Near Eastern world.
