symbols · old marks
Ouroboros 🐍
the snake that closes the circle
A serpent — sometimes a dragon — swallowing its own tail: the circle that draws itself. It is one of humanity's oldest doodles about time, meaning eternity, renewal, and the suspicion that endings and beginnings are the same door seen from two sides.
Where it comes from
The earliest known one coils on a shrine in Tutankhamun's tomb (14th century BCE), wrapping the god of time. Greeks named it — oura 'tail', boros 'eating' — and Gnostics and alchemists adopted it as a master diagram: the alchemical motto 'one is all' was often written inside its ring. It surfaces in Norse myth as Jörmungandr, the world-serpent circling the earth, and famously in 1865 chemistry, when Kekulé said a dream of the tail-biting snake handed him the ring shape of benzene.
What it means
Cyclical time, self-renewal, the unity of opposites: the creature feeds on itself and is fed, destroys and is reborn in one gesture. Read personally, it's the emblem of self-contained cycles — habits, seasons, the way every ending funds a beginning. Read cautiously, it also pictures the loop that goes nowhere; the difference between renewal and rumination is whether the circle spirals.
How people use it today
A steady favourite for tattoos and rings marking recovery, reinvention, or 'what goes around' hard-earned. Designers love it for the same reason alchemists did — infinity with a face. As a journal prompt it earns its ink: draw the circle, then mark honestly where on it you currently are.
The cat chases its tail, catches it, is briefly eternity, lets go: 'The mysteries are simple. You people write books.'
Symbols carry the meanings people have poured into them. We tell that story with respect — history first, promises never.
The ouroboros in alchemy and old books
After its Egyptian beginnings, the tail-eater travelled through the Greek-speaking world of late antiquity. Its most famous early drawing is in the Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra, a Greek alchemical text known from a Byzantine manuscript, where a half-dark, half-light serpent encircles the words hen to pan — “one is the all”. For alchemists it pictured the work itself: matter dissolving and re-forming, the end of one process feeding the start of the next.
The image moved into Renaissance emblem books and engraved title pages, and later into Victorian jewellery. Serpent rings with tail in mouth, or with head and tail meeting, were popular as tokens of eternal love; Queen Victoria’s engagement ring from Prince Albert was famously shaped as a snake. In mourning jewellery the closed circle stood for a bond that death does not break.
Choosing an ouroboros ring, pendant or tattoo
- Serpent or dragon? The snake is the classical form; the dragon version often nods to Norse Jörmungandr or to fantasy art. Pick the one whose story you actually want.
- Closed or nearly closed. A tail fully in the mouth says “the cycle is complete”; a small gap can say “I am choosing to leave the loop”. Small design choices carry meaning.
- Around something. Many designs place a date, an initial, a moon or a infinity sign inside the ring, which makes the symbol personal rather than generic.
- Context: the ouroboros belongs to no single living religion, so it is widely shared. Some esoteric orders use it in their insignia, so if a design copies a specific lodge emblem, ask before you wear it.
Reflection: renewal or repeat?
Draw the ring and, along its body, write the stages of a cycle you know well — a work rhythm, a pattern in relationships, the year’s seasons. Then ask:
- Which stage am I in right now?
- What does this cycle give me each time it turns?
- Is there a point where it could open into a spiral instead of a closed circle?
If the circle feels nourishing, keep it. If it feels like a trap, the drawing already shows you where a small change could break it.