Ouroboros

We've kind of talked about this in class, so I wanted to touch up on the subject. Ouroboros is the word for "a snake biting its own tail". It's Greek for "tail-eater". The Greeks really liked the idea of Eternal Recurrence. Eternal Recurrence is like the idea of "you never walk through the same river twice," everything goes in cycles. Ouroboros symbolizes this ideology. Plato believed that the first living thing in the universe was a self-eating immortal, perfectly constructed. However, it was not Plato who invented this concept.
The Ouroboros has appeared in many cultures. Artifacts containing a coiled serpent were found China that date from thousands of years before Plato was even born. Even the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl has been portrayed as an ouroboros. The Egyptians were also interested in this idea of the world ebbing and flowing, and they are most likely the cause of it being integrated into Greek philosophy. However, once Christianity began to flourish, this idea dwindled.

Later, alchemists began to use the Ouroboros. However, for them it symbolized the ultimate goal of all alchemists; the Philosopher's Stone. The Philosopher's Stone is a fabled material that is said to be able to turn basic metals into gold and also create the Elixir of Life. The Elixir, of course, would provide immortality. Therefore, Ouroboros, an infinite cycle, is appropriate as a symbol for immortality. Once the alchemists died off, and the Elixir of Life was no longer being searched for, Ouroboros decreased in popularity, only showing up occasionally on Masonic structures and such.

However, during the late 19th Century, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche revitalized the idea of eternal recurrence, and wrote many books which contained at least some mention of the idea. To Nietzsche, who was a staunch atheist, eternal recurrence was not controlled by an entity. Rather, he believed that time was cyclical, and that the world was somewhat like a sieve in that there would be people who were workers, people who were leaders, and people who were artists, etc. And he believed that eternal recurrence had more to do with what people would become, in that there will always be artists and patrons to support the artists. This gave the world balance to Nietzsche.

Nietzsche lived around the same time as the psychologist Sigmund Freud, and, if not directly, Nietzsche indirectly influenced the psychologist. After Freud came Jung, who was very interested in Nietzsche's ideas. Jung also became interested in the symbol of ouroboros. He wrote seminars interpreting Nietzsche's eternal recurrence as well as the ouroboros. To Jung, the ouroboros meant not just infinity, but also unity. The head and tail meet; opposites attract, and from the clashing of opposites comes One.

Since then, ouroboros have been used in many forms of media. For instance, many musicians have used it as names for songs/albums, and even Neil Peart, the drummer of the band Rush, uses the ouroboros symbol on his drum kit. It has been used in plenty of books, such as Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, and has even appeared in video games.

WALL OF TEXT OVER. Just some food for thought. I spent a long time on this, I better get comments.

Also, here are a few pictures of ouroboros.

Some Images involving ouroboros:

Neil Peart's drum set: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/Neil_Peart3.jpg

Quetzalcoatl as ouroboros: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7f/Quetzalcoatl_Ouroboros.png

An ouroboros tattoo featured on Dana Scully in an episode of X-Files: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c9/Scullyouroboros.jpg

Chinese Ouroboros from Chou Dynasty, around 1200 B.C.: http://www.crystalinks.com/ouroboroschina.jpg

Alembic, Inc., a guitar and bass company, known for close relationships with bands such as The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, etc. The ouroboros is a the circle, it may be hard to tell: http://www.zianet.com/ufo_lowrider/pics/alembic.gif