"The ouroboros is big nowadays," Martin says. "But many of these meanings were just arbitrarily layered on through those years of earlier reception of an enigmatic autophagous ('self-eating') snake."Īlthough the symbol itself remains a mystery in so many ways, the ouroboros is still a modern star, even outside the tattoo parlor. Jung ended up discussing the ouroboros as "some sort of deep archetype in human consciousness," Martin says. Symbolism played a major role in the Renaissance and Martin says people "devoured so-called 'emblem' books that had just such tidbits of knowledge (and Aesop's fables and all kinds of other lore) printed alongside woodcuts of the objects or symbols being interpreted." Through these books, a much wider audience came to discover the ouroboros image and centuries later, psychologists like C.G. Horapollo claims that the ouroboros was one of these pictures in the Egyptian writing system, and that it meant 'world.'" The manuscript was brought back to Florence (where it still remains). "Pumping up the ouroboros boom, a few decades before Ficino's birth, an Italian traveler discovered in a Greek island monastery a manuscript about Egyptian hieroglyphs that was a distant copy of a treatise written in Greek by an author called Horapollo, who lived in the 5th century C.E. "One of them, Marsilio Ficino of Florence, in the 15th century refers to the Egyptian ouroboros as a symbol for the nature of time itself," Martin says. Martin says that much of the ideas in alchemy leaned on semi-mystical interpretations of Plato's philosophy while Renaissance scholars also pulled from the school of Neoplatonic thought. So the wrap-around endless snake seemed fitting." One of their dogmas was 'one is all' in other words, all of nature is interconnected and interchangeable. "Alchemists adopted the ouroboros as the symbol of the nature of the universe. "The first was a body of semi-scientific lore and practices aimed at turning lower substances (like lead) into higher (like gold)," he says. In the Western world, the ouroboros picked up popularity around the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance thanks to two particular traditions, Martin says: alchemy and emblems. "But the texts in Egyptian never explicitly say what is going on with this self-consuming snake." "In some pictures, where she is arched over almost into a circle and shown giving birth to the sun in the East and then consuming it at day's end, looks a bit like the ouroboros circling around the earth or around figures of divinities, in other depictions," Martin says. But there are also theories that ouroboros is tied to other Egyptian gods, like the sky goddess, Nut. "This complex of myths was extremely important as it connected with further beliefs about the nature of time and the cosmos, the rise and fall of the Nile, and life after death," he says. Martin says some speculate the ouroboros may have begun as a symbol for the Egyptian sun god, Ra. "Yet what it is taken to symbolize now ranges all over the place, from ideas of eternity to regeneration and destruction and even recycling." "What it originally symbolized is pretty much a matter of educated reconstructions - we don't know for sure," Martin says. If the origin of the ouroboros is a mystery, what it represents is even more of an enigma.
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