A Symbol Of Destruction Across Culture and Time

In today’s post we discuss one of the many symbols of destruction expressed by humanity. It is known as a symbolic synergy of life, death, and destruction.

Our focus symbol today is known as “Ouroboros”, which is a mythological creature with a snake’s body and a dragon’s head. It’s a symbol of destruction that represents the cycle of life and death. It is a symbol that has been used for thousands of years in many different cultures and religions.

In the ancient Egyptian religion, it was a symbol of the god Osiris, who was believed to have been eaten by his own son, Horus. It was also used in the Chinese religion of Taoism, where it represented the eternal cycle of birth and death.

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The Symbol of Destruction has Ouroboros often depicted as a dragon

The symbol of destruction is also known as the “devouring dragon\snake” or “dragon with a human head.” It is a symbol that represents the balance of good and evil, life and death, and the cyclical nature of existence. It is also a symbol of the universe and the idea of creation and destruction.

Below we can learn the correct ouroboros pronunciation, history, and meaning of the symbol of destruction.

What is The Ouroboros Dragon?

Ouroboros (from the Latin word “aurum”, meaning gold, and the Greek word “Boros”, meaning serpent) is a term used in several contexts. In Alchemy it is a symbol of the alchemical process of transformation. It was adopted by the early Gnostics as a symbol of the eternal cycle of birth and death (and rebirth) that is the basis of all life. It has been adopted as a symbol for the process of the development of a new, more inclusive understanding of reality.

The symbol of the Ouroboros is a snake biting its tail, or a snake swallowing its own tail. It is used as an emblem for the cyclical nature of time and for the cyclical nature of life. It is also used to represent the symbol of destruction. The symbol is used in numerous ancient myths, such as the Egyptian myth of the creation of the world by the god Ra.

In the ancient Egyptian civilization, the symbol of Ouroboros was used to represent eternal life. This symbol was usually used as a mark for the Pharaohs.

 

Ouroboros:

Where it begins,
Is also where it ends.
Like a figure-eight,
The place where you rise from bed
Is also the place where
You rest your head.

Life is the snake that eats itself.
As we fret over health:
The time from before you were born
Is the same time that comes after
You’re weary and well-worn.

With each passing
Of the light of the moon
And the ray of the sun:
If death is an eternity,
Then an eternity
Is closing your eyes
And counting to one.

At least,
That’s what some people say.

At least…
That’s what I hope it to be.

Where it begins,
Is also where it ends.
Like a figure-eight,
The place where you rise from bed
Is also the place where
You rest your head.

Life is the snake that eats itself.
As we fret over health:
The time from before you were born
Is the same time that comes after
You’re weary and well-worn.

With each passing
Of the light of the moon
And the ray of the sun:
If death is an eternity,
Then an eternity
Is closing your eyes
And counting to one.

At least,
That’s what some people say.

At least…
That’s what I hope it to be.

Written by Wan Rezal and published in Eksentrika

How to pronounce “Ouroboros”?

Here, we will try to figure out how to pronounce the word Ouroboros correctly. The word Ouroboros comes from Ancient Greek “οὐροβόρος”, which is from οὐρo oura ‘tail’ plus -βορός -Boros ‘-to eat’. It is pronounced “IPA: /uːˈrɒbəˌrɒs/, /ˌuːrəˈbɒrəs/”, and “enPR: o͞o-rŏbʹə-rŏs, o͞o-rə-bŏrʹ-əs”.

 

What Is the Meaning of Symbol of Destruction in Ouroboros?

The word Ouroboros is a Latinised form of an Ancient Greek word. Ouroboros (Οὐροβόρεις) means “tail-devourers” in Greek. The term was used by Plutarch to refer to the cyclical nature of time: “the tail of the serpent devours its own head, and so time itself returns on itself”.

The Ouroboros symbol shows that there is no beginning and no ending to time. It reminds us that there is a cycle of birth and death. This cycle begins with new birth. In this cycle, the new birth creates old age and eventually death. The same cycle continues again with the birth of another person.

However, it is important to know that the end of one cycle does not mean the beginning of another. The first cycle is still the only one that is ever repeated. You can get to the beginning of the cycle by looking at the circle in the middle of the symbol. You can read that the cycle begins with the snake eating its own tail. This means that the beginning and the end of time are the same.

What Does This Symbol Of Destruction Look Like?

If you haven’t figured it out by now, the Ouroboros destruction symbol actually looks like “a dragon or a snake swallowing its tail”. Somewhere it looks like a snake, but its body is longer than a snake. Elsewhere, it looks like a dragon, but with the head of a snake and the tail of a bird. Its body is divided into two parts. A part looks like a face.

What we call the head of the snake. The other part looks like a pair of wings. What we call a bird’s tail. If you study the Ouroboros symbol closely, you will notice that it has a hole in its stomach. There is no end to the pit. This symbol represents the cyclical nature of time.

What Is The Origin of Ouroboros As a Symbol Of Destruction?

The ouroboros is a symbol that has been used by many different cultures and has been featured in many different ways. It is thought to come from ancient Greece and Egypt. The word ‘ouroboros’ comes from two words: ‘ourus’ meaning snake, and ‘Boros’ meaning dragon. In Egypt, the ouroboros was used as a symbol for creation and destruction.

The early Egyptians believed that the world would end when the gods decided to destroy it. Their hope was that the ouroboros would keep it going by creating new life from the old. The Ouroboros has been used to represent creation, and also the destruction of things. Many people consider the ouroboros to be one of the most ancient symbol.

Historical Representations

The word Ouroboros derives from Greek, but its use to describe the mythological creature dates back to the 2nd century BC, as mentioned in the article ‘Ouroboros’ by A.G. Bickford. In later Greek art, the serpent was sometimes represented with an upright tail, which appears to have been a mere fanciful device for giving the figure a more serpentine appearance.

The word Ouroboros was coined by Philo of Byzantium (c. 10 BCE – 50 CE) and was used by Ptolemy to describe the world-generating system of nested orbits that he believed existed in the cosmos.

An ouroboros is a circle with an inside and outside the loop. This is known as an infinite ouroboros. This symbol appears in many places, including ancient Egypt, Greece, Japan, and India. The ouroboros symbol has been found in many places such as a cave in Turkey.

The ouroboros symbol has been found in the form of an amulet or a carving on rocks and has been carved into the ceiling of caves. The Ouroboros is found on Egyptian tombs and other structures. It has also been found on the walls and floors of houses in Egypt and ancient Greece.

Historical Religious Content

If you study the history of religion, you will learn that the ouroboros is one of the most common symbols of different religious beliefs. It is a very old symbol. In fact, it is one of the oldest symbols that has been discovered. The Ouroboros symbol was found in the tomb of King Tutankhamun in the 14th century BC and in an Egyptian religious text that is the oldest known symbol in the world. It is also seen in a temple surrounding Tutankhamun’s sarcophagus.

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The Ouroboros Dragon as a Symbol of Destruction depicted on Tutankhamun’s Tomb

The ouroboros symbol is used to represent creation via destruction in a passage that describes how the sun god Ra was created through a union with the death god “Osiris.” It was also employed by the ancient Egyptians to represent the seasonal flooding of the Nile river, which had a significant impact on their agricultural and way of life.

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A stylized ouroboros dragon of destruction surrounding an eye of Ra. A modern take

Ouroboros shares some characteristics with the biblical Leviathan. According to the Zohar, Leviathan is a solitary creature without a companion, “with its tail in its mouth”, while Rashi Baba Batra describes it in 74b as “circling and encircling the whole world”. The identification seems to go back to the Kali Kavya of the sixth-seventh centuries.

Hindu cosmology features an ouroboros as helping to prop up the Earth. The symbol also appears on coins, jewelry, and architecture.

 

Ouroboros In Middle Ages

In the early Middle Ages, the ouroboros replaced the Pythagorean figure Ouroboros as a representation of the primordial creation. In the 13th century, the ouroboros appeared in several illustrated manuscripts, including the famous Book of Kells. The symbol was also adopted by the Cistercians and became part of their emblem. In the 18th century, the ouroboros became an important symbol for the Freemasons, who attributed it to Hermes Trismegistus.

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The Ophties worrshipped snakes. Author unknown

In the Middle Ages, the ouroboros became an important symbol in Christian art. It was used in the monogram of Christ and is featured on a number of church altars and sacramentals. In 13th-century England, the ouroboros was a symbol of God’s covenant with Israel. It also became popular among Renaissance artists, such as Dürer and Holbein.

In modern art, the ouroboros has been used in collages, painting, sculpture, photography, and other media. Some works, such as the rich witchcraft symbolism in “The Magic Circle”, by John William Waterhouse (1849–1917), feature only an outer ring of animals or people (observed as a necklace around the witches’ neck), while others show the complete cycle within a single image.

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The Magic Circle by John Willian Waterhouse

Ouroboros In Research

  • In 1865, the Ouroboros was the inspiration for German chemist August Kekulé von Stradonitz in his discovery of the linked carbon ring structure of a benzene molecule. The inspiration for the discovery of the carbon ring structure of a benzene molecule was found in 1865 when the Ouroboros was the inspiration

 

“I was sitting, writing at my text-book; but the work did not progress; my thoughts were elsewhere. I turned my chair to the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were gamboling before my eyes. This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by the repeated visions of the kind, could now distinguish larger structures of manifold conformation: long rows, sometimes more closely fitted together; all twining and twisting in snake-like motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke; and this time also I spent the rest of the night in working out the consequences of the hypothesis.” (From Alchemy to Chemistry by John Read)

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Kekule had a dream to inspire the bezene structure solution. Thanks for the air pollution
  • Jung saw the Ouroboros as an archetype of the subconscious desire to devour oneself and continually be reborn.
  • In the 19th century, Carl Jung thought of the ouroboros as a psychological archetype, representing the desire to self-absorb and be constantly reborn. Baines, a friend and translator of Jung, introduced the Ouroboros into English with his 1940 study of schizophrenia: “The Ouroboros symbol represents our psychic continuity with the immemorial past”.

“The alchemists, who in their own way knew more about the nature of the individuation process than we moderns do, expressed this paradox through the symbol of the Ouroboros, the snake that eats its own tail. The Ouroboros has been said to have a meaning of infinity or wholeness. In the age-old image of the Ouroboros lies the thought of devouring oneself and turning oneself into a circulatory process, for it was clear to the more astute alchemists that the prima materia of the art was man himself. The Ouroboros is a dramatic symbol for the integration and assimilation of the opposite, i.e. of the shadow. This ‘feed-back’ process is at the same time a symbol of immortality” (C.G. Jung, Collected works)

Ancient Egypt

The Enigmatic Book of the Netherworld is one of the earliest known ouroboros motifs. It’s from an ancient Egyptian funerary text, and it dates to the 14th century BC. The text tells about the actions of the gods Ra and Osiris in the underworld. The figure depicts ouroboros with their tails in their mouths, one encircling the head and upper chest, and the other around the feet of a large figure, which may represent the unified Ra-Osiris. Snakes are manifestations of the god Mehen, who protects Ra on his journey through the underworld. The end of time and the beginning of time are represented by divine images.

Ouroboros is also found elsewhere in Egyptian sources. For example, like many Egyptian serpent gods, it represents the formless disorder that pervades the orderly world. The symbol was used in Egypt until Roman times. For example, the Ouroboros is depicted on the amulet of Anubis. The 4th century CE Latin commentator Servius was aware of the Egyptian use of the symbol. He notes that the image of a snake biting its own tail represents the cyclical nature of the year.

Ouroboros Dragon In China

An example of an ouroboros, a purely artistic representation, was discovered in China on a piece of pottery. The area where the jar was found was occupied by the neolithic Yangshao culture from 5000 to 3000 BCE.

 

Norse Mythology

Norse legend tells of the great serpent, Jörmungandr, who encircles the earth and bites its own tail.  The Ouroboros is sometimes called the “snake eating its own tail,” but it is also commonly referred to as a “chaos monster”.

The legends of Ragnar Lodbrok say that when King Héraud gave his daughter Þóra Town-heart a small lindworm it turned into a large snake. It wraps itself around the girl’s bow and bites its own tail.

In Norse mythology, the serpent-slayer, or Þáttr, is a mythical hero who kills a snake with his sword. His eye was blinded by a snake and when he was reborn, he had the same snake in one eye. The Snakes surround the eyes and bite the tail, and the boy is named Sigurd Snake-in-the-Eye.

South America

According to the lore of the indigenous people of the tropical lowlands of South America, the water at the edge of the earth is surrounded by a snake, often a large anaconda, biting its own tail.

Ouroboros Connection With Indian Thought

In the Aitareya Brahmana, a Vedic text of the early 1st millennium BCE, the Vedic rituals are compared to “a snake biting its own tail.” This is also known as Ouroboros symbolism, which is an ancient symbol, which shows a snake biting its own tail or swallowing its own tail.

In Hinduism, it is said that samsara, or the cycle of rebirth, is a wheel of life that has a beginning and an end. It is a symbol of destination and impermanence.

A Symbol of Destruction According to Science

In a thorough study, linguist Marinus van der Sluij and physicist Anthony Perrat suggest that the ouroboros had a specific origin time, around the 4th or 5th millennium BC, and was ultimately based on globally independent observations of an intense aurora, with a slightly different character. Specifically, the Ouroboros could represent an auroral oval seen as a whole, at a time when it was smaller and closer to the equator.

This probably occurred during geomagnetic excursions, when the Earth’s magnetic field weakened and the poles shifted. Gregory Allen Schremp and Toke Thompson cautiously suggest that this highly speculative idea “may mark a bold new venture made possible by modern science”.

According to the Japanese Dragon Gate

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The Dragon of Destruction eating it’s own tail (again)

The Japanese professional wrestling promotion Dragon Gate used stylized ouroboros as its logo for the first twenty years of its existence. This design is a silhouette of a dragon, which is twisted into the shape of an infinity symbol. In 2019, the infinity dragon logo was replaced by a shield logo.

Other Examples Of The Ouroboros Dragon Image

The Ouroboros is a symbol used by a number of different groups of people.

Who Else Uses the Ouroboros Symbol of Destruction?

When scholars and academics use the term ouroboros in contemporary culture, they are referring to ancient myths that symbolize the continuous cycle of existence. Ouroboros is often used in discussions of the cycle of life and death in New Age spirituality.

  • The Ouroboros is a mythological symbol that has been used frequently in art, literature, and music since Eric Rucker Edison’s 1922 fantasy novel The Worm Ouroboros.
  • In astrology, the ouroboros is a symbol of the zodiac.
  • In Roman times, it was used on emblems and magical talismans.
  • In speech and writing, the ouroboros is sometimes referred to as the self-eating snake, used as a metaphor for looping phenomena, often of a self-destructive nature.
  • The Ouroboros is a popular tattoo and internet symbol of destruction or rebirth.

Is Ouroboros Dragon A Symbol Of Evil?

In ancient times, the Ouroboros symbol was associated with a number of positive symbols and concepts, including life, death, rebirth, and rebirth. The first representation of the symbol dates to the early 3rd millennium BC and a variety of interpretations have been proposed for its meaning. Some believe it depicts the creation and destruction of the world, a cycle of death and rebirth, or the spiritual transformation of all material forms.

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This unknown digital artist has been inspired by the Ouroboros Dragon

Some people may see Ouroboros as a symbol of destination or evil because it represents a cycle of destruction and rebirth. Other people may see it as a symbol of life and growth. Ultimately, it is up to the individual to decide what they think the symbol means.

In many cultures, a snake is thought to be an evil creature. They are believed to be the cause of a number of different curses. For example, a woman who was cursed to be a snake had the ability to turn herself into a snake whenever she felt like doing so. In some other cultures, the head of a snake is believed to be a magical symbol of power. If you are a magician, it would be a great idea to make your own version of the Ouroboros symbol.

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