Meaning of ouroboros | Babel Free

Definitions

1. A serpent, dragon or worm that eats its own tail, a representation of the continuous cycle of life and death.
2. Anything of a circular or recursive nature.
   broadly

Equivalents

Examples

“The alchemists were fond of picturing their opus as a circulatory process⟳, as a circular distillation or as the uroboros, the snake biting its own⟳ tail, and they made innumerable pictures of this process⟳.”

“Khepera eating his own⟳ seed is a model⟳ of Romantic creativity, where the self is isolated and sexually dual. Khepera bent over himself is a uroboros, the serpent eating its own⟳ tail, a magic circle of regeneration and rebirth. The uroboros is the prehistoric track of natural cycle, from which Judaism and Hellenism make⟳ a conceptual break⟳.”

“One myth speaks of Ouroboros, a serpent-like creature that survived and regenerated itself by eating only its own⟳ tail. By neither taking from nor adding to its environment, this creature was said to be completely environmentally benign and self-sufficient.”

“First, the snake has not caught its tail—the ouroboros figure⟳ is uncompleted. Blake executed fully formed ouroboros figures for the verso of this Night Thoughts page and for a later passage (6:690-92), and was familiar with numerous full ouroboros figures from contemporary and earlier sources […]”

“Like⟳ an ouroboros, the story created and informed by the writer’s own⟳ experience⟳ suddenly flipped back on itself, Childress’s life now reflecting the story rather than the other way around.”

“The result⟳ is a statistical ouroboros: a self-reinforcing discrimination machine that amplifies social inequalities under the guise of technical neutrality.”

CEFR level