The Ideas

The ouroboros, the serpent that bites its own tail

The ouroboros (also uroboros; from the Greek οὐροβόρος, “tail-eating”) is the image of a serpent or dragon that bites its own tail and so closes a circle. One of the earliest images that can be securely dated is Egyptian, from the 14th century BCE; in alchemy, the oldest example is a Greek manuscript copied in the 10th or 11th century and now in Venice, where the serpent encircles the words ἓν τὸ πᾶν, “One is the All”. What it means depends on who draws it: the chaos surrounding the ordered world in Egypt, the universe for a late antique Greek author, the unity of matter and the stages of an operation for the alchemists, the psyche for Jung. This page separates three layers: what the documents show, what is disputed and what was added later.

What does the ouroboros mean, and for whom?

People most often ask what the ouroboros means, and the honest answer is that it has no single meaning. Almost all its appearances share the idea of something closing on itself: a cycle that returns to its starting point, a whole without beginning or end. But each period fills it with different content. In Egypt, according to the Egyptologist Erik Hornung, the serpent that surrounds the world stands for the formless, the chaos that envelops the ordered world (Hornung, Conceptions of God in Egypt, 1982, pp. 163-164, cited in Wikipedia, “Ouroboros”). In Greek alchemy the serpent accompanies the formula “One is the All” and serves to express the unity of matter and the colour changes of an operation (Fernández García, Fortunatae 28, pp. 71-77). In the 20th century Carl Gustav Jung read it as an image of the integration of opposites within the psyche. If you look up the meaning of an ouroboros tattoo, you will mostly find this last reading, which is modern reception, not ancient history.

Egyptian origins: the shrine of Tutankhamun

One of the oldest securely dated images is on a gilded shrine from the tomb of Tutankhamun (KV62), from the 14th century BCE; Fernández García places the first representations in the 18th Dynasty. There, in the so-called Enigmatic Book of the Netherworld, two serpents with their tails in their mouths encircle the head and the feet of a large figure; Hornung identifies them as forms of Mehen, the protective serpent that coils around the sun god (Hornung, The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife, 1999, pp. 38 and 77-78, cited in Wikipedia, “Ouroboros”). Fernández García refers to the same tomb through the plates of Alexandre Piankoff, Les chapelles de Tout-Ankh-Amon (Cairo, 1951, pl. IV), and notes that Hornung records mentions of the serpent in the Pyramid Texts (Fernández García, n. 3). We have not been able to check which of the shrines carries the scene, so we do not give its number.

In Roman times the motif passes into magic: Greco-Egyptian gems and amulets show the serpent around names such as Abraxas or around the seven Greek vowels, and it also appears in the Leiden magical papyri. Fernández García stresses that these examples are more closely related to magic than to alchemy (pp. 69-70 and n. 6, referring to Mertens). Marcellin Berthelot had already described gems in the Bibliothèque nationale de France with the serpent and the seven vowels (Collection des anciens alchimistes grecs, Introduction, pp. 9 and 18).

The Venice manuscript: “One is the All”

The oldest alchemical ouroboros is in the codex Marcianus graecus Z. 299 of the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice, a parchment manuscript of 196 folios copied at the end of the 10th century or the beginning of the 11th, which scholars regard as the oldest and the finest of the Greek alchemical manuscripts (Fernández García, p. 71; Berthelot, Introduction). On folio 188v, at the end of a series of passages headed “On the instruments and furnaces of Zosimos” (ff. 186r-188v), there is a group of five drawings. One of them is a serpent biting its tail, its body half black and half white, covered in scales, with the inscription ἓν τὸ πᾶν in the middle (Fernández García, pp. 71-73). Berthelot reproduced it in 1887 as figure 11 and translated the formula the other way round, “le tout est un”, “the All is one” (Introduction, pp. 130-137): the Greek allows both readings.

Another drawing on the same folio shows three concentric rings of text, with a tail that ends in magical signs, and the signs for mercury, silver and gold in the centre. The outer ring reads:

Ἓν τὸ πᾶν καὶ δι᾽ αὐτοῦ τὸ πᾶν καὶ εἰς αὐτὸ τὸ πᾶν· καὶ εἰ μὴ ἔχοι τὸ πᾶν, οὐδέν ἐστιν τὸ πᾶν.

“One is the All, and through it is the All, and into it goes the All; and if it did not contain the All, the All would be nothing.”

(Greek text as given by Fernández García, p. 73; our translation.) The inner ring reads Εἷς ἐστιν ὁ ὄφις ὁ ἔχων τὸν ἰὸν μετὰ τὰ δύο συνθέματα, “One is the serpent, which has the ἰός after the two compositions” (our translation). We leave one word untranslated: in Greek ἰός means both “venom” and “rust” (Wiktionary, ἰός). Fernández García translates it as “rust”, which fits the chemistry of metals; “venom” fits the serpent. The text does not decide, and neither do we. According to Michèle Mertens, the editor of Zosimos, cited by Fernández García (p. 73 and n. 18), the inscriptions on the rings are the text of Authentic Memoir VI of Zosimos of Panopolis, and the three signs in the centre correspond to the substances of Memoir V.

The Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra: Cleopatra or Zosimos?

Above the drawing of the rings someone wrote Κλεοπάτρης χρυσοποιία, “Chrysopoeia (gold-making) of Cleopatra”, and that is why the whole group of figures is known as the Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra. The Cleopatra of this label is not the queen of Egypt: medical, magical and alchemical writings circulated under that name in antiquity (Fernández García, n. 15). What is disputed is whether the label tells the truth.

Berthelot believed it did. For him the Chrysopoeia was “the prototype, no doubt very ancient”, of alchemical drawings, a model older than Zosimos, drawn in the lost works of Cleopatra and later absorbed into those of her successors (Introduction, p. 137; our translation). He also noted that in the Paris manuscripts 2325 and 2327 the same figures stand at the head of Zosimos’s treatises on the instruments, and that there “the title has disappeared”. Fernández García observes that the figures correspond to the writings of Zosimos and not to the texts of Cleopatra, and reports Mertens’s verdict: nothing justifies the label, which should be put down to a copyist’s error. Of the four main manuscripts only the Venice one carries it, and its copies took it from there (Berthelot, Introduction, p. 134). For Mertens, Zosimos is the first alchemist to use the serpent biting its tail (Mertens, 1995, pp. 177 and 180, cited by Fernández García, n. 15 and 18). We have not read Mertens directly. What can be stated is the physical fact: the serpent is on a folio of passages attributed to Zosimos, in a manuscript copied some seven centuries after him. An earlier dating is a hypothesis, like Berthelot’s; a specific date such as “2nd century” has no support in these sources. This is the same test we apply on the Provenance page: a label in a manuscript is a fact about the manuscript, not necessarily about the author.

The four-legged ouroboros (Paris, 1478)

The four-legged ouroboros is in the codex Parisinus graecus 2327 of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, a kind of alchemical encyclopedia of 299 folios on paper bearing the arms of Henri II, from Fontainebleau; according to its colophon it was copied by Theodoros Pelekanos of Corfu (Fernández García, p. 74 and n. 21), and Berthelot gives the year, 1478 (Introduction, p. 129). It contains two serpents biting their tails, carefully drawn and coloured. The one on folio 196r is made of three rings, red, yellow and green, and has scales, three ears and four legs; Berthelot reproduced it as figure 34 (Introduction, pp. 158-159). The second, with two rings, comes later in the same codex: Fernández García places it on folio 279r and Berthelot on folio 270, a discrepancy we have not been able to resolve without seeing the manuscript.

What makes this copy valuable is that it explains the drawing. The text accompanying the figure on folio 196r begins Τοῦτο γάρ ἐστιν τὸ μυστήριον· ὁ οὐρόβορος δράκων, “This, then, is the mystery: the ouroboros serpent”, and continues: οἱ τέσσαρες αὐτοῦ πόδες ἐστὶν ἡ τετρασωμία· τὰ δὲ τρία ὦτα αὐτοῦ εἰσιν αἱ τρεῖς αἰθάλαι, “its four legs are the tetrasomia, and its three ears the three sublimed vapours” (text in Berthelot and Ruelle, CAAG II, pp. 21-22, as given by Fernández García, p. 75; our translation). In a passage of Zosimos quoted by Olympiodorus, the tetrasomia, “the four bodies”, means copper, iron, tin and lead; Fernández García also explains it as the four elements, and the three vapours as sulphur, mercury and arsenic (pp. 74-75 and n. 22 and 24). The same text describes the colours of the composition: dark green, then golden, then cinnabar red. Here the serpent works as an encoded recipe. Berthelot observes that a description of the serpent’s colours in the Letter to Theodorus of Stephanus of Alexandria does not quite match this drawing, and concludes that “there must have been many variants” (Introduction, p. 159; our translation).

The sources, in order

The table brings together the sources we have been able to check. Where we have not verified a digital copy or its licence, we say so.

What the alchemists themselves said about Egypt

The Greek alchemists themselves already say that the ouroboros comes from Egypt. Olympiodorus, the author of an alchemical commentary of the 5th or 6th century, writes:

Ἱερογραμματεῖς γάρ τινες τῶν Αἰγυπτίων βουλόμενοι κόσμον ἐγχαράξαι ἐν τοῖς ὀβελίσκοις ἢ ἐν τοῖς ἱερατικοῖς γράμμασιν δράκοντα ἐγκολάπτουσιν οὐροβόρον.

“For some of the sacred scribes of the Egyptians, when they wish to engrave the world on the obelisks or in the sacred letters, carve a serpent that eats its tail.”

(Berthelot and Ruelle, CAAG II, p. 80, as given by Fernández García, pp. 70-71; our translation.) The passage is evidence of what a late antique alchemist believed, not a fact of Egyptology. The same holds for the Hieroglyphica attributed to Horapollo, a late antique Greek book that claims to explain the hieroglyphs: there the serpent devouring its tail signifies the universe, and its scales the stars (I, 2; tr. Cory, 1840). The 1840 translator admits to having touched up the text, so it is best read with caution. The Egyptian connection is real as far as the motif goes; its exact route into alchemy cannot be traced in the documents, and what reached the alchemists came filtered through Greek beliefs about Egypt.

Is the ouroboros a Hermetic symbol?

The ouroboros does not appear in the Poimandres or anywhere else in the Corpus Hermeticum, nor in the Asclepius or the Emerald Tablet: none of these texts describes a serpent biting its tail. There is a connection, but it runs along two narrower paths.

The first is a shared idea. The formula of the Venice manuscript, “One is the All”, expresses the same idea that the Asclepius states at its opening: omnia unius esse aut unum esse omnia, “that all things belong to one, or that one is all things” (Asclepius 1; Latin text as quoted in Tylak, Collectanea Philologica 17; our translation), and that chapter 2 repeats as omnia unum esse et unum omnia. Antonella Sannino has traced this concept of “One-All” through medieval Hermeticism, in the Asclepius, in the Poimandres and in the Latin versions of the Emerald Tablet (Sannino, 2012), whose text speaks of all things coming from one thing. It is the same idea, not a quotation: nothing indicates that the Venice drawing refers to the Asclepius.

The second path is a person. Zosimos of Panopolis, around 300 CE, read the Hermetica: he urges his pupil Theosebeia to “hurry to Poimenandres”, and he is also, according to Mertens, the first alchemist to use the ouroboros. He is the only documented author in whom the two threads meet. To say that “Hermes Trismegistus created the ouroboros”, or that it is “a symbol of the Corpus Hermeticum”, goes beyond any source.

The Gnostics, neighbours of Hermeticism rather than relatives (see Hermeticism and its neighbours), also used the image. In the Pistis Sophia, a Coptic text, the outer darkness is a great dragon that encircles the world with its tail in its mouth and contains twelve dungeons of punishment (ch. 126; English text). It was translated into English by G. R. S. Mead, whose 1921 version we paraphrase here instead of quoting it, because it is not in the public domain in every country. Fernández García also notes that the serpent was a symbol of Gnostic groups such as the Ophites and the Naassenes (n. 8). Here the serpent is the boundary of the world and a prison, the opposite of the unity expressed by the Venice formula; on the meaning of the word, see Gnosis.

From Maier to Kekulé and Jung: the reception

In the Latin alchemy of the early 17th century the ouroboros is already an established emblem. Emblem XIV of the Atalanta fugiens (Oppenheim: Johann Theodor de Bry) by Michael Maier, the German physician who defended the Rosicrucian manifestos, was engraved by Matthäus Merian and bears the motto Hic est Draco caudam suam devorans, “This is the dragon that devours its tail” (our translation; 1618 copy at the Science History Institute). The legs and colours of the Paris codex have gone: the serpent now stands for the whole of the Great Work.

In 1890, at the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of his benzene formula, the chemist August Kekulé said that the idea of the ring had come to him while he was dozing, as he watched chains of atoms writhing like snakes, until “one of the snakes” bit its own tail (Berichte der Deutschen Chemischen Gesellschaft 23, 1890, pp. 1302-1311). The anecdote is repeated as fact, but it was told a quarter of a century later, and historians of chemistry dispute it: John H. Wotiz and Susanna Rudofsky doubted that the text printed in 1890 faithfully reproduces the speech, and Günter Paulus Schiemenz showed that the link with the alchemical ouroboros began as an unsupported claim, repeated along with Berthelot’s plates (Schiemenz, 1989); Levi Tansjö argued in 1993 that Kekulé was speaking of chains of atoms that moved like snakes, not of real snakes (Technikatörténeti Szemle 20). What is certain is that Kekulé told it this way in 1890.

The most widespread reading today is Carl Gustav Jung’s. In Mysterium coniunctionis (1955-1956) he read the ouroboros as an image of assimilating the opposite, that is, the shadow, and as the symbol of a perpetual renewal that kills, begets and gives birth to itself; for him that process was a projection of the unconscious (our summary, based on the quotation in Fernández García, p. 78). His pupil Erich Neumann made the ouroboros the image of consciousness before the birth of the ego (Ursprungsgeschichte des Bewusstseins, 1949). It is a 20th-century interpretation, valuable in its own field, but it is not what Zosimos or the copyist of 1478 meant. We deal with the problem of reading alchemy through Jung in The Great Work.

Common myths about the ouroboros

“The first ouroboros is in the pyramid of Unas, around 2300 BCE.” The claim circulates widely, including in the Spanish Wikipedia, without a footnote (accessed 29 October 2026). We have found no source that shows an ouroboros drawn in that pyramid. What Hornung records are mentions of the serpent in the Pyramid Texts, the funerary corpus whose oldest examples are precisely in the pyramid of Unas (Pyramid Texts); the confusion may come from there. One of the first securely dated images is Tutankhamun’s, from the 14th century BCE. “Cleopatra wrote the Chrysopoeia in the 2nd century.” Nothing identifies her with the queen; medical, magical and alchemical writings circulated under the name of Cleopatra, the label comes from a manuscript of the 10th or 11th century (and from its copies), and its authenticity is disputed; the 2nd-century date has no source. “It is a symbol of the Corpus Hermeticum.” It does not appear in it; what is shared is the idea of One-All. “Kekulé discovered benzene by dreaming of an ouroboros.” He told the story in 1890, and the account is disputed. “It always meant the same thing.” In Egypt it encircled and protected, in the Pistis Sophia it imprisons the damned, in the Paris codex it encodes metals and vapours, in Jung it describes the psyche. The resemblance to serpents in other mythologies, such as the one that encircles the world in Norse tradition, is a comparison of forms; we have found no evidence of transmission between them.

How to read the ouroboros

Read it in three layers, in this order. The fact: an Egyptian image of the 14th century BCE and, in alchemy, two Greek manuscripts with a date and a shelfmark, the Venice one (10th-11th centuries) with ἓν τὸ πᾶν and the Paris one (1478) with its explanation of legs, ears and colours. The debate: whether the Venice group of figures is by Cleopatra the alchemist or by Zosimos with a mistaken label, and what ἰός means. The reception: Maier’s baroque emblem, Kekulé’s anecdote and Jung’s psychology, which dominates today’s searches for its meaning. All three are history; only the first tells you where and when the serpent actually appears. To see the places on a map, the Atlas locates Panopolis, the city of Zosimos, and Alexandria.

Key facts

Name	Ouroboros, also spelled uroboros, from the Greek οὐροβόρος, “tail-eating”
Early dated image	Gilded shrine of Tutankhamun (KV62), 14th century BCE (Hornung)
Earliest alchemical example	Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Marcianus gr. Z. 299, f. 188v, a copy of the late 10th or early 11th century
Inscription	ἓν τὸ πᾶν, “One is the All” (or “the All is one”)
First alchemist to use it	Zosimos of Panopolis, c. 300 CE, according to Mertens (1995)
In the Hermetica	It does not appear; the two share the idea of One-All (Asclepius 1-2)
Edition and study	Berthelot and Ruelle, 1887-1888 (public domain); study in Spanish: Fernández García, Fortunatae 28 (2017-2018)

Fair questions

What does the ouroboros mean?

It stands for something that turns back on itself, without beginning or end: a serpent or dragon biting its own tail to close a circle. The specific meaning changes with the period: in Egypt it surrounded and protected the ordered world against chaos; in Greek alchemy it goes with the formula “One is the All” and encodes the metals, vapours and colours of an operation; in Jung it is an image of the psyche integrating its opposites. The meaning usually given to ouroboros tattoos comes from this last, 20th-century reading.

What is the snake that eats its own tail called?

The ouroboros, also spelled uroboros. The word comes from the Greek οὐροβόρος, “tail-eating”, and the Greek alchemists already use it, for example Olympiodorus in the 5th or 6th century.

Where does the ouroboros come from?

From Egypt: one of the oldest securely dated images is on a gilded shrine from the tomb of Tutankhamun, from the 14th century BCE. The claim that it is drawn in the pyramid of Unas, around 2300 BCE, has no source behind it. The Greek alchemists themselves attributed it to Egypt; the earliest Greco-Egyptian examples belong more to magic than to alchemy, and the oldest alchemical example is a Greek manuscript of the 10th or 11th century.

What is the Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra?

The name given to a group of alchemical drawings on folio 188v of the manuscript Marcianus gr. Z. 299 in Venice, with rings of text, apparatus and a serpent biting its tail. Of the four main manuscripts of Greek alchemy, only this one carries the label “Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra”; the copies made from it repeat it. Berthelot (1887) took the group for a prototype older than Zosimos; according to Mertens (1995), the label is a copyist’s error and the figures are by Zosimos. The Cleopatra of the label is not the queen.

Is the ouroboros a Hermetic symbol?

Not strictly: it does not appear in the Corpus Hermeticum, the Asclepius or the Emerald Tablet. What it shares with those texts is the idea that the All is One, and the alchemist Zosimos of Panopolis, who uses the ouroboros, also read the Hermetica. What links them is shared ideas and readers, not the symbol.

Sources & further reading

• Aurelio J. Fernández García, “Uróboro: la serpiente que se muerde la cola en los textos alquímicos griegos”, Fortunatae 28 (2017-2018), pp. 69-79, doi:10.25145/j.fortunat.2018.28.007; PDF on Dialnet.
• Marcellin Berthelot and Charles-Émile Ruelle, Collection des anciens alchimistes grecs, 3 vols. (Paris: Steinheil, 1887-1888), especially vol. I, Introduction, pp. 9, 18, 129-137 and 158-159 (figures 11 and 34), and vol. II, pp. 21-23 and 80; vol. I on Internet Archive (public domain).
• Michèle Mertens (ed.), Les alchimistes grecs, IV.1: Zosime de Panopolis. Mémoires authentiques (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1995), pp. 177-181; cited through Fernández García.
• H. J. Sheppard, “The Ouroboros and the Unity of Matter in Alchemy: a Study in Origins”, Ambix 10 (1962), pp. 83-96.
• Erik Hornung, The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 38 and 77-78, and Conceptions of God in Egypt (1982), pp. 163-164; cited through Wikipedia, “Ouroboros” (accessed 29 October 2026).
• Alexandre Piankoff, Les chapelles de Tout-Ankh-Amon, II (Cairo, 1951), pl. IV; cited through Fernández García.
• Horapollo, Hieroglyphica I, 1-2, tr. A. T. Cory (London, 1840), sacred-texts.com (public domain).
• Pistis Sophia, ch. 126, tr. G. R. S. Mead (London, 1921), sacred-texts.com.
• Asclepius 1-2, Latin text as quoted in Aneta Tylak, “Corpus Hermeticum XVI”, Collectanea Philologica 17 (2014), pp. 29-36, PDF; critical edition: A. D. Nock and A.-J. Festugière, Corpus Hermeticum, II (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1945).
• Antonella Sannino, “Der Unus-omnia Begriff im Hermetismus des Mittelalters”, Studi Filosofici (2012), abstract at unora.unior.it.
• Michael Maier, Atalanta fugiens (Oppenheim: Johann Theodor de Bry), emblem XIV, 1618 copy at the Science History Institute (Public Domain Mark 1.0).
• August Kekulé, “Benzolfest: Rede”, Berichte der Deutschen Chemischen Gesellschaft 23 (1890), pp. 1302-1311.
• Günter Paulus Schiemenz, “Neuer Wein in alten Schläuchen? Das Hexagon, das Tetraeder und Legenden um August Kekulé”, Mitteilungen der Fachgruppe Geschichte der Chemie 3 (GDCh, 1989), pp. 38-52, PDF, which cites John H. Wotiz and Susanna Rudofsky, “Kekulé’s dream: fact or fiction?”, Chemistry in Britain 20 (1984), pp. 720-723; Levi Tansjö, “The Fictitious Kekulé-dream”, Technikatörténeti Szemle 20 (1993), Hungaricana.
• C. G. Jung, Mysterium coniunctionis (1955-1956), Collected Works, vol. 14; Erich Neumann, Ursprungsgeschichte des Bewusstseins (Zurich, 1949).
• Wiktionary, entry ἰός (accessed 29 October 2026).