Ouroboros
The Ouroboros is a symbol of a serpent forming a circle by eating its own tail. In New Kingdom Egypt, including the tomb of Tutankhamun, it appears encircling gods and cosmic scenes, representing the cyclical nature of time and the self-enclosing cosmos.
Ouroboros
1,330 BCE — Tomb of Tutankhamun (KV62)
A serpent that devours its own tail, turning endings and beginnings into the same point.
The Circle That Closes on Itself
he Ouroboros depicts a serpent whose head bites its tail, forming an unbroken ring. Unlike a straight line with a clear start and finish, a circle has no privileged point where it begins. This simple shape carries a radical idea about origins: if the universe is cyclical, then every beginning already contains an ending, and every ending feeds back into a new beginning.
In the Tomb of a Young King
In the tomb of Tutankhamun, Ouroboros-like serpents appear in funerary texts encircling the unified sun god or enclosing cosmic scenes. Here the symbol is tied to renewal and protection: the closed serpent defines a boundary that separates the ordered world from surrounding chaos, while suggesting that time itself is held in a repeating loop.
Origins as Endings
Ouroboros captures the same principle that runs through every origin in this archive: the beginning of one thing is the end of another. Earth forms from the debris of older stars. New species arise as others disappear. Each Archive artifact is an "origin" chosen from a longer chain of transformations. The serpent eating its tail is a reminder that nothing truly begins in isolation—it is always consuming what came before.
A Symbol That Travelled
Over millennia, the Ouroboros traveled beyond Egypt, appearing in Greek, Gnostic, alchemical, and later esoteric traditions. In many of these contexts, it points to unity: the all-in-one, the self-containing whole, or the identity of opposites. In this sense, it anticipates later non-dual ideas in the Archive, where separation between beginning and end, self and world, becomes blurry.
Connections Across the Archive
Within Origins, Ouroboros links philosophical questions about "nothing" to early symbolic acts like the handprints of Cueva de las Manos. It also foreshadows later non-dual and infinite motifs: the Zen Ensō and the symbol for infinity. Together, these artifacts explore a shared theme: where does a line begin when everything is part of a larger cycle?
