Ouroboros
A serpent that devours its own tail, turning endings and beginnings into the same point.
Visual Provenance
This golden representation of the Ouroboros isolates the symbol from the complex funerary texts where it was found. By presenting it on a neutral background, we focus on its geometry: a perfect circle formed by a living creature. This emphasizes its meaning as a self-contained cycle, where the end feeds back into the beginning.
The Circle That Closes on Itself
The 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.
Tomb of Tutankhamun
Discovered in the Valley of the Kings, the tomb (KV62) contained golden shrines depicting the Ouroboros—a serpent swallowing its tail, marking the boundary where the end feeds back into the beginning.
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Pyramid Texts
Ouroboros
Collapse of New Kingdom
Pyramid Texts
Ouroboros
Collapse of New Kingdom
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 resonates with the idea that the origin 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.
Artifact Profile
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?
Ouroboros Hoodie
Own a piece of history. Premium heavyweight cotton hoodie featuring the Ouroboros artifact.
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Data Source: The Human Archives
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