ouroboros and uroboros and uroborus

I was planning to provide an overview of some of the difficult words from these pages, but I couldn't get beyond two of them before I found the need to stop and examine them more closely. Let's begin with lemnisc/lemniscus/lemniscate. The Collegiate only tells us that the word is derived ultimately from the Greek and then it journeyed through Latin to English, that it means "ribbon," and that it has an association either with a figure eight (lemniscate) or a band of fibers, especially nerve fibers (lemniscus). But the word is far more interesting than this simple description suggests. Let's pry it open gently and see its inner workings.

Lemnisc et al.

Indeed, the first usage in English of the term lemnisc, from 1706, emphasizes the "ribbon-like" meaning of the term. "The ends and stalks of the tender branch were tied together with a lemnisc or ribbon." But the term lemnisc/lemniscus could also be used, beginning in the 18th century, to describe a punctuation mark-- the division sign (why isn't it on my keyboard?). Thus, as an author from 1718 said: "The Lemnisk was a straight line drawn between two points.." Such textual diacritical markings went back at least to the third century CE, for we have an 1849 quotation that suggests as much: "Origen (d. 254) marked these texts with various asterisks and obeli, lemnisci and hypolemnisci." Ah, another word--hypolemnisci. But we shouldn't get too carried away by it. It is, literally an "under lemniscus," or a division sign without the top dot. Thus, it is a dash with one dot under it.

Time does not permit a full discussion of the anatomical meaning of the term--a band or bundle of fibres in the central nervous system, especialy one of those connecting sensory nuclei to the thalamus-- and so I will conclude by looking at its mathematical significance. In 1694 the Swiss mathematician Jacob Bernoulli published an article on a curve "shaped like a figure 8, or a knot, or the bow of a ribbon," which he called a "lemniscate" (pendant ribbon). Though Bernoulli thought that he had discovered the mathematics of this curve, most scholars say that he was describing a special case of a Cassinian Oval, described first by Cassini in 1680. I hesitate to try to introduce here the mathematics of the "lemniscate of Bernoulli," as it is called. Even though I was a mathematics major for two years in college, my math is, as my Italian teacher would say, "un po' arrugginito." Suffice it to say that the "figure 8" is also a symbol for infinity or eternity, and it and the (endless) circle are used by many cultures to describe the infinite.

A Detour on the Ouroboros

But I want to disgress for just a moment. The two classical symbols of eternity are the figure eight and the circle. But the mythological representation of a circle is often that of a serpent swallowing its own tail. Known as the ouroboros or uroboros, the tail-swallowing serpent has been interpreted in a vast array of philosophical, pyschological and alchemical systems. Whenever you put these three words in the same sentence, you know you are playing with a symbol that is so plastic in its significance that it may almost be meaningless. Let me illustrate what I mean by a few quotations from the 20th century. From 1940: "Thus the uroborus symbol represents our psychic continuity with the immemorial past." This seems like quite a leap--from a serpent eating its tail to our psychic continuity with the past, but I will leave it there for now. Then, from the same work: "Geber, or Jabir, the most famous of the Arabian alchemists, who lived in Kufa about A.D. 776, used the uroborus to represent a closed system or magic ring, denoting the idea of an eternal process." Well, then there is a 1953 work on Jung's psychology, which describes the uroboros as the "dragon that devours, fertilizes, begets and slays itself and brings itself to life again." Quite a proficient dragon, if I do say.

Some authors see the symbolism of the uroboros as indicative of the serpent's control of this universe, a universe bound under sin and needing redemption, while Northrop Frye, in his classic work (1957) on the Anatomy of Criticism, says: "Alchemical symbolism takes the ouroborus and the hermaphrodite..in this redemptive context." Does this suggest, then, that the uroboros has a redemptive significance? And then, if everything isn't confusing for us, an author in 1975 could say that the "Endless Snake" depicts an ouroborus who has become "one with himself." The ouroborus seems to be ultimately plastic symbol--it can mean almost anything to anyone, depending on whether you focus on the serpent, on its self-swallowing and generating, on the closed-circle nature of the serpent or on the symbolism of the serpent in Christan theology.

Conclusion

Well, I discovered that ouroborus, which appears as uroboros in the OED, though it gives ouroborus and uroborus as alternative spellings, isn't in the Collegiate and thus I don't have to learn it for the Bee in Cheyenne in June. Good to know that, once I have spent all this time trying to understand the rudiments of this elusive symbol. I, who thought that I could easily do two words on this page, will have to put off lierne until the next essay.

1832