Ouroboros: The Tail-Eating Serpent

The ouroboros is an ancient symbol of a mythical serpent or dragon that bites its own tail. It has come to represent, rebirth, infinity and the continuous wheel of cycles. But it also turns out to be a clever way for some animals to defend themselves and can be seen in everything from storms on Saturn to nanotechnology.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
those are some interesting ear rings you have on there. Oh,
thank you, my aura borus ear rings. They are the

(00:24):
aar borus snake and it's actually curling and biting its
tail in its mouth. Well that's the illusion actually when
it's in my ear Yes, the Aora borus. You know,
we recently did that episode on symbols, and we talked
a little bit about powerful symbols, ancient symbols, symbols that
just resonate with meaning and continue to do so just
across thousands and thousands of years of human history. And

(00:46):
the aura borus is a fantastic example of this. Uh.
Sometimes it's depicted as a more of a snake. Sometimes
it's more of a dragon or a lizard looking creature,
and it is always biting its own tail and or
consuming its own tail, So the tail is going in
the mouth, and it instantly even if you're not familiar

(01:07):
with any of the the the historic interpretations of the
o reborus, it instantly draws certain ideas to the forefront
the idea of on a very simple level, like the
consumption of oneself auto cannibalism, but also the idea that
what is what's going to happen? What is happening with
the serpent eating its own tail? How long can it
can maintain this, this self devouring movement before it can't

(01:32):
eat itself anymore? Does it get to the point where
it just blinks out into nothing or is this a
continuing cycle? Is it not only eating itself but emerging
from itself? Okay, so it's the whole idea of like, uh,
you're either descending into nothingness or you're coming from nothingness. Yeah.
So I wanted to point out that rat snakes, along

(01:53):
with some other species of snakes, have been known to
swallow their tails um in an act of as you say,
auto cannibalism, although this has seen primarily in captivitying when
they're cages that are small. Yeah. Um, so it is
something that exists in nature, but largely the rbrus has,
as you say, come to symbolize this idea of rebirth,

(02:13):
uh infinity in this continuity, this this wheel of cycles
that you've actually talked about before in terms of some Sara. Yeah, yeah,
I mean it's essentially it's a it's a cosmic serpent,
and there are a lot of cosmic serpents and world
serpents in mythology, I mean, ranging from the Leviathan that's
mentioned in the Old Testament, Uh, comes up in the
Book of job or the organ Mander, the giant be

(02:37):
steel serpent that plays a role in Ragnar Rock in
the End of the World, and the or wards resonates
with these ideas of self consumption. Uh, it's continuing to emerge,
and you might even draw that if this process is disturbed,
it might well mean the end of time. So it's
a circle of eternity. It takes our linear existence and
turns it on its head, turns it into the cyclical

(02:59):
form that at once makes more sense and that it
ties back to our cyclical understanding of life. But also
it's kind of mind blowing in and on itself because
you again you try to figure out how how would
this work in real life. It's kind of like an
extra painting, like the oldest possible extra painting. As I said,
the bors dates back to ancient times. Uh, the pretty

(03:23):
much the earliest one that we've ever encountered comes comes
from Egypt, from the what we refer to as the
Enigmatic Book of the nether World. And that's just a
name we came up for it. It's in great and
not you and I, but we as modern humans are
ultimately modern humans. It was fine and found engraved in
a shrine of Tuton common Uh and in it we

(03:44):
see a figure named He who rides the hours, and
both the head and the feet of this figure surrounded
by an ora bors serpent uh. That is designated is
me Hin the Enveloper, and that comes from about the
fourteenth century v C. But elsewhere in China and the
Near Ease, we see examples of it in the neolithic
yang Shao culture that thrived in the Yellow River between

(04:05):
five thousand and three thousand BC, and so it just
continues to carry on from there. There's some scholars that
believe that there's a link between the the yin yang
symbol of the opposing forces swirling together, classic Asian symbol,
that there's a connection between that and the aura borus
you see later on. The Gnostics looked at it as

(04:25):
the soul of the world. The alchemists prized it Uh.
It ends up interpreted in other mythologies as well, in
some South American traditions as well as in uh some
of the ancient Mapa mondays that we were talking about
in our Sea Monsters episode. You see the Great Tale
of our in Serpent as a beast that encircles the
known world or the known oceans. It becomes something that

(04:45):
represents the limits of our geographical understanding and perhaps our
cosmic understanding as well. Yeah, that's interesting because in Norse
mythology it comes to represent this idea of the surcumference
of the world here right, And I wanted to mention
that there's a really starkly pet will hand drawn are
a borus that dates back from or back to ancient Egypt,
and it has the writing all is one inscribed in

(05:06):
the middle, which kind of speaks a bit too zen
buddhism um. So yeah, you have all these different ancient
civilizations embracing this symbol, and I thought that's really powerful
and cool and and actually if you look at even
someone like the German chemist August Cakel who dreamed of
a snake that seized a talentso mouth of that was

(05:28):
inspiration for him figuring out that benzine had a ring
like molecular structure, So it's definitely ingrained in our conscious
and I think it's interesting that it may even relate
to the yenang. Yeah. Now, and speaking of consciousness, Carl
Young had this to say about it. He did. He
was talking about the alchemist's fundness for the ora borus,
and he says, the alchemist, who in their own way

(05:50):
knew more about the nature of the individualization process than
we moderns do, express this paradox to the symbol of
the ora borus, the snake that eats its own tail.
The ora borus has been said to have a meaning
of infinity or wholeness. In the age old image of
the ara Borus lies the thought of devouring oneself and
turning oneself into a circulatory process, for it was clear

(06:10):
to the more astute alchemist that the prima material of
the art was man himself. The ora Borus is a
dramatic symbol for the integration and assimilation of the opposite
of the shadow. This feedback process is at the same
time a symbol of immortality, since it is said of
the ara Borus that he slays himself and brings himself
to life. Fertilizes himself and gives birth to himself. He

(06:31):
symbolizes the one who proceeds from the clash of opposites,
and he therefore constitutes the secret of the prima material,
which unquestionably stems from man's consciousness. Now, of course, I
can't help to wonder if the Matrix ever really worked
the Ora Borus into its plotlines. It should have if
it hadn't, because it's got the whole the one thing though,
I was kind of tuning out a little bit in

(06:52):
the third one, but it seems like that's where it
would have shown up. Um. Well, okay, so maybe maybe
the Matrix didn't take hold of that imagery. But you know,
as we said, this did get kind of buried into
people's consciousness. And then of course you have or subconscious
you have people taking on the r brs in a
folk tale like fashion and sort of incorporating into the boogeyman,

(07:15):
which is interesting. You're talking about hoop snakes, I believe, Um, yes, now,
this is this is a creature that stems from lumberjack
folklore of Wisconsin in Minnesota during the nineteenth and early
twentieth century. The they're often generally just referred to in
general as the fearsome critters. And I really believe this
is an underappreciated area of monsters, probably because, I mean,

(07:36):
part of it is that, on one hand, these monsters
were used to sort of describe weird noises that you'd
encounter in a lonely landscape. But they were also used
to lighten the mood around camp. So they were they
were silly, they were exaggerated, they were fun. And so
the example of the hoop snake is here you have
a highly colored snake and extremely poisonous and aggressive of course,

(07:56):
like any monster should be. And it moves by taking
its hail in its mouth and then jumping up and
rolling like a hoop at high speeds. So again it's
it's a it's a predator. It'll definitely come after a human.
The lumberjack, so specifically lumberjacks. When you're wearing those check shirts,
your your toast, Yeah, they see you, and you're making
all that noise of that axe. And so the hoop

(08:18):
snakes running at you. What are you gonna do? What's
your defense? This thing just barreling towards you. You know,
it's just poisonous, is all get out my ax, you
no accident, gonna work one move, one move? What do
you do? Uh well, oh I jumped through it. Yes,
you dive through the center of the hoop, and then
a This confuses the hoop snake, and then the the
the hoop snake cannot stop. It just keeps on rolling.

(08:40):
So that's how the lumberjacks supposedly survived the motions of
the hoop snake. Yeah, I love it because I love
this idea that you have a snake taking its tail
into its mouth and all of a sudden becoming you know, mobile,
and just rolling after someone and then trying to sting
someone with its tail. So it's great imagery. But while
the hoop or also called the mud snake, cannot stay

(09:02):
with its tail, it does have a hard spine back
that could draw blood when it thrashes vigorously. So some
of this is observing snakes in the way they lay
around and and and may appear to have a hoop
like form, and and thinking, hey, you know what if
that thing were to take its tail in its mouth
like this sort of image that's ingrained in my psyche,

(09:23):
and it were to roll around like a like a
hoop toy, well, and in fact that actually does happen,
although not with snakes, right. Yes. The the amazing thing
about this is that there are creatures that are you know,
serpentine in form essentially, that do roll up. And certainly
a lot of creatures roll up, I mean humans when
when we get in our fetal position for a little

(09:45):
you know, lonely sleep or something, or are you know
cats sleeping on the couch whatever, A lot of creatures
roll up into a form. But they don't roll across
the ground in that curled form. But you do see
that in at least a couple of usually, but you
do see this activity in a couple of different creators.
First of all, the mount Lyle salamander, and uh, like

(10:06):
a lot of salamanders, it curls up, but it also
uses this as a no nonsense defense measure. Um. It
makes its home on the steep slopes of California's Sierra
Nevada Mountains. And what does this sucker do if something
threatened it, Well, it curls up, rolls away, or if
it needs to get down that steep terrain really quickly.
What's the best way to do it? Roll up, roll up? Yeah,

(10:28):
and just then you're going down the hill. Yeah, because
then all of your like internal origans are all protected too,
because you know, not only from a predator, but if
you're going down rocky terrain and you're bumping along the way,
it makes sense that you would, you know, decrease the
friction on your body and increase locomotion as you're going down. Yeah.
And it's by these kind of rubbery too, so it
absorbs the impact of the bounce. This it's not like

(10:50):
if you were I would roll up in a ball
and then head off down a steep slope. It would
break us. But if we put a little salamander suit on, yeah,
well maybe then and then we curled. I wonder if
there's ever been a superhero that does this, has like
a salamander suit, and they kind of do They can
roll kind of like Metroid. I guess when they need
a barrel over some enemies or get away from him.
I like this, like Sally the Salamander superhero. Yeah. Yeah,

(11:14):
or by the way, it could be a great transhuman feature,
Yes right, because I wouldn't mind that honestly, I could
roll down some hills, yes, and there you know, And
the cool thing about this is it's not just this
one salamander that does it. There's also the pearl moth caterpillar,
and this one does a similar thing. If it meets
a predator, it anchors it's rear to the ground, recoils rapidly,

(11:35):
and then rolls away backward like a tire mouth to tail.
Oh no, it gets even better in this. It's like
very start to start to slay. Is that when it
rears up and it curls into that wheel, it does
a it's kind of springs backwards, so it's a back
flip into a like an inverted tire form, and then
it rolls away. Yeah, and it's bright green and so

(11:57):
it's sort of like beautiful and and then there's a
bunch of music playing in the background of multicultural instruments. Yeah.
So so these are both creatures great examples of hoops
snake like abilities in actual animals. Yeah. And the cool
thing about that caterpillar is that it moves some forty
times faster than its normal pace, and it goes from

(12:18):
flat and stationary to rolling in about sixty milliseconds. I mean,
that's an insane short amount of time. They're in fact um,
this is inspired AI designers to look at this particular
bit of biomimicry in robotics for that very reason. Alright,
so we've talked about the wheeling around curling up, but

(12:39):
I don't hear any tailbiting. Well, for tail bitting, we
need to go to the armadillo girdled lizard, which was
formerly known as prince no it's formally known as Cordialis catafractice,
but now is or a Boris catafractice. So it's actually
named for the world consuming serpent. Because this particular South

(13:01):
African lizard, it's a small little guy six and a
half to eight and a half inches or centimeters in length,
and when threatened they curl up, they bite the tip
of their tail and sort of hold themselves there. So
when they're doing this they're curling up there, they're very spiny.
They have all these spiny scales, so when they curl
up in the ball like that, they're they're covering their

(13:22):
vulnerable bellies. Yeah. I was thinking about how their names
are so descriptive, the girdled lizard, the armadilla girdled lizard,
because it really does look like these rowse girdling of
plates that are fringed with those spiky points, and so
as you say, when it curls up and it's just
you don't even want to touch it, you don't even
try to get to it soft under a belly. Yeah,

(13:43):
and they look absolutely adorable. If you do a Google
image search on these guys, or if you do a
YouTube search, you'll probably find find a clip from one
of Attonborough's BBC shows where he's blowing up and plucking
one out of the rocks and holding it up because
they'll they'll bite their little tails and they look like
just an a door rble, like beautiful sculpted or a boris,
and they'll remain that way for some time because they're threatened.

(14:05):
So they're they're like, well, I'm not taking any chances.
I'm gonna stay here biting my own tail, holding myself
in place in this defensive posture until I know everything's clear.
You know. In terms of design, I was thinking that
they look like something Cleopatra would have worn. Yeah, and
she was that said bring me one of those visits
to wrap around my wrists. And apparently they're a popular
pet as well for some people. Now, of course, it's

(14:28):
important to note that they while they are biting their
own tail, they are not eating their own tail. We
mentioned some examples of certainly zoocosis situations where an animal
that is disturbed in some way, shape or form will
start chewing on its tail. They're they're also tales of
mammals and and other creatures that bite on their own
tailor or eat part of their own tail. And it's
generally just a sad case. But there there there are

(14:50):
situations where eating your own tail is just perfectly okay
and perfectly economical. I'm talking about, for instance, the leopard gecko,
which is one of uh one of many um which
is one of many of the lizards that can detached
its own tail as a protective measure. You know, the deal.
They're threatened, they jettison the tail, The tail flops around

(15:12):
and spasms, and then they run off. It's on one level,
it's like leaving a decoy behind to distract a predator.
But also it's kind of a bribe, saying, look, you're
not gonna eat me, but I'm gonna leave this delicious tail.
And in fact, the tails tend to have a lot
of resources in them. Uh So you know that's a
it's a nice fatty piece of meat. So what happens

(15:33):
if the gecko gets away and then comes back and
finds that the predator that threatened it, or what it
thought was a predator, the threat that did not eat
that tail portion, Well, I mean that could be dinner, right, yeah,
I mean why wasted? It's just pure economy. You know,
if you accidentally dropped twenty bucks out of your wallet
and then you walked away, and you came back and
nobody else had found it, you put that up back

(15:53):
up and put it back in your wallet, and and
the gecko does the same thing. It's like, well, if
you're not gonna eat that piece of me that I
dropped to bribe you, then I'm going to eat it
myself and take those important nutrients and all that important
energy back into myself, which is the basis of the
arborous idea right off life sustaining it's giving up and
sustaining itself in one fluid movement. So that's the and

(16:15):
again it's a happier vision of animals eating themselves. All right,
let's take a quick break, and when we get back
we will talk about a storm arborous on Saturn. All right,
We're back and we're going to talk about the storm
that bit its own tail. This is so exciting to me. Yes,

(16:38):
this is pretty crazy. So first of all, let's talk
about storms here on Earth, particularly hurricanes. Okay, on Earth,
a hurricane feeds off the energy of warm water, okay,
and it leaves a cold water awake, and it just
grows more and more and more powerful. We all know
the deal with. Watch them move in, watching the weather
channel and whatnot, and they grow more and more powerful,
and then they hit land. And when they hit land,

(16:59):
there's a lot of this struction. But then they lose
their energy because mountains will they sort of include them, right,
and their energy dissipates. Yeah, they can't. They can't feed
off of the land. They need to feed off of
the warm water. But Saturn, this massive planet that doesn't
have these land forms that could impede storms, which happens

(17:19):
all atmospheric disturbance. It's glorious. Yeah, And in this case,
what you what you had happened and this this could
Back in two thousand ten, this was Ford Well It's
first detective December track by Cassini's radio and plasma wave
subsystem and imaging cameras and a storm, massive storm erupts
around thirty degrees north latitude and it begins to move

(17:43):
and eventually, within months the storm wraps around the entire planet,
stretching about one nine thousand miles or three thousand kilometers
in circumference. Uh, thundering, throwing, lightning, just going crazy, just
a type of storm of the intensity of which we
can we can scarcely imagine here on Earth. And he
goes all the way on the planet and reaches its beginning,

(18:05):
reaches its tail. Yeah, because shortly after that that bright,
turbulent head of the storm emerged this is according to
fizz dot org and started moving west. It spawned a
clockwise spinning vortex that drifted slowly. So you're talking about
seven months, as you say, covering that one hundred and
ninety thousand miles or three hundred thousand kilometers in circumference,

(18:27):
this massive stormhead meeting itself. And what happens when it
meets itself, Well, like an r barus, it sort of
disappears into itself and it's a it's a huge mystery
to scientist because we're not quite sure why the storm
would behave that way, but it's crazy. You can look
up the images of this on online, and it's just
it's you know, intense stormy the entire planet and thrashed

(18:49):
for two hundred one days. And this is this is
amazing to me. It's updraft erupted with an intensity that
would have sucked out the entire volume of our atmosphere
in one fifty days. That is how massive it is.
That's a great word for it. But to be fair,
I mean, Saturn is eighty three times larger than Earth,
so we're talking about different stats here. Yeah, and it's

(19:11):
just an entirely different kettle of fish when it comes
to the atmospheric disturbances that can occur there, as is
typified by on Jupiter. They're the great Red storm that
of course looks like a giant red eye. That's that's
an intensity of storm that again, it's just not even
possible on Earth and scarcely can even be imagined by us.
I know, I think I smell in episode of brewing here. Alright,

(19:34):
So what other type of our bars do we have
outside of nature? We have something called a nano ar borus,
and chemists of the Script's Research Institute in California they
created this nanotol which is an our brand molecular switch
that looks like an oar borus. It's molecular tail coils
up and around it, it's sort of like right up

(19:56):
to its cup like head, and the molecule is used
to detect metals, toxins, and other pollutants in our environment.
It's really cool because it's default position is the r
boris pocisition, but when it encounters a metal ion, its
middle section bends around that ion and then that springs
it open. So it's a good way to figure out
whether or not um there are metallic impurities present, or

(20:20):
if you've remediated an area of pollutants. Is a good
way to go back and see if it's actually been
completely removed from from that soil. And Ben Coxworth, writing
for Gizmeg, made the effought very astute observation that the
our borus, which is, as we have pointed out earlier
associated with alchemy, has kind of come full circle with

(20:41):
its ability to perhaps detect gold. Yeah, because what is
nanotechnology if not some form of alchemy? You know, that's right?
So now are we going to see people coming to
beaches with these instead of the little metal detectors? Yeah,
they're just unleash a little um of classroom for goo um.
You know two other things here about the horra borus.

(21:04):
One I was reminded by by Young's quote he mentions feedback.
When you think of a feedback loop, a feedback loop,
this is sort of an aa borous in its way
in some own sense. You know. It's like sound leaves
speaker goes back through the microphone into the same system
and it just gets louder and louder and becomes that
awful whining. I've also read some theories regarding wormholes, cosmic

(21:26):
wormholes that a cosmic wormhole would create would create a
feedback loop and then would destroy itself in the process,
and much like our storm horra bors exactly and uh.
And then there's another really cool thing that links our
a borus and science a little bit uh here possibly
And for this I want you to to want you to
think about this all right, A glowing world serpent that

(21:48):
encompasses the earth where we're might ancient man see something
that that summons this idea, especially if you were to
travel north or south. Oh, I don't know, Robert Lamley,
it on me Aurora borealis. You know, I was reading
a paper titled the Aura borus as an auroral phenomenon,

(22:09):
and it argues that considering the antiquity of the theme
and it's near universality, it's a geographic link with the
outmost boundaries of the world descriptions of glowing and radiation.
They the authors argued that it might just have its
origins in a human observation of intense auroral phenomena, including
a plasma instability type known as dio cotton instability, witnessed

(22:30):
by humans towards the end of the Neolithic period. So
you think that would further reinforce what they saw on
their terrestrial world, which is, you know, perhaps a snake
biting its own tail and then looking up at the
sky illuminated snake in front of them. Yeah. I don't
know if I could I completely. I mean, they make
a really nice argument for it in the paper. I

(22:51):
don't know if I buy it, because it seems like
an idea that it's so universal that it may stem
from several different sources, you know. All right, So there
you have it, the Aora borus, the hoop snake. Some
real world and real off world examples of of how
this actually occurs. How and how we may have thought

(23:12):
it up to beginning. As always, we'd love to hear
from everyone out there. What do you think? What do
you think of the aora borus? What if your attachment
to the oora borus? What do you think when you
look at the symbol? Do you have a tattooed on
your body? I know it's a pretty popular symbol out there,
and there's a number of different artistic interpretations of it
that are pretty amazing. Let us know. You can find
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(23:32):
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(23:58):
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