Archetypes: The Ouroboros
Introduction
In order to understand the most fundamental of all Archetypes, one first needs to understand the Archetype as such, and its formation through irrational but evolutionary processes. Neurons that fire together, wire together. This is a truism in neuroscience. If one neuron goes off at the same time another one does, they begin to connect [1]. They associate. Associations are irrational. They do not follow a linear progression. Correlation is not causation, but it is associative. Instead of a linear, rational connection, the bell rings and Pavlov’s dogs salivate. Neuron “bell” associated with neuron “salivate”, even when food is no longer present.
In time, the irrational associations expand, forming complex networks of connections, complexes, and entire neurological systems predicated on functionality. This is an evolutionary concept. Those associations that make one more likely to survive and perpetuate, are likely to last. How then, would one inherit this neurological pattern when those associations are learned in a single lifetime? Does the dog’s child still salivate at the bell? How can we inherit a memory? An individual born with the association as a mutation, a consequence of chance, is born with a dual advantage. First, they gain the functional benefit of the association. Second, they save the energy and time necessary to form the association. This association-sediment flows down the generational cascade and, over time, these associations settle into unconscious stratum; layers of inherited thought petrified and reified over millions of years.
An analogy: A piano player reads a piece of music. They associate the explicit directions on the paper, with actions taken by their fingers. This takes time, but, eventually, the piece is played without thought or effort. It is proceduralized. It is unconscious. Given millions of years, the music sheet of life settles into the species. We play the music of our ancestors through our unconscious actions. We inherit ways of thinking.
How then did our ancestors think? “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”; the development of an individual retraces the developmental pathway of the species. Put psychologically, you recapitulate the way your species thought throughout your development. And by examining the development of individual thought, alongside cultural artifacts that were the products of the ancestral psyche, we can conceptualize the minds of those who came before us and our own minds, themselves predicated on a cultural developmental pathway.
These are Jungian Archetypes: broad unconscious complexes, conceptualizations of the world formed by a vast array of associations, inherited, acted out in development and evident in the cultural products that emerge from our unconscious mind. We see them in our behavior. We see them in our art. We see them throughout history. The archetype in story is a reflection of the Archetype in our collective unconscious. Today, let us begin with the most fundamental Archetype, that initial state from which all other forms of thought were differentiated and emerged: The Ouroboros.
The Ouroboros
We must understand that all things complex, like our thinking is now, are reliant on simplicity. It is from a singular concept that many interacting concepts come into being. One begets many. However, a paradox emerges. When all things are contained within a single, seemingly simple concept, describing that one thing becomes difficult. Our modern minds, having long differentiated man from woman, night from day, or pleasure from pain, are not accustomed to thinking about a single thing as containing its opposites; coincidentia oppositorum, a fruitful composition dependent on opposites. Instead, opposites are just that: irreconcilable. A thing cannot be what it is, and what it is not at the same time. The Ouroboros, however, is always its thing and its opposite because it is the first concept. The differentiation of the Ouroboros results in all of the concepts we have now that we can then recognize as different things, even opposing things. Its simplicity is its complexity.
It is where we came from. The womb of modern thought. And like the womb, it is all encompassing. An egg, with the female body as shell and shield. Eric Neumann, the star student of depth psychologist Carl Jung, said in The Origins and History of Consciousness, “One symbol of original perfection is the circle. Allied to it are the sphere, the egg, and the rotundum - the ‘round’ of alchemy” (p. 8). The circle, the celestial dome, is evident in the Taoist Yin and Yang. Yin is earth, darkness, night, passivity, absorption, and female. Yang is heaven, light, day, activity, penetration, and male[2]. Contained within the sphere is heaven/earth, darkness/light, night/day, passivity/action, penetration/absorption, and male/female. Nothing is neglected in the first womb from which all things were born. Literally, every need is provided within the womb. The mother is the watery surround, a remnant from our evolutionary history in which we were born into the sea. First we were born in underwater eggs, then within a shell - an adaptation that allowed us to bring the ocean on land. Mammals carry their ocean within them, the living mother-ocean-egg.
Here we see the initial state of consciousness assert itself in our culture. The ego, the concept of oneself, the “I," was initially undifferentiated from everything else. The need to manipulate the world, and thus have a concept of that thing which is manipulating, did not exist. There is no need for the unborn child to manipulate the world when everything is provided for it. First need, manipulation, and then an understanding of the manipulator. The development of the self-concept, and the concept of others, is called a Theory of Mind in psychology. The lack of a theory of one’s own mind is visible in children who will fail to recognize that the person in the mirror is themself; they do not know who they are, and therefore do not know who the mirror image is[3]. The womb is pleromic, autarchic, and all-providing. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters” (Genesis 1:1-2; King James Version). The Ouroboros is the deep as well as Eden. The initial ocean our ego is drowned in, may be both the ocean our species hails from, and the womb in each individual; ontogeny reinforces phylogeny.
In psychology, one tests if a behavior or psychological pattern is biological by controlling for culture. These are cross-cultural studies. Many cultures that vary widely are tested, if people all display the same pattern of behavior despite the different cultures, it is safe to say that the behavior is biological rather than cultural. Does this conception, ocean/water/chaos/initial state emerge across cultures? Yes. The Deep in Christianity. The dark waters in the Potowatomi creation myth[4]. Lugu Lake is revered as a Mother Goddess by the Mosuo[5]. It is the great deluge that Yü, Tamer of the Flood, cleared to make China habitable[6]. Apsu, the water beneath the earth, and Tiamat, the dragon and personification of salt water, in the Mesopotamian creation myth[7]. The Tao Te Ching says, “There was something formless yet complete, That existed before heaven and earth; without sound, without substance, Dependant on nothing, unchanging, All pervading, unfailing, One may think of it as the mother of all things under heaven” (Lao Tzu, cited by Neumann, p. 9).
Here chaos takes on a new personification: the dragon. Tiamat is a sea dragon. Water, amorphous and ungraspable (one cannot grasp the concept), and is thus chaotic, attached to the dangers of chaos in nature. What is unknown is chaotic psychologically. Being limited, there is always something unknown. Thus, the snake Jörmungandr circles the Norse world - it always rests outside what you know. Lynne Isbell, a behavioral ecologist from the University of California, Davis, said that snakes were “the first and most persistent predators” of early mammals[8]. The constancy of reptilian predation, like the constancy of the pleromic waters, creates a persistent concept, long settled into our psychic stratum. It is The Predator, that which is dangerous in the unknown. Dragons are real, but they are a category (i.e., snakes, flying predators, and fire). The Sphinx with serpent tail, lion body, wings and a woman’s head follows the same logic; that dangerous part of Mother Nature. Thus, cultural heroes are those who confront the Ouroboros. Marduk cuts Tiamat apart, “and creates the cosmos from her pieces” (Peterson, p. 90). Apollo pierces Python (the “great she-dragon”[9]) with his arrow, before cutting her (later referred to as male) into pieces[10]. And Jörmungandr, having grown large enough to bite his own tail, is confronted by Thor.
The perfect circle, the round, that all-encompassing, self-generating being takes on many forms. It is often depicted as the ouroboros, the snake that bites its own tail, from which this Archetype derives its name. Medieval alchemists used the symbol, and the first known representations are on the shrines surrounding Tutankhamun’s sarcophagus. Neumann expounds:
As the Heavenly Serpent, the uroboros was known in ancient Babylon… it was often
depicted by the Madaeans; its origin is ascribed by Macrobius to the Phoenicians… appearing as Leviathan and as Aion, as Oceanus… As Kneph of antiquity it is the Primal Snake, the ‘most ancient deity of the prehistoric world.’ The uroboros can be traced in the Revelation of St. John and among the Gnostics as well as among the Roman syncretists; there are pictures of it in the sand paintings of the Navajo Indians and in Giotto; it is found in Egypt, Africa, Mexico, and India, among the gypsies as an amulet, and in the alchemical texts (p. 10-11).
The Ouroboros as the snake biting its own tail is an abstract symbol that emerged in tandem with the personification of the Ouroboros in story, as Python, Tiamat, or Quetzalcoatl. The Ouroboros is, psychologically, our initial Edenic state. It is the womb, the ocean, paradiso, from which our ego emerges, and consciousness alongside it. It is the unknown chaos, that which we do not understand, from which we began. It is always outside of our subjective world, and it is the great dragon, danger incarnate, inhuman and foreign, that lurks in yonic caves, beyond our comfort.
From Dawn to Dusk
One could expect the reemergence of the Ouroboros in modern culture by two ways: As the product of expressing unconscious contents, such as Alex Grey’s hallucinogenic art, or by re-depiction, the borrowing of old symbols to state something explicit. Dr. Iain McGilchrist, in his staggering masterpiece The Master and His Emissary, makes the distinction between newness, “seeing afresh what one thought of as familiar, as though for the first time”, and novelty, “deliberately disturbing the representation of reality in at attempt to ‘shock’ oneself into something that feels unfamiliar”[11]. The Lord of The Rings, and much of Tolkein’s work, was inspired by Beowolf, but one would certainly consider his creative act original. This is newness. Whereas Frozen, the 2013 Disney film, is a prime example of postmodern deconstruction, wherein a familiar story, artwork or theme, is taken apart, has its concepts and categories dissolved and rewritten[12]. The film ends with the princess being saved by her sister, and not a man. This is the point. The standard narrative, representation, was deconstructed and altered in an attempt to ‘shock’ us into a feeling of unfamiliarity or originality. This is novelty.
The grand example of deconstruction, a form of novelty, is Star Wars: The Last Jedi, where the standard Star Wars theme, which is mythological and therefore the foundation of all story, is deconstructed, resulting in a house built on sand. The plot is shoddy, and the theme is entirely incoherent. In one scene, Fin is stopped from sacrificing himself, ostensibly because they will win not by “fighting what we hate but saving what we love[13],” and then, Vice-Admiral Holdo sacrifices herself and we are meant to solemnly applaud her sacrifice[14]. Fundamental presentations of right and wrong were recognized, taken apart, and represented, resulting in two antithetical opinions about self-sacrifice only minutes apart. Incoherence is novel, but it is not creative, interesting, or original.
These two pathways are not mutually exclusive actions. Again, coincidentia oppositorum is at play. The dynamic interplay between explicit-novelty and implicit-newness, conscious representation and unconscious expression, respectively, is stated in the film Ex Machina when discussing Jackson Pollock’s paintings, “He let his mind go blank… not deliberate, not random, some place in between[15].” The nuance here is subtle but the interplay between these two states appears to be in constant conflict across our culture. Too explicit? Propaganda. Too unconscious? Either not created at all, it never becomes conscious, or inaccessible without a serious interpretive framework (the 2019 film Midsommar flirted with this line). There is a golden mean - “some place in between.”
Furthermore, that content that appears on the surface as art, but moved upwards through the brainstem, from the unconscious towards the world is what evolutionary biologists call a “homologous structure.” This means that a similar trait emerged in two different species because they share common ancestry. A finch and an eagle both have wings because they have a common ancestor. In this context, the reason that a modern depiction carries the same trait as an ancient depiction is because they share the same Archetypal ancestor. For example, Voldemort in Harry Potter is snake-like. He has slit nostrils and can even speak to a great python. He is similar to a Gorgon with snake hair and magic abilities because they share the Ouroboros as a common ancestor. The closer or deeper a conception is, the more closely it relates to the Ouroboros and the more the icon resembles the great “she-dragon.”
The Ouroboros in Contemporary Culture
The Ouroboros emerges across our films, music, and stories. It appears in our art and imaginations. When an artist is attempting to depict the ultimate chaos, that which is below, or horrifies us, the Ouroboros bursts from the primordial waters. In the Disney film Aladdin, the villain Jafar descends into chaos and shape shifts into a cobra at the climax of the film. Harry Potter confronts a basilisk in the basement of Hogwarts. Bilbo Baggins confronts the dragon Smaug under the Lonely Mountain. In the Tool song Descending, we begin with ambient noise which develops into deep water sounds, before emerging on the shoreline. “Stir us from our, Wanton slumber, Mitigate our ruin, Call us all to arms and order.” Tool raises the ego from the deep, while simultaneously calling the culture to mitigate the chaos; it is a call to the ordering of ourselves and our society. The staking out of an island in the tempestuous sea. Building the world from the chaotic expanse.
Seven Lions, an EDM artist, put out a song called Serpent of Old in 2013 - to much controversy amongst his fans - that is one of the most unnerving manifestations of the Ouroboros and The Great Mother (an Archetype I will describe in an upcoming article) in recent memory. This was considered by his fans a major departure from the style they had been accustomed to. It was often hailed as “dark," “bleak," even “gothic[16].” The name “Serpent of Old” is chthonic. The music rips from psychic bowels an unconscious desire. It is an instinctual call; cult prayer and demonic beckoning. The lyrics destroy boundaries between categories, returning one to the original position: “Come to me with all your anguish, Come to me in high demand, I am a woman, between my legs, Hire me, I am your man!” The speaker is both man and woman, like Yin and Yang, both phallic and yonic, the serpent's tail and mouth, respectively. It beckons you, with whatever your desire may be, back into pleasurable unconsciousness. The Ouroboros births and consumes itself. It is male and female parts contained within the whole. It is the penetration of Yang and the absorption of Yin. “Come into my hollow cave, Nothing left inside you. Cum into my hollow cave, Nothing left inside you. I am your god!” It is the explorer and the cave, a consistent yonic symbol. Paglia says, “The North American Indian myth of the toothed vagina (vagina dentata) is a gruesomely direct transcription of female power and male fear. Metaphorically, every vagina has secret teeth, for the male exits as less than when he entered” (p. 13). And later when commenting on the women in The Faerie Queene, “Their greatest power is in womblike closed spaces, in bedchambers, groves, and caves… where the male is captured, seduced, and infantilized. Spencer’s great word for such places is ‘bower,’ both garden and burrow. Embowerment is… a psychological convolution of entrancement, turning the linearity of quest into the uroboros of solipsism” (p. 187). The mouth of the Ouroboros consumes the ego, leaving it adrift in a sea of stomach bile.
The body and sex as a metaphor is the mapping of what is unknown onto what is most familiar, for the sake of conceptual manipulation and understanding. Atum, the first god and creator of all other Egyptian gods, masturbated the gods into existence, as his hand was the feminine within him[17]. The most familiar act of human creation is sex. Male and female are within it. That which created man and women, the universe, did so by sexual means. The universe is personified as a single sexual creator, both male and female, birthing reality via parthenogenesis. Modern people often reel in disgust from these sexual and body metaphors. By developing our knowledge, we can rely on a grand array of things to metaphorize without having to rely on the body. But prehistoric people had little knowledge, relative to ourselves, to rely on as a metaphor. The body was the first territory mapped from our subjective throne.
The dragons in Game of Thrones are relatively unique depictions. They do not live underground, except when banished by the shame of Khalissi. They are thrown into the unconscious cave, repressed, for the damage they caused and the chthonic guilt they inflicted. Only the masculine ego, carrying the enlightening torch, in the form of Tyrion Lannister manages to liberate them. It is worth noting that they were believed to be extinct at the beginning of the series. That which is unknown, mystical and chaotic, is disregarded by the politically savvy and arrogant. In their mind, there is nothing outside of their domain, but three dragons are hatched beyond their kingdom; again Jörmungandr circles the world.
In Hayao Miyazaki’s kaleidoscopic masterpiece Spirited Away, the dragon takes on a positive guise. In the west, the dragon harbors gold, a virgin, or the key to winning a battle in the case of Game of Thrones. Chaos covets what is most valuable to you. The dragon in Spirited Away is a life-giving river spirit. It is laughing and playful, old and wise. The value is within the river spirit - it is what is valuable. Framed as allegory, nature, though watery and chaotic, is intrinsically valuable. The pollution of the rivers, for Miyazaki, is a great danger. Nevertheless, the dragon still follows a similar motif. It is just the positive element of the bivalent Ouroboros.
The black hole Gargantua in Interstellar is an example of the chaotic unknown. It is the round, the sphere, the celestial dome. The light rings around it are the coiled snake. Cooper, the main character played by Matthew Mcconaughey, must (spoilers) go into the black hole to retrieve that thing of value. Introvertedly, it is going into the unconscious to discover that thing about ourselves. Extroverted, it is going to the place we do not wish to in order to discover something of value in the world; in sterquiliniis invenitur, “in filth it will be found[18].” Interstellar, being a cerebral film, bends towards the extroverted, by which I mean world-focused as opposed to inner-self-focused. However, the pattern remains the same: Confront the chaotic unknown, gain something of value.
Conclusion
The Ouroboros is the initial Archetype. Per Neumann, it contains three stages: “The pleromatic stage of paradisal perfection in the unborn, the embryonic stage of the ego [the beginning of self consciousness]... [and the] genital-masturbatory phase… that of Atum… the self contained creative principle” (p. 34). This maps onto both individual development and the development of the species; the personal and transpersonal. The subjective experience of birth, both of oneself and of the ego, is described, presented as, paradise, water, darkness, chaos, the dragon, and ouroboros.
That Archetype is the common ancestor from which all other cultural species are derived. It is multivalent, containing all things, undifferentiated. It is the whole. The constant pairing of the Ouroboros, as a subjective state, with water, chaos and predators, has reinforced its chimeric dragon-image within our developing minds. Once settled into our brains, it is inherited and distributed across the species. It transcends the individual. It is transpersonal. And reemerges in the expression of our unconscious through the artistic mediums, made recognizable to others by our embeddedness in our culture and the activation of the Archetype within each of us.
We now stand in awe of great symbolism across the arts, unable to grasp what strikes us, but inspired deeply from within while unsure of what we see. The world, and the Ouroboros within it, presented as stimuli, triggers the matching puzzle piece within us - lighting our unconscious fire.
Read more of Joe Jackowski’s writing at theparodies.substack.com
Continue reading about Archetypes with this article on the meaning of the Bull.
Or this article on the Green Lion and Unicorn.
References
You can view neurons connecting here.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/yinyang
You can view an example of children and Theory of Mind here.
Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigeonous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants. Milkweed Editions.
Ryan, R. & Jetha, C. (2010). Sex at Dawn: How we mate, why we stray, and what it means for modern relationships. Harper Collins. (p. 127)
Tzu, L. (2005). Tao Te Ching. (C. Muller, trans.) Barnes & Noble Classics.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Lahmu-and-Lahamu#ref233797
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2013/10/did-snakes-help-build-primate-brain
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0138%3Ahymn%3D3
Fry, S. (2017). Mythos: The Greek myths reimagined. Chronicle Books. (p. 97)
McGilchrist, I. (2010). The Master and His Emissary: The divided brain and the making of the western world. Yale. (p. 412)
More on deconstruction can be read here: https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-deconstruction/
Fin is stopped from sacrificing himself here.
Holdo sacrifices herself here.
Ex Machina, discussion of Jackson Pollock here.
http://owsla.com/release/seven-lions-serpent-of-old/
Neumann, E. (2014). The Origins and History of Consciousness. Princeton Classics. (p. 34)
Peterson, J. B. (1999). Maps of Meaning: The architecture of belief. Routledge. (p. 406)
Paglia, C. (1990). Sexual Personae: Art and decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. Vintage Books. (Not noted in text)
More writing from Joe:
Podcasts with Joe
Today on the podcast, we are joined by Joe Jackowski. Joe is a Marine Corps veteran and current graduate student at Vanderbilt University in the Cognitive Psychology in Context program. His primary interest is meaning in life, which broadly extends to problems in ethics, A.I., and culture.
In this episode, we sit down to discuss his first long-form article on his new sub stack, Apotheosis: A Philosophy for Influencers