View allAll Photos Tagged Biting
Title: Biting Bittern
Taken: 2014/05/24 06:39:17
Model: Canon EOS 5D Mark III
f/6.3 AT 1/2000 s Set ISO 800
Lens: 403 mm
Focus Mode: One-Shot
Notes: 150-500mm
Metering: Evaluative
Sharpness: -1
WB: Auto
Flash: Off, Did not fire
Saturation:
Sensativity: Recommended exposure index
This symbol appears principally among the Gnostics and is depicted as a dragon, snake or serpent biting its own tail. In the broadest sense, it is symbolic of time and of the continuity of life (57). It sometimes bears the caption Hen to pan--’The One, the All’, as in the Codex Marcianus, for instance,
of the 2nd century A.D. It has also been explained as the union between the chthonian principle as represented by the serpent and the celestial principle as signified by the bird (a synthesis which can also be applied to the dragon). Ruland contends that this proves that it is a variant of the symbol for Mercury--the duplex god. In some versions of the Ouroboros, the body is half light and half dark, alluding in this way to the successive counterbalancing of opposing principles as illustrated in the Chinese Yang-Yin symbol for instance (32). Evola asserts that it represents the dissolution of the body, or the universal serpent which (to quote the Gnostic saying) ‘passes through all things’. Poison, the viper and the universal solvent are all symbols of the undifferentiated--of the ‘unchanging law’ which moves through all things, linking them by a common bond.
Both the dragon and the bull are symbolic antagonists of the solar hero. The ouroboros biting its own tail is symbolic of self-fecundation, or the primitive idea of a self-sufficient Nature--a Nature, that is, which, Ã la Nietzsche, continually returns, within a cyclic pattern, to its own beginning. There is a Venetian manuscript on alchemy which depicts the Ouroboros with its body half-black (symbolizing earth and night) and half-white (denoting heaven and light)