The ouroboros has certain features in common with the Biblical Leviathan. It is a common belief among indigenous people of the tropical lowlands of South America that waters at the edge of the world-disc are encircled by a snake, often an anaconda, biting its own tail. This snake encircled the iris and bit itself in the tail, and the son was named Sigurd Snake-in-the-Eye. Ragnar later has a son with another woman named Kráka and this son is born with the image of a white snake in one eye. The serpent is slain by Ragnar Lodbrok who marries Þóra.
In the legends of Ragnar Lodbrok, such as Ragnarssona þáttr, the Geatish king Herraud gives a small lindworm as a gift to his daughter Þóra Town-Hart after which it grows into a large serpent which encircles the girl's bower and bites itself in the tail. In Norse mythology, the ouroboros appears as the serpent Jörmungandr, one of the three children of Loki and Angrboda, which grew so large that it could encircle the world and grasp its tail in its teeth.
Seal of the Theosophical Society, founded 1875 The chrysopoeia ouroboros of Cleopatra the Alchemist is one of the oldest images of the ouroboros to be linked with the legendary opus of the alchemists, the philosopher's stone.Ī 15th-century alchemical manuscript, The Aurora Consurgens, features the ouroboros, where it is used amongst symbols of the sun, moon, and mercury. Its black and white halves may perhaps represent a Gnostic duality of existence, analogous to the Taoist yin and yang symbol.
The famous ouroboros drawing from the early alchemical text, The Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra ( Κλεοπάτρας χρυσοποιία), probably originally dating to the third century Alexandria but first known in a tenth-century copy, encloses the words hen to pan ( ἓν τὸ πᾶν), "the all is one". 400 AD) describes the ouroboros as a twelve-part dragon surrounding the world with its tail in its mouth. In Gnosticism, a serpent biting its tail symbolized eternity and the soul of the world. Early alchemical ouroboros illustration with the words ἓν τὸ πᾶν ("The All is One") from the work of Cleopatra the Alchemist in MS Marciana gr.