Ouroboros

The serpent of eternity goes round an' round, round an' round, round an' round...

The symbol of a serpent eating its own tail, making a circle.

Dating back to Ancient Egypt, the Ouroboros is a symbol of eternity and the cyclical nature of time and the universe. The fact that the serpent is eating itself is also indicative of the idea of self-consumption in the way we live. Sometimes it may even be two serpents each eating the other's tail, taking on similarities with the Yin Yang symbol. Another, more modern common variation is for the snake or snakes to have an additional knot which forms the infinity symbol, ∞.

The ouroboros' primary Motif, found in ancient and medieval philosophical and alchemical texts, is a representation of eternity and cycles. In particular, it is associated with themes of death, rebirth, and renewal and with interpretations of history as a repeating cycle instead of a linear progression. In modern fiction, it is also often associated with Time Travel, and in particular with the concept of time loops, where the "final" parts of the sequence serve to set up the "starting" ones in a cycle with no beginning or end. Note the connection to The Phoenix and also the serpent as the shedder of skin and rejuvenator which acts much like the phoenix motif.

Sometimes, the ouroboros is present as a physical being in its own right, and, in some versions, the serpent encircles the world or the World Tree, and is tied to its fate. Most often, however, the ouroboros appears as a symbol or motif instead of a living creature.

See also Serpent of Immortality.

---

Examples:

Advertising

• In The Myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, the Underworld's logo is a snake eating its own tail as a symbol of the afterlife.

Anime & Manga

• Battle Angel Alita: Desty Nova has a Lotus-Eater Machine he has named the Ouroboros program.
• Fullmetal Alchemist: All of the homunculi are marked for what they are by a tattoo of a winged serpent eating its tail with a hexagram in the center, somewhere on their bodies. Also interesting, is that "One is all, all is one" is sort of Arc Words for the series.
• Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple: The Eight Deadly Fists of Ragnarok have Ouroboros surrounding the Roman Numerals on their gloves.
• In Mobile Suit Gundam SEED, ZAFT's dispersal of the N-Jammers, thus depriving both sides of nuclear options at the time, was known as "Operation Uroboros"
• Mon Colle Knights: Oroboros is the master of the seventh realm, time, and as such it is an inorganic lifeform. It "appears" through the center of a gate that is the mathematical infinity symbol, and the Big Bad intends to use it to make everything one.
• Noein: This motif crops up a lot, usually signaling that the amount of crazy quantum time travel hax is about to get even worse. The giant one that occasionally appears by a nearby island even serves as a portal to (effectively) The Legions of Hell near the end of the series.
• Ouroboros: The two main characters are in a team named Ouroboros, whose symbol is two dragons that bite each others' tails to form an infinity sign. This can also be found in one of Tatsuma's one-liners: "There are two dragons in Ouroboros".
• Tiger & Bunny: A crime syndicate calls itself Ouroboros; members can be identified by ouroboros-symbol tattoos. For a while, Barnaby believed they were responsible for his parents' deaths, but they turned out to be a red herring. While it seems like it is unrelated to the motif of the Ouroboros, Ouroboros is in fact fed by Maverick, who essentially leads the heroes. His actions cause Ouroboros to become a real shadowy organization as well, and they are essentially unstoppable, vowing to return at the end of the series.
• Souten Kouro, an adaptation of Romance of the Three Kingdoms focusing on Cao Cao, starts with depiction of the Ton, a massive grotesque snake/dragon/crocodile-like beast that eats the world. When it runs out of things to eat, it begins devouring itself starting from the tail, and eventually it itself ceases to exist along with all that it ate.

Comic Books

• Batman (Grant Morrison): Ouroboros is one of the themes of Dr. Dedalus and Leviathan and therefore of Talia al-Ghul in Batman Inc..
• Bone: Mim, the queen of the dragons and creator of the living and dreaming worlds, is based on the Ouroboros. As long as her tail remains in her mouth, the world is held in balance. When she gets possessed by the Lord of the Locusts, she lets go of her tail and the world is no longer safe.
• G.I. Joe (Devil's Due): In the G.I. Joe Reloaded Alternate Continuity, an ouroboros is the symbol Cobra carved in the place of one of their first attacks.
• Mickey Mouse Comic Universe: In "The Dragon That Swallows Its Tail", the protagonists, during their journey, end up going to the past, and find the eponymous dragon, which is actually a cave formation. At its end turns out to be a portal to the modern day; they cross through and find out that their arrival caused a Stable Time Loop which made them go on their journey in the first place.
• Thorgal: In "The Lord of the Mountains", a ring that allows time travel takes the form of an Ouroboros. It happens to represent the Stable Time Loop that will happen/has happened to one of the characters.
• Tintin: In Tintin in the Congo, Tintin makes a snake swallow its own tail and eventually eat himself.

Fan Works

• Apotheosis: Much like Celestia and Luna embody the sun and moon, the two dragon gods represent the ouroboros. In the physical world, this is symbolically represented through a cyclical pattern of usurpation and renewal — one brother rules for a time, but over time becomes corrupt and complacent; this drives the other to usurp him, bring initiative and leadership back to the dragons, and banishes the former ruler into the wilderness, where he broods and renews himself until it is time to repeat the cycle. In the spirit world, the two are represented by a physical ouroboros, a reclusive beast that embodies the brothers and their endless cycle.
• Past Sins: In The Road Home, Shining Armor, Cadence, and Twilight are attacked by a lake serpent with A Head at Each End that Twilight identifies as an ouroboros.
• Soul Eater: Troubled Souls: Medusa creates a curse called Ouroboros. A vector snake bites someone and strips them of an ability or personality trait that defines them as a fighter. The snake is actually wrapped around a limb, biting its own tail to create the image of an ouroboros.

Film — Animated

• The Secret of Kells: Brendan manages to defeat Crom Cruach, an ancient deity which resembles a mix between using a gigantic serpent and a Celtic Knot, by trapping him within a chalk circle and stealing his eye, whereupon Crom, blinded, consumes himself into nothingness.

Film — Live-Action

• The Ferryman involves an evil spirit that manages to escape death by possessing the bodies of the people on board a pleasure cruise. Every body it currently possesses bears a tattoo on its back depicting a snake biting its tail in figure of eight, an obvious symbol of eternity and immortality.

Literature

• "—All You Zombies—": The bartender wears an ouroboros ring, symbolizing how the story's event make up a convoluted, self-contained Stable Time Loop, and how the main character's history is a closed looping system, as through time travel he's fated to have a one-night stand with himself to give birth to also himself, and then to go back again and make sure that the whole thing takes place properly.
• The Chrysopoeaia of Cleopatra is an alchemical text that dates all the way back to 2nd century Alexandria. "Chrysopoeaia" means rather literally "Making Gold" or basically, since you're dealing with alchemists here, transmutation into gold i.e. a Philosopher's Stone. You can also see from the light-dark comparisons the similarity to the Taijitu.
• Conan the Barbarian: In The Phoenix on the Sword, Thoth-amon's Ring of Power is shaped like a serpent coiled three times and holding its tail in its mouth.
  He triumphantly lifted a ring of curious make. It was of a metal like copper, and was made in the form of a scaled serpent, coiled in three loops, with its tail in its mouth. Its eyes were yellow gems which glittered balefully.
• Discworld:
  • The Light Fantastic: Tethys, the water troll, landed on the Disc after falling off another world. One of the worlds he passed had a giant serpent eating its own tail around the disc, instead of the turtle/elephant arrangement of Discworld itself. This may be a reference or either the Norse mythology of Jörmungandr or, due to it also appearing in connection to the turtles-elephants-world model, Adisesha of Hindu tradition.
  • Pyramids: Dios carries a staff tipped with a pair of carved serpents. He doesn't actually notice that each one has its tail in its mouth until after he's flung 7000 years into the past, making him a Stable Time Loop.
• Incarnations of Immortality: Sning the magical ring. It can come to life and it can answer yes or no questions by squeezing its wearer's finger.
• The Neverending Story: AURYN takes the shape of a two-serpent ouroboros, one black and one white. Inside it is a pocket dimension where the Water of Life is guarded by the actual two giant serpents, whose strength would destroy the world if they let go of each other's tails. In the film, the two snakes also intertwine in the centre to make the infinity symbol variation.
• Redwork is about alchemy, and there's a ring in the shape of a serpent eating its own tail.
• A Song of Ice and Fire: The sigil of House Toland is a green dragon eating its own tail, on a yellow field.
• That is All: John Hodgman explains that the ouroboros is not a symbol of eternity after all, but rather just a dumb snake that bit its own tail. Then it crushes Los Angeles.
• The Wheel of Time: The Aes Sedai wear a ring shaped as the Great Serpent eating its tail. The most prominent symbol of the series is the Great Serpent looped in the shape of infinity, intertwined with the titular Wheel.
• World Without End has it, not in the narrative itself, but rather in the cover (actually, it looks more like a basilisk).
• The Worm Ouroboros is a story that is taken to be part of a wider conflict with an ill-defined beginning or end which casts an interesting light on the heroics of the main characters. To reflect this, they have the name and also the Book Ends of Here We Go Again!.

Live-Action TV

• Altered Carbon: The Quellists, an anti-immortality extremist group, combine an ouroboros with a caduceus and an infinity symbol to create a pair of fighting serpents entwined in a figure eight formation.
• Doctor Who: A Time Lord called the Corsair has an Ouroboros emblem tattooed on his (or sometimes her) body after every regeneration.
• The Good Wife: Alluded to with regard to a convoluted piece of legislation based upon circular logic.
  Elsbeth: So let me get this straight — it allows for hearsay as long as a murder is established, and a murder is established here because there's a hearsay statement that establishes it? I mean, tell me when the snake actually devours its tail, okay?
• The Heart, She Holler: Meemaw creates a Recursive Reality by telling a story to Hambrosia about herself telling a story to Hambrosia. In the appropriately-titled "Oralboros" Cutter the Vet dies from a Visual Pun the full effects of this Recursive Reality when he makes an Ouroboros out of himself.
• The Invisible Man: Early on, Darien Fawkes gets a special Ouroboros tattoo that monitors the amount of counteragent in his blood via sections of the tattoo turning green or red. Once the entire tattoo turns red, Quicksilver Madness sets in.
• Lost: In Mrs. Hawking's first appearance, she is wearing a brooch in the shape of an ouroboros. Appropriately enough, her role is to tell Desmond (who is in the past, but with memories of his future), to not deviate from the timeline he remembers. In Season Six, when Desmond meets her, she's wearing a different brooch that has two parallel lines on it.
• Millennium (1996): Members of the Millennium group are identified by the Ouroboros symbol.
• The Pretender: This is the symbol of a sect that practices cannibalism. Later, it's revealed that Mr. Lyle is a member.
• Red Dwarf: "Ouroboros" reveals that Lister was discovered as a Doorstop Baby in a box with the word "Ouroboros" on it (originally misread as "Our Rob or Ross"). This turns out to be significant as Lister is his own father. The box originally contained Ouroboros-brand everlasting batteries.
• The X-Files: In "Never Again", Scully got an Ouroboros tattoo. Then she did or did not hook up with a guy with a tattoo that talked to him. It's one of several hints from the series that Scully might be somehow immortal.

Music

• The Alan Parsons Project's 1985 album, Vulture Culture, has one of these on the cover.
• Crass' logo is meant to draw from the swastika, the Ouroboros, a cross, and the Union Jack, suggesting that power will eventually destroy itself.
• Gojira: The Way of All Flesh, the fourth album, opens with the track "Oroborus" which describes the motif and its relationship with life and death. The album itself is about coming to terms with mortality and dying.
• The Mars Volta: The Bedlam in Goliath, the fourth full-length album, contains a track named "Ouroborous" that loops back onto a pair of choruses and a series of guitar riffs that Word of God has declared to be a reference to this motif. Also fits in with the various weirdness that permeates the album, being as it is based around sayings and events that the band encountered while using an old Ouija Board they found in Jerusalem, and the string of unpleasant events that they thought were due to a curse from the board.
• mothy: In the Vocaloid song "The Escape of Salmhofer the Witch" in the Evillious Chronicles, two ouroboros symbols are seen at the end, probably representing the "Twin Gods" of the series.
• The Smashing Pumpkins' fifth album Machina featured a lot of artwork from Vasily Kafanov and a lot of other alchemy-inspired artwork. You can see quite a lot of it here and amongst the number, lies several of the Ouroboros.
• Taylor Swift: The lyric video for "Look What You Made Me Do" features an ouroboros during the chorus.
• Tears for Fears: There's an animated spinning ouroboros in the "Sowing the Seeds of Love" music video.
• They Might Be Giants: "I Palindrome I" features the chorus: "And I am a snake head eating the head on the opposite side", in keeping with the song's theme of repetition and symmetry.
• Trobar De Morte's album Ouroboros, which includes a song with that name. Its◊ artwork includes a woman with an ouroboros on her forehead.
• Woven Hand has ouroboros artwork, from an Albrecht Dürer engraving, on the final page of Black of the Ink.

Religion and Mythology

• Hindu Mythology: Adisesha is a primordial being who coils and forms the seat of Vishnu. Adisesha does not actually consume itself and it in fact has thousands of heads but still Adisesha forms a symbol for infiniteness and the endlessness of time.
• Hoop snakes, which are part of folklore in both North America and Australia supposedly bite their tail and roll downhill to escape danger. (There aren't any snakes that actually do this.)
• Norse Mythology: Jörmungandr, the World Serpent, is the offspring of the giantess Angrboða and Loki who grew so large that he could encircle Midgard, the Earth, and grasp his own tail. When Jörmungandr lets go of his own tail, the world will end.
• The Talmud:
  • Bava Kamma 117a-b describes an event where Rav Kahana died, and a huge serpent encircled the hill where he was buried with its tail in its mouth. Rabbi Yochanan, who felt responsible for his death, had to ask three times before the serpent would let him pass, the final time referring to Rav Kahana as his "teacher" instead of his student or colleague. Then he raised him from the dead.
  • A similar story is told about Rabbi Elazar son of Rabbi Shimon (Bava Metzia 84b). The other rabbis didn't bother to bury him for many years. Eventually, Rabbi Elazar's father appeared to them in a dream and demanded why his son wasn't buried beside him. In this case, the snake let them in when they called "Serpent, serpent! Open your mouth to allow a son to enter next to his father." A serpent also encircled the cave when Rabbi Elazar's own son was was going to be buried, but apparently couldn't be dislodged (85a).

Tabletop Games

• Drop Mix: One of the rock playlists is called Ouroboros.
• Dungeons & Dragons: In the 3rd party supplement Creature Codex, there are stats for the Ouroboros, here interpreted as a snake with a white head and front body, and a black back half. Once slain, it is reborn with the colors switched.
• In Nomine: The band symbol of the balseraphs — demons resembling winged serpents, known mainly for spinning extremely convoluted lies within lies within lies — is an ouroboros coiled in a double-layered figure eight.
• Iron Kingdoms: The druids of Circle Orboros are named after Ouroboros (minus one o). They worship the Devourer Wurm, the embodiment of chaos.
• Magic: The Gathering: Eternal Dragon and Evershrike are a dragon and winged snake, respectively, shown holding their tails in their mouths. Both can be returned to your hand from the graveyard for a price in mana, representing the ouroboros' association with immortality.
• Pathfinder:
  • Stats for the ouroboros are included in Bestiary 6. They are described as being enormous serpents made from even tinier serpents (in turn made from even smaller ones, repeating to infinity) from the Astral Plane. Embodiments of the cycle of creation and destruction, they forever consume themselves and are reborn in an endless loop. They are among the most powerful beings in the cosmos, but are extremely aggressive and destructive, making them a favorite summon for extremely powerful but homicidally insane spellcasters.
  • Ragadahn, a demigod associated with dragons, secrets, and eternity, is fond of using this symbol, and his holy sign is a serpent biting its tail while curved in the shape of an infinity symbol.
• Tarot Cards: In some tarot decks, the World (XXI), the last of the Major Arcana, has an ouroboros surrounding the chick (or whatever is) present in the center of the card.
• Warhammer 40,000: The symbol of the Thousand Sons Chaos Marines is an Ouroboros, in keeping with the motifs of the Marines themselves, and their cities.
• The World of Darkness:
  • If you pay close attention, the symbols for both Worlds of Darkness are ouroboroi.
  • Vampire: The Masquerade: The Tzimisce clan symbol is a sinister rendering of an ouroboros. Several theories abound as to the nature of this fact, but the best explanation is that the clan is very wise as to the cannibalistic nature of the Crapsack World they live in.
  • Werewolf: The Apocalypse: Chronicles of the Black Labyrinth discusses the Ouroboros as a symbol of the Wyrm.

Video Games

• BlazBlue: Hazama has a weapon called Ouroboros which grants him long-range attack options. To further the thematic 'cycle' in Ouroboros, this guy is responsible for creating the time loop that plagues the first game. To further the thematic 'autoconsumptive' theme in Ouroboros, his weapon exacerbates emotional vulnerabilities in his enemies.
• Bravely Default: The Greater-Scope Villain and True Final Boss that Airy serves is called Ouroboros, and the ouroboros symbol appears around each world he consumes, allowing him to talk them into spiritually cannibalizing themselves.
• Breath of Fire: Nina's strongest weapon in Breath of Fire III and Breath of Fire IV is called Ouroboros.
• Broken Sword: The Serpent's Curse: The serpent eating its own tail is revealed to be a Gnostic symbol and forms part of the MacGuffin painting and also of the Tabula Veritatis.
• Brood Star: The Ouroborosect is a dragon-like space bug whose serpentine body encloses the playable area of the screen during its boss fight. It doesn't bite its own tail because it's too busy spitting energy bullets and laser beams at the player's spacecraft.
• Cassette Beasts: One of the game's Mons is Aeroboros, a flying snake who bites their own tail, forming the shape of a ring. They're an Air-type monster who can generate strong winds by cycling air through their body, and to obtain one you must remaster a Masquerattle that is equipped with the Air-type move Zephyr.
• City of Heroes has an organization called Ouroboros that seeks to fix problems caused by people messing with time. In game terms, their facilities allow players to replay story arcs they have outleveled. Their symbol is a golden, angular ∞ version.
• Cookie Clicker: One of the upgrades for the Fractal Engine is the Chocolate Ouroboros. Fitting, since Fractal Engines are designed to create more cookies from other preexisting cookies, which would be consumed to make even more cookies, etc.
  "Forever eating its own tail and digesting itself, in a metabolically dubious tale of delicious tragedy."
• Fallout: New Vegas: In the DLC Old World Blues, all the Think Tanks have looping thought processes as a result of a limitation of their programming. To reflect this, they've all taken on names that represent some form of infinity, including Dr. Borous, shortened from Ouroboros. A smart character can call him on the misspelling, though he'll Handwave it. The other five are Doctors Klein (Klein bottle), 8 (infinity symbol on its side), Dala (short for "mandala," Sanskrit for "circle"), 0 (a literal circle), and Mobius (Mobius strip).
• Fire Emblem Heroes depicts Gullveig, the Big Bad of Book VII, with a Snakes Are Sinister motif, which is eventually revealed to be additionally based on the mythological Ouroboros. Gullveig herself is the result and overall focal point of a Stable Time Loop, being a Conqueror from the Future who repeatedly travels into the past in order to reincarnate, gather magical power, and ensure her own eternal victory. The Chapter where this reveal is dropped is also literally titled “Ouroboros”.
  Gullveig: “All those born of the past will know death in the future. I, however, was not born—and neither will I ever meet my end. My life is a cycle unending, eternal. The golden serpent springs ever forth from its own swallowing mouth.”
• Flight Rising: Mentioned by the description of the Swallowtail Buttersnake familiar (as a pun on the more literal definition of swallowtail), "Also known as the Ouroboros Buttersnake."
• Golden Sun: Dark Dawn has the Ouroboros Labyrinth. It's not as big a labyrinth as it sounds.
• Groove Coaster: The track "ouroboros -twin stroke of the end-" features one in its background visuals. Furthermore, the intro of the track is repeated at the end, and yes, fans have looped it.
• Hiveswap has recurring imagery of snakes and serpents (some of it borrowed from Homestuck, which can be found under Webcomics), and a mysterious achievement called "Boros", suggesting an ouroboros motif.
• Inscryption features the Ouroboros as a collectable card. Every time it dies, it reanimates by returning to your hand, and also gains an attack and health buff. The stat boosts are permanent, retaining after a battle is over, after you die, starting a new game, the game completely changing form, and being turned into a robot.
• Trails Series: A shady conspiracy called Ouroboros is behind a big portion of the series, although their ultimate goals are still unknown. Their emblem has a serpent eating its own tail.
• Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 2: The Ouroboros symbol appears on the floor during the final boss - where Present!Raziel kills Past!Raziel with the soul of Future!Raziel.
• Lost Kingdoms has one as a high-level mon you can evolve one of your dragons into.
• Macross 30: The Voice that Connects the Galaxy takes place on a colony world called Ouroboros. Time Travel shenanigans occur.
• Mega Man ZX Advent: The Ouroboros is the ultimate Biometal in the form of a giant floating ring made up of all the Model Ws, which serves as the final level of the game and the source of the Big Bad's final One-Winged Angel, through which he intends to Restart the World.
• Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty has an Ouroboros appear in the map screen if you try to use it when GW is glitching. This hints at the purpose of the S3 program.
• No More Heroes: The last boss fight takes place in an arena surrounded by an energy dragon that eats its own tail. It constricts more tightly as the battle progresses, representing the self-destructive cycle of revenge.
• Resident Evil 5: The apocalyptic Virus threat is named "Uroboros" (the Serbo-Croatian spelling), since it mutates its host into a giant mass of intertwining tentacles, slowly devouring the host so it must constantly seek more hosts to infect.
• Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey: The boss of Sector Eridanus is Ouroboros. You have to fight her twice over because, for the first time, five demons are giving her energy to survive indefinitely. She's beaten on the second try, but who said that it'll be easy? Then it turns out that defeating Ouroboros doesn't actually enable the Red Sprite to escape the Schwartzwelt... she appears as a silver serpent, her body in a vertical infinity symbol, tail in her mouth.
• Snake (yes, that game) pulls a lethally straight example in which snakes die when biting their own tails, much like the real-life example noted below.
• In Splatoon 3, there is a gigantic, eel-like flying King Salmonid named Horrorboros. While it never does eat its own tail, it always flies in a circle around the stage, and its being named after the ouroboros ties in well with the Salmonids' worship of both eating other sapient races and being eaten themselves.
• Strider (Arcade): The first boss is called Ouroboros, a large centipede/serpent robot created by the merge of Kazakh's ruling party. In its second appearance during the final stage, it actually starts circling itself in place, making it look just like the symbol it is based on. Ouroboros Mk.III from the 2014 ''Strider'' is a Shout-Out to it. Ouroboros also just happens to be Hiryu's best-known Hyper Combo from Marvel vs. Capcom, though it was likely named due to the Hyper's nature (two bots constantly spinning around Hiryu) rather than as a callback to the boss.
• Swarm Simulator: Evolution: The final and most powerful production unit is called the Endless, and it resembles a cosmic ouroboros made of ascended swarm units.
• A Very Long Rope to the Top of the Sky: Rings that protect against multiple status effects are named after snakes; the best one is the Ouroboros Ring, which stops every status effect except instant death and stun, created by fusing the two Snake Rings, Jade and Yellow.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 3: the six main characters gain a power early on that allows them to merge with each other into "Ouroboros forms", represented by a fiery image of an Ouroboros symbol in their eyes. Several characters say that "the will of Ouroboros" is the only thing that can fix the world. There have been multiple generations of Ouroboros across thousands of years fighting against Moebius, trying to break the stasis Moebius has kept the world trapped in. An eternal cycle created to combat another eternal cycle.
• Xenogears: The Final Boss is a form of Miang called Ouroboros, and its defeat probably represents the end of the 10000-year cycle of death and rebirth Deus initiated in order to repair itself and fly off to destroy other planets.

Webcomics

• Gunnerkrigg Court: In the third treatise, there's an ouroboros symbol in the sky. In a later page, a stylized depiction of Coyote appears to reference the ouroboros.
• Homestuck: The two-snake symbol, specifically referencing The Neverending Story's use of it, is associated with the Cherubs. It turns out to be a part of their mating process; when mating, they transform into immense crocodile-headed snakes, and the act is consummated when they bite each other's tails and twist themselves into an infinity symbol.
• Ker-Kyl's Watch: The ruler of 29XX is named Lord Ouroboros.
• Ozy and Millie: In one strip, Lewellyn, a dragon, attempts to explain the symbol, and provide a visual reference by biting on his own tail.
• In Rhapsodies the Circle Band's logo consists of the Chinese symbol "Fo" superimposed over an ouroboros
• A Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic posits that the symbol was initially conceived as a discreet signal to inform potential paying audiences of buildings containing autofellatio shows.
• Unwinder's Tall Comics: In this strip, there's an ouroboros in the panel border art. It's the first hint that this metafictional webcomic is doing something amazing.

Web Original

• hololive: One half of Ouro Kronii's name is derived from this creature, as it represents time and infinity, so it's no surprise that snakes are one of her Animal Motifs. Her New Year's 2022 kimono reveal stream also introduces a white snake mascot named Boros, bringing this reference full circle.
• Homestar Runner: In the Strong Bad Email on mini-golf, the "Worm Hole" dodges Homestar's putt, after which the Worm himself pops up, shouts "Get Your Own!" and takes a bite out of the golf ball. Then another Worm pops out of the golf ball, bites the first Worm, and the two end up forming an endless loop.
  Homestar: "I'm gonna say that's a birdie. Yep... definitely a birdie."
• Mortasheen:
  • The Grobbidile is a useless, wormlike by-product of monster creation most notable for a potent Healing Factor and insatiable hunger for the closest source of meat. As a result, most Grobbidiles spend their lives joyfully devouring their own tails. Rarely, it can evolve into the hydra-themed Grobbydrus.
  • Before Grobbydrus was revealed, someone came up with a fanmade creature called an Ourobbidile which would be created when a Grobbidile consumes a growth serum. Their backs are lined with hard plates and they are far more aggressive than their previous forms, and attack prey by rolling at them like massive wheels and flattening them. When they lack other targets, they revert to idly chewing on their own regenerating tails.
• SCP Foundation: The Ouroboros Cycle is a long tale featuring four of the SCP-001 proposals. First is the Children, where the Foundation uses nine children to harness a dangerous power that can wipe anything out of reality. Second is the Broken God, where the Church of the Broken God revive their deity, who then goes on a rampage across Mexico, becoming bigger with each chunk of metal it gets. Third is Atonement, where a Foundation Scientist becomes like a humanoid black hole with the power to wipe out all but one world in the Multiverse and offers to do so after telling the O5 Council that the anomalies they work to contain come from other worlds and leak in. The last is The Way It Ends, which follows an elite group of Chaos Insurgency agents in a quest to kill all the O5s. The overall theme consists of the Foundation messing with power beyond their understanding and how, no matter what happens, the Foundation must remain.

Western Animation

• Ninjago: The main city inhabited by the first season's villains, the Serpentine, is named after the Ouroboros, with the arena in the center having carvings on the walls depicting the symbol. This ends up being foreshadowing of sorts, as in the finale of season 1, the Ninja stop the Great Devourer by baiting it into running into and biting its own tail, causing it to resemble the symbol.
• She-Ra and the Princesses of Power: The ouroboros is the symbol of Tung Lashor's gang of Snake People.
• Star vs. the Forces of Evil: Queen Eclipsa casts an Ouroboros spell on Rhombulus's snake arms. She was apparently particularly proud of this spell.

Real Life

• Friedrich August Kekule von Stradonitz realized that the unusual properties of benzene could be explained if its carbon chain connected around in a hexagon. He claimed he got the idea after having a dream in which he saw a serpent eating its own tail.
• Carl Jung, he of Jungian Archetypes, proto-troper, included this in his writings.
• It is possible that the inspiration for the symbol is the view of the Milky Way galaxy in the night sky, hence its appearances in astronomy-focused cultures.
• It's possible for real snakes to bite their own tails. Usually, the real-world ouroboros dies when this happens, though one can save it with a little sanitzer to make it gag. It's usually a result of heat delirium, where the snake can't tell that that tasty-looking moving thing is a part of it.
• Armadillo Lizard, a little lizard whose defense tactic involves curling up and biting its own tail, protecting its soft underbelly with its hard back, and as such it is given the scientific name Ouroboros.
• A Stimson's Python in the Alice Springs Reptile Centre somehow shed its skin inside itself, with the shredded tail ending in the mouth. It broke itself free after 3 hours.

---