archetype.guide
archetype.guide

Post-Jungian · an archetype

Uroboros (the Great Round)

The round before the first division, holding and swallowing at once.

Erich Neumann’s name for the first archetypal stage of consciousness, taken from the serpent that eats its own tail: the undivided round in which ego and world, child and mother, are not yet apart. Not the same claim as Jung’s alchemical ouroboros, a symbol of the self.

The uroboros, in Erich Neumann’s usage, is the first stage in the growth of consciousness and the archetype that rules it: the condition before there is an ego able to tell itself apart from anything else. Neumann named it after the ancient image of a serpent swallowing its own tail, because that image shows a whole which feeds on itself, begets itself and has no outside. Psychologically it stands for the state of the newborn and, on Neumann’s parallel, for the dawn of human consciousness, when self and world, inner and outer, mother and child are not yet divided. Seen from within it is containment and ease; seen by an ego trying to stand on its own, it is a pull back into sleep and dissolution. For Neumann both are the same round.

Go deeper

At the threshold

I AM that which began;Out of me the years roll;Out of me God and man;I am equal and whole;God changes, and man, and the form of them bodily; I am the soul.Beside or above meNought is there to go;Love or unlove me,Unknow me or know,I am that which unloves me and loves; I am stricken, and I am the blow.

Public domain · Swinburne, Hertha (1871)

A voice that is the beginning and the whole and holds both sides of every opposite in itself, as Neumann’s round does before anything divides.

Constellation

The figures who carry it

Hover a star. Jung’s own examples are marked; the rest are readings applied later, and the entry below says by whom.

All 6 figures as a list
  1. Jung’s example

    The serpent that bites its own tail

    Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness (1949; English 1954, Princeton Classics ed. ISBN 978-0-691-16359-8), pp. 10–11, ancient

    The self-begetting circle that slays, weds and impregnates itself, which Neumann calls the archetype of the All One.

  2. Jung’s example

    The World Parents in the round

    Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness (1949; English 1954, Princeton Classics ed. ISBN 978-0-691-16359-8), pp. 9, 18, ancient

    Heaven and earth lying joined before anything comes between them, Neumann’s image of the paternal and creative side of the round.

  3. Jung’s example

    Plato’s spherical cosmos

    Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness (1949; English 1954, Princeton Classics ed. ISBN 978-0-691-16359-8), pp. 8–10, after the Timaeus, c. 360 BCE

    A world made as a sphere, needing no other company, Neumann’s first figure of a perfection prior to time and space.

  4. Jung’s example

    Giotto’s Envy

    Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness (1949; English 1954, Princeton Classics ed. ISBN 978-0-691-16359-8), p. 11 n. 17, c. 1305

    A fresco in the Arena Chapel at Padua where a serpent leaves the figure’s mouth and circles back to bite her face.

  5. a later reading

    The serpent of the Codex Marcianus

    Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (1944), CW 12 ¶447 and fig. 147, 11th century

    The Greek alchemists’ tail-eater, Jung’s image of Mercurius devouring and renewing himself, from which Neumann borrowed the name.

  6. a later reading

    Kekulé’s reverie

    Kekulé’s 1890 Benzolfest speech, https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Friedrich_August_Kekule, 1890

    A chemist’s account of a snake seizing its own tail before he saw the benzene ring, the best-known modern use of the image and a disputed one.

The wider sky

Where the Uroboros has been seen

30 exemplars across 12 fields, from myth to this year. Each is marked as Jung’s own example, a scholar’s reading, a widely published reading, or ours.

Hover a field in the sky, or choose one above, to read its exemplars.

Interlude

Darkling I listen; and, for many a timeI have been half in love with easeful Death,Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,To take into the air my quiet breath;Now more than ever seems it rich to die,To cease upon the midnight with no pain,While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroadIn such an ecstasy!Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain--To thy high requiem become a sod.

Public domain · Keats, Ode to a Nightingale, stanza 6 (1820)

The wish to be dissolved without pain into something larger, the pull Neumann called uroboric incest and likened to a Liebestod.

Nothing has an outside yet, and nothing is missing.

Sleep is easy here, and waking is the work.

Somewhere in the warmth a small light begins to resist.

The deep layer · what was written

Uroboros: the entry

Definition

The uroboros, in Erich Neumann’s usage, is the first stage in the growth of consciousness and the archetype that rules it: the condition before there is an ego able to tell itself apart from anything else. Neumann named it after the ancient image of a serpent swallowing its own tail, because that image shows a whole which feeds on itself, begets itself and has no outside. Psychologically it stands for the state of the newborn and, on Neumann’s parallel, for the dawn of human consciousness, when self and world, inner and outer, mother and child are not yet divided. Seen from within it is containment and ease; seen by an ego trying to stand on its own, it is a pull back into sleep and dissolution. For Neumann both are the same round.

One distinction has to be kept clear. The tail-eating serpent is an old symbol in its own right, and Jung wrote about it as an alchemical image of a process that consumes and renews itself, which he read as a symbol of the self. Neumann took the symbol from Jung, and Jung said so, but he made it into something else: the name of a developmental stage, and of a primordial archetype at the head of a sequence. The alchemical ouroboros belongs with the self. Neumann’s uroboros is a claim about where consciousness begins.

History

Jung met the tail-eater in alchemy. His 1933 Eranos lecture on a patient’s paintings, published in English in 1939, notes that the alchemists symbolised the mercurial seed by a serpent forming a circle by biting its tail, called the ouroboros (The Integration of the Personality, 1939, p. 46). Psychology and Alchemy (1944) makes the devouring spirit of the prima materia “Nous in the form of Mercurius or the tail-eating Uroboros” (CW 12 ¶447), with the serpent of the Greek alchemical manuscripts as its illustration. Aion (1951) says the alchemists expressed through the uroboros the paradox of the self, which appears whole in the earliest dreams of childhood and is also reached only through long work on the unconscious (CW 9ii ¶297). The fullest statement comes in Mysterium Coniunctionis:

The uroboros is a dramatic symbol for the integration and assimilation of the opposite, i.e., of the shadow. — C. G. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955–56), CW 14 ¶513

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

Neumann’s book appeared in Zürich in 1949. Jung’s foreword noted that its conceptual frame was a symbol whose meaning had first dawned on him in his own recent writing on alchemy: the uroboros. Neumann’s aim, set out in the introduction, was to show that a series of archetypes forms the backbone of mythology, that they stand in a fixed order, and that each individual consciousness passes through the same archetypal stages as humanity once did (1954, pp. xv–xvi).

The uroboros opens the series. Neumann gathers round it every image of a perfect beginning: Plato’s spherical cosmos, the Chinese t’ai chi, the World Parents lying joined in the round before anything comes between them, the Upanishadic first being who splits himself into husband and wife (pp. 8–9). The circular serpent itself, which slays, weds and impregnates itself, is “the archetype of the ἓν τὸ πᾶν”, the All One (p. 10). This round, he argues, is the self-representation of the dawn state, the infancy of mankind and of the child, and its reality is lived again in every early childhood (pp. 11–12). Its maternal side is the source of every picture of paradise: being held in the whole, without effort or division (p. 15). Its pull is what Neumann calls “uroboric incest”, a passive wish to be dissolved and taken back, which he finds in forms running from the mystic’s union to the drunkard’s craving for unconsciousness (p. 17). The round also has a paternal, creative side:

The uroboros, the great round, is not only the womb, but the World Parents. — Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness (1949; English 1954), p. 18

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

What follows the uroboros is separation. The Great Mother emerges from it, the hero parts the World Parents, and the first dragon the hero fights is “the primordial archetype of the uroboros” before it splits into mother and father (p. 323). The Great Mother (1955) restates the idea in its second chapter: the uroboros is the symbol of the psychic state of the beginning and the most complete example of an undifferentiated primordial archetype, standing between the archetype as such and specific figures like the Archetypal Feminine (pp. 18–19). The Child, published after Neumann’s death in 1960, applies the uroboric phase to the first year of life, with the danger of a “distress-ego” woken too early when its containment breaks (1973, p. 77, as quoted in Samuels 1985).

Edward Edinger (1972) identifies Neumann’s uroboric state with the ego’s original identity with the Self, and traces to it the nostalgia people feel for their origins (pp. 6–7). Ken Wilber (1980) kept “uroboros” for the prepersonal state of infantile fusion, and Andrew Samuels used “uroboric omnipotence” for infantile fantasies of return to an object-less oneness (Samuels 1985).

The debate

The first question is the one Neumann left open: is the uroboros a stage, a symbol of a stage, or an archetype? He used all three descriptions, sometimes on the same page. Wolfgang Giegerich (1975) made that the ground of attack. As Samuels summarises him, archetypes do not develop, so a developmental series of them breaks a rule of analytical psychology; Neumann’s stages are better read as his own archetypal fantasy, taken too concretely; and linking the growth of the ego to phylogeny through myth makes no sense, since phylogeny is far older than any recorded culture (Samuels 1985, ch. 3).

Michael Fordham (1981) agreed that Neumann misused the concept, but his main objection was developmental. Neumann’s infant is adultomorphic, a baby described from the adult’s point of view: wholly unconscious and passive. Fordham’s infant is a separate self from the start, active and capable of relating, and his model of a primary self that deintegrates and reintegrates gives no place to an initial undivided round. Samuels reads the two models as halves of one Jungian account of early development, and notes that Fordham accused Neumann of idealising childhood (1985, ch. 5).

The third argument is about direction. Ken Wilber (1980) conceded that infantile fusion is paradise of a sort, but held that it is the unity of not yet knowing, below the personal, and not the awakening beyond it; to take it as the model for adult union with the whole is to confuse “pre” with “trans”. That bears directly on this entry’s distinction. Edinger’s scheme puts the uroboric state and the conscious relation to the Self at the two ends of a single ego–Self relationship, which is close to Jung’s paradox in Aion. Wilber’s objection is that the two rounds are not the same and should not share a symbol.

Empirical status

None. No study has tested the uroboros as a psychological construct, and no instrument measures it. The adjacent mainstream research is infant development, and it cuts against the literal developmental claim. Daniel Stern (1985), drawing on experimental infancy studies, concluded that infants never experience a period of total self–other undifferentiation and pass through no symbiotic phase; experiences of union come after a core sense of self, as achievements rather than a starting point. The finding is aimed at Margaret Mahler’s phases and reaches Neumann’s by implication; it does not touch the uroboros as a symbol in myth, where his evidence lies.

Appearances

The tail-eating serpent is one of the most widely documented images in the history of religion, and Neumann’s own list is the starting point: the Heavenly Serpent of Babylon and its Mandaean depictions, Oceanus and Aion, the Alpha and Omega of Revelation, the Gnostic Pistis Sophia, Navajo sandpaintings and a serpent circling back to bite the face of Giotto’s Envy in the Arena Chapel, Padua (pp. 10–11). In alchemy the classic image is the serpent drawn in the eleventh-century Codex Marcianus of the Greek alchemists, reproduced by Jung (CW 12, fig. 147). Norse myth’s world serpent grasping its own tail is usually read as a parallel. August Kekulé’s 1890 account of a reverie of a snake seizing its tail, before he arrived at the benzene ring, is the best-known modern instance, and its truth is disputed. In fiction the image gives the title to E. R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros (1922), whose story ends where it began, and a ring to the self-begetting narrator of Robert Heinlein’s “—All You Zombies—” (1959).

Readers should note that almost all of these are appearances of the symbol, not of Neumann’s stage. Reading a creation myth, a burial in the embryo position or a longing for oblivion as uroboric is Neumann’s method, applied after the fact.

Sources

  • Neumann, E. (1949). Ursprungsgeschichte des Bewusstseins. Rascher. English: The Origins and History of Consciousness (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Bollingen Series XLII, 1954; Princeton Classics ed., 2014. ISBN 978-0-691-16359-8. Foreword by C. G. Jung; pp. xv–xvi, 5–38, 323.
  • Neumann, E. (1955). The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype (R. Manheim, Trans.). Bollingen Series XLVII. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-01780-8. Chapter 2, pp. 18–19.
  • Jung, C. G. (1939). The Integration of the Personality (S. Dell, Trans.). Farrar & Rinehart. Chapter 2, “A Study in the Process of Individuation”, p. 46. Revised for CW 9i.
  • Jung, C. G. (1944). Psychology and Alchemy. CW 12 ¶447 and fig. 147.
  • Jung, C. G. (1951). Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self. CW 9ii ¶297, ¶407.
  • Jung, C. G. (1955–56). Mysterium Coniunctionis. CW 14 ¶513.
  • Edinger, E. F. (1972). Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche. Putnam, for the C. G. Jung Foundation; Shambhala ed., 1992. ISBN 978-0-87773-576-2. Chapter 1, pp. 6–8.
  • Giegerich, W. (1975). Ontogeny = phylogeny? A fundamental critique of Erich Neumann’s analytical psychology. Spring, 110–129. As summarised in Samuels (1985), ch. 3, ISBN 978-0-7102-0864-4.
  • Fordham, M. (1981). Neumann and childhood. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 26(2), 99–122. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1465-5922.1981.00099.x
  • Wilber, K. (1980). The Atman Project: A Transpersonal View of Human Development. Theosophical Publishing House. ISBN 978-0-8356-0532-8. Preface and chapter 2.
  • Samuels, A. (1985). Jung and the Post-Jungians. Routledge & Kegan Paul. ISBN 978-0-7102-0864-4. Chapter 3, “The ego”; chapter 5, the Fordham–Neumann comparison.
  • Stern, D. N. (1985). The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology. Basic Books; Karnac ed., 1998. ISBN 978-1-85575-200-9. Chapter 1.
  • Eddison, E. R. (1922). The Worm Ouroboros. Project Gutenberg #67090.
  • Heinlein, R. A. (1959). “—All You Zombies—”. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March 1959. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27%E2%80%94All_You_Zombies%E2%80%94%27
  • Kekulé’s 1890 Benzolfest account and the doubts about it: https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Friedrich_August_Kekule

Leaving

Gave his sentiment divineAgainst the being of a line.'Line in nature is not found;Unit and universe are round;In vain produced, all rays return;Evil will bless, and ice will burn.'

Public domain · Emerson, Uriel (1847)

A parting turn of the circle, in which what goes out comes back, as true of the alchemists’ serpent as of Neumann’s stage.

The colour drains

Back into the dark, and on.

Next in the journey◉ Great MotherLoving and terrible, the first world.Return to the void