Ouroboros

The royal icing has dried in the book. It makes a great crunching sound when I bend the pages of the books now. I suspect that flakes of icing will fall from the book for the next while as it purges itself of the sweetness.

Also an update on the jalapeno pepper that got served up for lunch: I forgot to remove it and it is now completely dry and cemented to the page. Kinda spooky.

I was colouring in my journal this evening and my son noted the words on the first page: To Create is to Destroy.



He didn’t understand what that could possibly mean, so we discussed the concept of growth from destruction.

We talked about Jenga, the game where you build an ever taller building on increasingly shaky foundation. We talked about how sometimes you just have to destroy the tower to build a stronger one and that’s how life, creativity even civilizations are sometimes. (deep)

I told him about Ouroboros, the serpent that eats its own tail. In Norse mythology he is Jormungandr, the monstrous child of the mischievous god Loki. 

At Ragnarok (Armageddon) Jormungandr, who surrounds the world, will eat himself, crushing the earth as he does, destroying everything.

And yet, it is not necessarily a literal death, but a metaphorical one. A death of old ways, old thinking and an opportunity to begin again.

My son was familiar with the name Ouroboros, because it is the name of a city in one of his favorite cartoons: Lego Ninjago. In Ninjago there is also an evil snake named the Great Devourer, who the Ninja’s defeat by tricking it into eating its own tail.

The Great Devourer had stolen the golden weapons from the Ninja’s and used them to create a new and better weapon.

“So he had to destroy them to make something new?”

“Yeah,” my son said. You could see the light bulb go on. 

Please note: I might have the story wrong, there was a lot of Ninjago, Minecraft and mythology talk this evening and it got a wee jumbled. 

In Hermetic and Gnostic traditions Ouroboros is a symbol of the unity of spirit, soul and body - One the All. It is also the symbol of the never-ending cycle of life, death and rebirth. Ouroboros represents coming full circle.

Creation out of destruction out of creation out of destruction.

Excerpts for this entry from a paper I wrote this past spring. The paper is about Dragons, Pilgrimage, The Hobbit and of course Ouroboros. You can read it in full by clicking on the “OK, that’s a lot of words” link under Pages, cuz it is a whole lotta words.

My precious, my precious.