An ancient Mystery-image of cognition: a serpent that swallows its own tail, the swallowed part turning to light and ringing the body as an aura.
The Tail-Devouring Serpent in Anthroposophy is the esoteric form of the ouroboros, which Rudolf Steiner presented in Anthroposophy: Its Roots of Knowledge and Fruits of Life (GA 78, Stuttgart, 2 September 1921) as the old Mystery schools' picture of the human process of cognition, der Erkenntnisvorgang. The popular version shows a snake biting its tail. The guarded version shows the snake devouring it: as far as the tail passes into the mouth it becomes spiritualized, and the vanished substance reappears as a thinner-coloured aura ringing the body. Steiner sets beside it a second figure, an elastic sphere pierced and turned inside out through itself until it emerges rimmed with light, borrowing the word umstülpen from Carl Unger's lecture that same morning. Both show knowing as a closed circuit that consumes its own end and gives the consumed part back as light. It belongs to the instinctive-imaginative epoch before Copernicus, and depth psychology met it again as Erich Neumann's uroboros in 1949.
The Tail-Devouring Serpent is the picture the old Mystery schools drew when they wanted to show what happens inside a person who comes to know something. Exoterically the snake merely bites its tail, a closed ring. Esoterically it eats the tail, and the eaten portion does not simply vanish: it becomes spirit, and stands around the serpent as an aura painted in a thinner colour.
In Steiner's Own Words
The actual symbolic images were carefully kept secret within the groups by those who knew, out of a certain desire for power, so that they alone could be the knowers and the others the ignorant. The image that is actually meant by the exoteric symbol of the snake biting its tail is one in which the snake is painted in such a way that it not only bites its tail, but also devours its own tail, so to speak. As far as the tail end goes into the mouth, it becomes spiritualized. And then something appears which, if one draws the snake with a denser color, would have to be painted in with a thinner color like a kind of aura around the snake.
What it Means Today
Depth psychology kept this serpent and read it from the other end. Erich Neumann opened The Origins and History of Consciousness (Zurich, 1949; English translation by R. F. C. Hull, Bollingen Series, 1954) with the uroboros, and the book carries a foreword by C. G. Jung. For Neumann the tail-eating round is the starting condition, the undivided pre-egoic state out of which an ego has to separate itself, with every later stage, the hero, the dragon fight, the separation of the World Parents, measured by distance travelled from that circle. Steiner, lecturing in Stuttgart twenty-eight years earlier, puts the same figure at the far end of the road. His serpent is not what consciousness leaves behind. It is the shape thinking takes after the I has been strengthened to its culmination and then allowed to flow back through its own beginning, and the aura is the evidence that something was released rather than merely recycled.
Thalira synthesis: the ouroboros is one circuit read from opposite ends, and the whole question is whether you meet the circle before you have an I or after you have spent one. That gives a working test for any self-referential practice, from Goethean observation of one's own observing to the evening review of the day. Does the loop close and go dark, or does it close and give off light?
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