Picture by Daniel Archer.
I didn't know what an ouroboros was, but apparently it is a symbol for eternity. It is a dragon eating its own tail. Stars "eat" dead ones. Pretty cool stuff. You learn something new every day. Though, for some reason I remember seeing that symbol in middle school when I was about 12-13 years old.
The first known Ouroboros was in the Enigmatic Book of the Netherworld, the ancient Egyptian funerary text of King Tutankhamun. Pretty old stuff, about 14th century B.C., at least in human terms.
The text concerns the actions of the god Ra and his union with Osiris in the underworld. In an illustration from this text, two serpents, holding their tails in their mouths, coil around the head, neck, and feet of an enormous god, who may represent the unified Ra-Osiris. Both serpents are manifestations of the deity Mehen, who in other funerary texts protects Ra in his underworld journey. The whole divine figure represents the beginning and the end of time.
