Ouroboros: The Rhythm of Creation
Archetypal musings on the creative path
As is typical on the creative path, I often find myself reflecting on the process, how things are going, where I need to adjust, how sustainable things feel. Like clockwork, momentum and excitement crumble in the face of uncertainty and burnout. It is a crucible unlike any other, requiring constant adjustment to an unfolding, completely uncharted map.
Do I have the resiliency and necessary resources to navigate this unknown territory? If I’m being honest, I don’t always know, and a sense of futility usually follows. But just as this depressive reality seems to take hold, something begins to shift. There’s a change in the wind, once more the creative sails are full, and I am back on course. Sometimes I wonder…is this the pulsing lifeblood of creation? Will I always be subject to this ebb and flow?
This is where I found myself some weeks ago, contemplating the never ending complexity of the work I am dedicated to. As an act of stepping away from egoic preoccupations, I took out my tarot deck, and with the prompt, “What should I consider as regards my creative work?”, I drew a card — The Magician.
The Magician is often a welcome sight. Cast within a vibrant, luminous setting, the figure emanates arcane wisdom, acting as an intermediary between creative chaos and the focused intention needed to participate in the mercurial flows.
He is awareness, action, agency, power to influence and shape reality. Upon his table we find the items of the minor arcana suits, each representing areas of direct experience that the Magician can wield in his pursuits to transform and manifest. He flows between macrocosm and microcosm, a conduit of inspiration, crowned with symbols that speak to his capability.
To continue the thread of exploration, I placed the card next to my bed, reflected on his themes, and fell asleep with the intention to incubate a dream. I awoke in the middle of the night with these words echoing in mind:
“The vivid imagination and the circle of imagination towards imagination.”
The phrase rang with a strangeness characteristic of the unconscious: seemingly non-sensical, playing upon itself, confounding the day world ego and its desire for literality and continuity.
I rarely, if ever, remember actual words in my dreams, it’s usually the impression of conversation and ideas exchanged. The language of the unconscious is symbolic, it breathes in metaphors and expresses in images. The words seemed imbued with meaning, a mysterious incantation that held insight to my query.
Ouroboric Cycles of Creation
“In the age-old image of the Ouroboros lies the thought of devouring oneself and turning oneself into a circulatory process, for it was clear to the more astute alchemists that the prima materia of the art was man himself.”
— C.G. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis
What are the vivid and circulatory aspects of imagination? How does that lead to a realization of creative potential, expression, and participation?
Vivid as in spirited, full of life, that which is animated, distinct.
Circle as contained within itself, no beginning and no end, unbroken, eternity.
Contemplating the words brought images of spirals, a sense of falling into myself, round and round in a sort of ascending and descending interplay. Then it struck me, that the dream and the tarot card felt connected via the symbol of the ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail, which the Magician wears upon his waist.
The symbol has gripped the psyche of mankind, an enigmatic image that has cropped up in ancient Egyptian funerary texts, alchemical manuscripts, and dreams of the everyday individual. It hints at secrets one could only hope to discover by meditating on its serpentine sheddings, receiving its boons of poison and healing, finding liberation in its forbidden wisdom.
The ouroboros depicts the grappling with seemingly opposing and warring forces. It devours itself and then gives rise to its new form. It finds equilibrium in disharmony. It oscillates between what is fixed (grounded, structured) and what is volatile (changeable, elusive).
To me, that means being in the creative flow requires fortitude as you navigate integration and disintegration simultaneously. That at times, things don’t seem to move, yet the lack of growth somehow gives way to movement once again. It is a process feeding into itself, energizing itself, through its own creation and destruction.
It rarely makes sense, the ouroboros is paradoxical, after all. It whispers that the process never truly ends. Cycles lead to more cycles, a dance that fuels infinite iterations. Are we cursed to live the same pattern over and over?
Perhaps we do when we resist the destructive energy; it is uncomfortable, disruptive, destabilizing. The rhythm of creation is halted when we don’t allow ourselves to circulate through all aspects. What seems key then is leaning into the unraveling parts of the cycle, for it leads to a synthesis, a development, or at the very least, a small step forward or an expanded new point of view.
This is where the archetypal constellation of the Magician comes in. By adopting his viewpoints, we ride the waves, letting them move through the psycho-somatic matrix as they should. We allow ourselves to come apart at the seams, releasing all the nascent creative seeds back into the ground for fertilization. Dormancy is a time of gestation, things are afoot even if we are unaware; then life springs back once more, reborn from the death we fought against.
For myself, I am reminded to temper the desire to get things going when it feels that inertia hangs heavy. That times of excitement and progress are just as valuable as times of withering or frustration. Like the Magician, I am a vessel by which the great forces of creation can be channeled. Whether focused on work, relationships, psychological growth, or seemingly mundane initiatives, it is always present; lurking under the surface, the very fabric of reality itself.
Join the conversation
How do you interpret the symbol of the ouroboros?
What does the Magician card mean for you?
How do you balance cycles of creation and destruction in your own work?
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To see the Ouroboros eating its tail, perhaps it represents the creative process feeding on memory. No accident perhaps, the Ouroboros is seen eating the part furthest from its head (self), or the earliest memories. No accident again, the Ouroboros is never seen at any stage further than the first devouring of itself, a representation of sustained creativity. Writing a novel requires stamina, first to get it out, then to revise it again and again, over and over until you can't see it any more, to put it away, and do something else for a while, coming back to it with a little objectivity, revising again and again, finally finishing it, sending it out, hearing nothing or something back, starting on a new novel, repeating the process, always your own method, but mostly in common with everyone who writes or composes or paints, or simply sits and thinks, with imagination harnessed to memory, descending, mining the seam of gold, the seam of silver, perhaps an opal or rarer the uncut diamond, bringing it to the surface, working there to bring out its lustre. Ouroboros may not be eating its tail, rather it may be sucking on it for comfort in the hard world where it's been placed.
I find myself between pleasure and pain when in the rhythms of creation. My dreams tell me when the soul in my work is dying and needs to be revived with choking baby girls. But when I’m curious and accepting of stagnation I see spirals in solar plexus’s. On a somatic level I try my best not to be taken by anger and frustration but work with it at the gym or in movement, even try to create with it.
If there is an easy “flow” to this madness I haven’t found it. What I have found is allowances and faith, with highs I cherish and emptiness I nourish. Full circle, never ending yet faithful to the process.