The earliest known ouroboros appears in the Enigmatic Book of the Netherworld in Tutankhamun's tomb, fourteenth century BCE: two serpents of the god Mehen encircling the unified Ra-Osiris, the dead sun renewing itself. The Book of the Dead gives Atum rising from chaos-waters as a snake, renewed each morning. Greek alchemy canonized the image: the Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra, third-century Alexandria, draws the serpent enclosing hen to pan, the all is one, half black, half white. Plato's Timaeus describes the first living thing as a circular self-eater needing neither eyes nor food, since nothing was outside it.
The Chrysopoeia's black-and-white serpent reads as the Western yin-yang, and the symbol kept collecting: Gnostic world-soul, the alchemist's opus, Jörmungandr holding Midgard together by holding its own tail, the dragon circling the tortoise that carries the world's elephants. One lineage even derives Wallis's infinity sign from a double-looped ouroboros. Every culture that meets the image recognizes it instantly, which is either proof of an archetype or proof that snakes and circles are both common.
The claim: the ouroboros is the emblem of every self-consuming institution, empires eating their own foundations, platforms eating their own users, attention economies eating attention, and the Egyptians placed it around the god precisely because renewal requires the consumption of what you were. Verdict: the Ra-Osiris fusion supports the renewal reading; the self-consumption reading is ours, and the symbol tolerates it, as it tolerates everything. A serpent with no outside can only dine inward. Draw your own institutional parallels. The symbol already has.
If the serpent lives by eating itself, what exactly is it feeding?