Stellar Ouroboros
Joaquín Molina
,Mixed media, 200 × 180cm.
The ouroboros is the symbolic figure of a snake eating its tail. It is universal, and particularly popular for illustrating medieval treatises on alchemy from Western Europe. It alludes to the end as beginning and to the beginning as end, to the eternal cycle of death and rebirth, destruction and construction. In Molina’s work it is enclosed within a spiral star that rotates counter-clockwise. At the same time, the ouroboros comprises the symbol of Adam Kadmon, a concept that comes from the Jewish Cabala and applies to Divine Light without recipients, and, at the same time, to the paradoxical condition of a being who is created (Adam) on the one hand and a manifestation of a primordial Divinity on the other. As such, it can be understood as the divine and superior human being, primordial man or the first being derived from God. The work alludes to another mystery that cannot be elucidated by reason, that of Creation.