uroboros

Noun

ouroboros (plural ouroboroi or ouroboroses)

1. A serpent, dragon or worm that eats its own tail, a representation of the continuous cycle of life and death.
   • The alchemists were fond of picturing their opus as a circulatory process, as a circular distillation or as the uroboros, the snake biting its own tail, and they made innumerable pictures of this process.1968 [1951], R. F. C. Hull, transl., Aion […] (The Collected Works of C. G. Jung), 2nd edition, volume 9.2, Princeton University Press, translation of original by C. G. Jung, →ISBN, page 264
2. (broadly) Anything of a circular or recursive nature.
   • Like an ouroboros, the story created and informed by the writer’s own experience suddenly flipped back on itself, Childress’s life now reflecting the story rather than the other way around.2019 March 6, Soraya Roberts, “Reality Bites Captured Gen X With Perfect Irony”, in The Atlantic