St. Luke's Attic

In Norse myth, Jormungandr is also known as the Midgaard Serpent or The World Serpent. The Greeks called it Orobouros. It is a monstrous serpent that circles the world; it is so large that it is able to stretch around the earth and still fit its tail in its mouth. This fitting of the tail into the mouth is telling because it speaks of cycles, repetition. 

This drawing is about many things. It’s actually a pastiche of several different drawings that laid around in my studio for a long time before I knew what to do with them. The head was a demo for pen and ink and the gargoyle heads were for an illustration job of some sort. Jormungandr came later. I put all of this together because of my reading of Purgatorio in The Divine Comedy and CS Lewis’ The Discarded Image. For the medievals, chance, fortune, mutability, change, sin, all of these things were alien to the heavens properly speaking. All that stuff only happened below the circle of the moon. (Did you see the moon in my drawing? Did you? Did you?) The title of my piece is Subjected to Futility and Beset with Temptations. Because we live below the circle of the moon, we are subject to things like temptations – we repeat cycles of temptation, self-denial, temptation, capitulation, repentance, temptation, self-denial, etc.

The Divine Comedy itself is, of course, based on circles, a spiral, and spheres. (My chart of Paradiso can be seen here.) In hell everyone is confined to a circle which is a never-ending cycle. Once in a circle, no one in it can ever leave it. In a sense, in hell, the serpent bites his tail and never lets it go. This is my diagram of hell and its circles:

This is a two page spread from my drawing book Sins Committed, Sins Remitted. There is an orange Jormungandr and a blue Ouroboros. My Ouroboros is crying for reasons that I will leave up to you, the viewer. (The red earthworm astronaut should maybe be ignored – or not, it’s up to you.) I like the medieval artists’ tendency to draw all of their animals with little ears and a dog nose. And plus drawing mammalian dragons is pretty fun. 

To sum up, Jormungandr and Ouroboros are cyclical monsters that devour themselves and they figure into my artwork somehow. I don’t know how much more I have to write about them as I still find them both mysterious. I will just have to keep making drawings to figure it all out.