Invoking The Serpent || About Ella

Who is this woman invoking serpents?

Ella McCrystle lives in Baltimore, MD as the proverbial "woman who collects cats." Her rabbit actually did eat her Child Within. Being a native Baltimorean, she has many opportunities to write about trash.

She's been rejected by some of the finest publications in the world, but she's been published or upcoming in better: stationæry, The Surface, MiPoesias, Snow Monkey, InkPot, ligature, Wicked Alice, Poems Niederngasse, Defenestration Magazine, The Erotica Readers & Writers Association, SpaceBreather, Citizen32, The Sidewalk's End, Quintessence Magazine, Ink [Magazine], MiPo~Print, The TMP Irregular, Writer's Hood, ken*again Epiphany Magazine, Survivor Wit, Literati Review, Quietpoly Writers' Magazine, Penwomanship, The James River Poetry Review, Bonsai Project 2004, Sometimes I Sleep With the Moon, SaucyVox, The Writer's Cabaret, Writing is Magic, Lodes of Odes, MikeDuron(dot)com, Villanelle Central and others.

Ella once moderated a variety of online poetry forums and was a member of several critique workshops. She has now limited that to being a poetry mentor with the PEN American Center's Prison Writing Program, the founder/co-founder of a couple writer's groups including Write to Heal and in her spare time, she edits The Hiss Quarterly.

Known to break into Billie Holiday tunes at the least appropriate moment and alternately ponder the meaning of cheese or life, Ella has been scribbling notes others insist on calling poems for a few years. She's considering getting serious about it. She has no idea why she is writing this brief biography in third person.

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About The Ouroboros

What's with the snake thing?

It's called an ouroboros (ou-roo-bore-us) - yup, it's a serpent eating its own tail. Alternate spellings include: oroborus, uroboros, and oureboros.

Where did it come from?

The Serpent biting its own tail was seen in Egypt as early as 1600 BC. From there it moved to the Phoenicians, then to the Greeks, who named it the Ouroboros, which means "devouring its tail." The serpent biting its tail is found in other mythology as well, including Hindu, where the serpent is a dragon circling a tortoise which supports four elephants that carry the world, and in Norse myth, where the serpent's name is Jörmungandr.

What's it all mean anyway? Why did you pick that?

The ouroboros has several interwoven meanings. Foremost is the symbolism of the serpent biting, devouring, eating its own tail. This symbolizes the cyclic nature of the universe: creation out of destruction, Life out of Death. The ouroboros eats its own tail to sustain its life in an eternal cycle of renewal. In some drawings, especially this one by an early Alchemist Cleopatra, a black half symbolizes Night, Earth, and the destructive force of nature, yin. The light half represents Day, Heaven, the generative, creative force, yang. Alchemically, the ouroboros is also used as a purifying glyph.

From the Chrysopoeia ('Gold Making') of Cleopatra
during the Alexandrian Period in Egypt.
The enclosed words mean 'The All is One.'