"This said, his guilty hand pluck'd his piece,
and as the grim Ouroboros he did feast."
I can understand Lawrence's philosophical dislike for the ancient symbol of a snake devouring its own tail. For eternal cycles, in which origins and ends are revealed to be one and the same, are abhorrent to many of us. And, like Lawrence, I prefer my serpents to have sharp fangs, moving about on the alert, heads held aloft, experiencing the world with a gentle flick of a forked tongue and dancing round the heels of Woman, not coiled up into endless self-reflexivity.
And it's this latter aspect of the ouroboros - the suggestion of self-absorption and self-satisfaction - that really troubles Lawrence I suspect. For what this ancient Egyptian symbol ultimately refers us to is not a model of infinity or primordial wholeness, but the divine practice of auto-fellatio.
In other words, him with his tail in his mouth is really a god with his cock in his mouth and I can imagine Lawrence - to whom all forms of masturbation are anathema - finding that extremely hard to swallow. Nevertheless, the fact remains that there are numerous ancient texts describing acts of oral self-stimulation; a practice favoured not only by Egyptian deities, but by those mortals devoted, flexible and well-endowed enough to also enjoy such.
For example, in a document held by the British Museum, one can read a short poem embedded in a prose account of creation which narrates how the sun god Ra created the sibling deities Shu (god of air) and Tefnut (goddess of precipitation), by sucking himself off and spitting his semen onto the ground. Never in a million years is Lawrence going to feel comfortable with this queer act of generation.
Indeed, I think he'd sooner accept that in the beginning was the Word, than that in the beginning was a self-administered blowjob.
Notes
D. H. Lawrence, 'Him With His Tail in His Mouth', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988).
The document I refer to held by the British Museum, is the Papyrus Bremner-Rhind, written c. 4th century BCE. Obviously, I haven't read the original - nor could I - but I have no reason to doubt the accuracy of the translation and reading by Egyptologist David Lorton, whose essay Autofellatio and Ontology (1995), can be read by clicking here.
