MANIFESTO FOR AURYN

All quotes are taken from Ralph Manheim’s English translation of Die unendliche Geschichte by Michael Ende, published 1979.

“Everyone in Fantastica knew what the medallion meant. It was the badge of one acting on orders from the Childlike Empress, acting in her name as though she herself were present. It was said to give the bearer mysterious powers, though no one knew exactly what these powers were. Everyone knew its name: AURYN”

Before it was AURYN, the ouroboros persisted through human history from the very beginning. Sometimes a dragon, sometimes a snake, always self-consuming, almost always divine. I wonder when the first person saw that desperate, starving snake and saw god in it. Did they think it could consume itself and survive? Did they know that its desperation wouldn’t lead to survival? Did they try to help? Or did they only see the symbol?

“Atreyu said softly: “It’s because of AURYN.”

When I learned to read, I learned all at once. I spent little time on baby books and bedtime stories, because once I knew how to read I just knew. I loved fantasy, historical fiction, anything with a complex world. The final, thirteenth book of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series was finished when I was seven years old. I read anything and everything over and over. This is all to say that I don’t remember how old I was when I first finished The Neverending Story, but I was young- ten or younger. I can’t really remember a time before it. Many have seen the 1984 children’s film adaptation, but the book is something different. A masterwork of metafiction, simulacra, fantasy, and world-building, it nestled itself deep in my mind and became the very foundation of how I would think for the rest of my life. I was captivated by the book’s mere appearance- a first-edition English translation from the original German, bound in deep red canvas that had long since lost its dust cover. Raised just above the rest of the surface, two snakes coiled around each other, each holding the others’ tail in their mouths. An ouroboros. It’s the soul of the book- the physical one held in my hands and the book read by Bastian Balthazar Bux to save himself and Fantastica. The books are one and the same, tied together at the soul- Fantastica’s ouroboros- AURYN. Once Bastian enters Fantastica, he is entrusted with the physical AURYN once held by Atreyu, his Fantastican counterpart whose journey followed through The Neverending Story. As he holds it, he realizes that the bronze medallion has two sides: on the front, the snakes are finely detailed, but on the back there is an inscription:

Do What You Wish

From this point on, he does.

At the age of 18 and one day, I got my first tattoo. For five years the image sat in my notebook, waiting for the day when I could have it as part of myself. Right in the center of my chest, where AURYN rested on Atreyu and Bastian before me. Two snakes, impossibly intertwined, locked into place with an unbreakable bite on the other’s tail. From that point on, I had to live out the inscription: Do What You Wish.

“I have AURYN,” said Bastian.”

The AURYN symbol -the ouroboros- the snake eating its own tail has been interpreted by humans since at least the Ancient Greeks. They gave the creature its common name. In its simplest form, the snake turns on itself and swallows just the tip of its tail, locking itself into a circle. The snake won’t let go once it has hold of the tail. I can see two symbols in the one. When I look at the snake as an individual animal, the ouroboros is a tragedy: hunger and fear driving an animal to self-destruction. If the Ouroboros is a symbol of something greater than itself, if it ceases to be one tragic animal and instead is allowed to transcend its mortal associations, it becomes laden with nuance. Ouroboros is: an eternal recycling of the universe, sentient and automatic, encompassing both self determination and predestination. The ouroboros is ancestral knowledge and the unceasing influence of history and all the moving parts of the universe that came together at the singular point that is You.

I see a third symbol sometimes: the conceited warping of nature. If the snake is consuming itself with no capability or intent to re-use and re-create, simply distilling and consuming until the circle shrinks into a single point, then it becomes a cautionary tale that is disturbingly poignant to our time. The Ouroboros is simultaneously the best and worst sides of human nature.

All ancient cultures had a concept of reincarnation. Not in the literal, westernized sense in which the personality and soul are transferred between bodies, but in the natural cyclical sense. It’s a theory based on observation. The bodies of dead plants and animals can be observed as they decompose in the earth, and new life is nurtured from that soil. The soil grows plants, animals feed on the plants, old life becomes new. Human animals and non-human animals construct their structures from earthen materials which the earth eventually reclaims. Stories were told of the celestial bodies rising and setting, bringing life and warmth and dark and rest. The bodies were personified and stories told in grander forms, evolving through generations into modern religion. It all comes from the same place, and to dust it will return. As the sun symbolizes life, the cross symbolizes sacrifice, the owl symbolizes wisdom, Ouroboros is the interconnectedness and eternal recycling of all things.

If the tail is held, known and connected, the snakes remain forever. When consumption and commodification begin, nothing new is created. The machine consumes its parts. Simplifying streamlining interpreting until all that is available to consume has already been digested at least once. Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra is incomprehensible because it is self-contained and self-referential. All of human history is self-referential. But we are able to re-interpret, re-analyze, invent connections and concepts that have never been made before. We can write programs that rewrite our own thoughts, but they can’t make anything new.

“Nothing is lost,” she said. “Everything is transformed.”

I had really begun living the words only a month and a half before the tattoo. I did what I wished and left everything I knew behind. I couldn’t afford to move that far, just one state away, but it was all that I needed to create a new being for myself. I worked, taught, walked, learned, prayed. I learned the difference between what I wish and what I want and what I need. I’m still learning that, but AURYN helps. AURYN grants and always holds the power that is needed. For Bastian, AURYN eventually granted every wish in his heart The insecurities and weaknesses that defined him in the human world melted away and he became the opposite. Each wish is granted as if it has always been eternally true.

“What mattered was that the words gave him permission, ordered him in fact, to do whatever he pleased.”

This, of course, was wrong.. AURYN did not order him to do what he pleased. It commanded only to do what you wish. Bastian is only a child in the legend, about ten years old. He hasn’t learned yet that what you please and what you wish are vastly different things. A wish is deeply held and inseparable from your very soul and being. A wish is the fulfillment of what you need, deeper than what you can know until you have it. What you please is just that- what pleasures you in the moment? What topical balm will soothe your ego? You always have the power to do what you please. It’s what most of us are always doing. It takes great power and courage and wisdom to do what you wish.

“AURYN is the door that Bastian has been looking for. He carried it with him from the start.”