On the desk in
front of me rests a ring in the shape of a serpent biting its own tail. It
owes its presence there to an accretion of personal meanings that began
when I was seven or eight and my
father, a scientist who studies the structures of
crystals and alloys, related an anecdote about the great German chemist
Friedrich August Kekule. Kekule's fame rests in large part on his
discovery of the chemical structure of the benzene molecule in 1864 - a
structure which came to him in an astonishing dream. It was this dream
which my father described to me; here is Kekule's own account of it:
"I was sitting writing on my textbook, but the work did not
progress; my thoughts were elsewhere. I turned my chair to the fire and
dozed. Again the atoms were gamboling before my eyes...My mental eye,
rendered more acute by the repeated visions of the kind, could now
distinguish larger structures of manifold conformation; long rows
sometimes more closely fitted together all twining and twisting in
snake-like motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized
hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if
by a flash of lightning I awoke..." (1)
Waking research
confirmed that benzene did indeed take the form of a closed ring - a
hexagon with a carbon and hydrogen atom at each of its six points (2). But
while my father's principal aim was to illustrate the role of intuitive or
unconscious thought in scientific inquiry, for me Kekule's discovery was
surpassed in significance by the nature of his dream's imagery. To my
child's mind, the simple yet inscrutable image of the self-consuming
serpent seemed to resonate with meanings far beyond benzene. What was it
after, that weird snake? Did it want more of itself than just its tail?
And what if it got it - what would be left? The very fact of its snakeness
also intrigued me, hinting as it did of infinite wiles and poisonous
persuasions. Could this be the same snake, or a relative of the snake,
that had peddled illicit fruit in Eden? Was this baffling pose another of
its tricks? Kekule's choice of the word "mockingly" suggests it might
be.
Kekule does not mention whether he had encountered this
serpentine image before his famous dream, but it is likely he had seen it
in a book or museum, for it is a symbol with a long history in many
cultures (3).
continued
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