history repeats, first time as tragedy, second time as farce - Marx
those who forget history are condemned to repeat it - Santayana

The middle east/egypt Uroboros snake that swallows its own tail, signalling end is begin, thing is nothing, contains the same concept in nihilist philosophy commonly attributed to Laozi. Actually this is just one out of many common cultural ideas from East and West, and this page will present a number of these.

Related to nihilism is the idea of the Nameless God in fact, He always had a name, Yahweh, but this could not be spelt out in the Semitic cultures because the early Semitic languages had no vowels, only consonants hence, the name could only be written as YHWH. It was the Greeks who took the Semitic alphabet, found a number of letters represent consonants that did not exist in Greek, so redefined them to represent vowels instead.

What sound did Yahweh originally represent? The all vowel chant iaoue, later spelt as Yahover the h sound was added because a long chant iaoue makes some people breathless so they took a breath in the middle and at end, iahoueh, so that after consonants came along, it was spelt yhwh.
A related historical note: Abram changed name to Abraham when the consonant h was added to Semitic alphabet.

The ballet story of Swan Lake was the product of the romantic era, love triumphing over witchcraft, but its original version was quite different, the Swan Maiden: Young man saw flock of swans turning into maidens on lake shore, hid one of their feather suits preventing the owner turning back into bird form and fly away she had to go home with the man, but one day somehow found the suit and left. In the picture below, the man, a prince, voluntarily gave back Swan Maiden's suit freeing her from enslavement in human form.

Most Chinese readers actually know a much more colorful version, Cow Boy and Weaving Girl: a group of fairies, who usually live in heaven weaving silk that turn into clouds, came down to bathe in the lake (it is not clear why they couldnt bathe up where they lived), and cow boy hid the clothes of one girl so she had to follow hin home. The heavenly queen sent underlings to take her back, but allowed the couple to meet once a years - which was actually the annual fertility festival when the silk-weaving tribal girls came down from the mountain castle to bathe and allow nearby farming men to have sex with them and get them pregnant. The tradition of bird worship explains the part of the story whereby a bridge of magpies was formed allowing cow boy to cross over to the side of weaving girl.

When Shanghai held the World Expo in 2010, visitors were surprised when they saw the Taiji symbol prominently displayed at the Romanian pavilion: potteries from an archaeological dig of the Cucuteni-Trypillian cultural era, which also exists in western Ukrains, were found to have that symbol.

The traditional Chinese taiji diagram has black and white parts dividing a circle, with a white dot in the black part and black dot in the white part, which are said to represent yin and yang, with a little yang in yin and a little yin in yang actually the figure shows two mating snakes, the dots being their eyes

Taiji is therefore just a fertility symbol, like the swastika showing four copulating snakes (in some representations, two snakes curving back to show four ends). In some Taoist literature, two snakes are replaced by two fishes, but the idea remains the same. The existence of the symbol on ancient Romanian pottery shows the symbol long predates Taoism and Laozi, neolithic in origin.

The chinese Huaxia tribe worshiped the snake - in fact, the tribal ancestors were represented as half human and half snake. Various Han cave painting depict them to be coiled together, one holding the compass, the other the right angle - the compass draws circle, right angle square, so they represent "round heaven square earth", depicted above in the architecture of Shanghai museum.

RHSE reveals the flat plains experience of the tribe: standing on flat land, the horizon is equal distance from you in all directions, forming a circle, and blue sky covers the circle like a hemisphere dome, hence round heaven. Looking east west/north south in straight lines, earth is surely square.

But the compass/right angle symbol also appears in the western culture, the emblem of Freemason, and before them Templar knights, who presumably found the symbol in the Jerusalem temple itself, a Jewish heritage which the Jews may not recognize themselves today.

In fact, Jews also do not recognize that, like the ancient chinese, they used to worship the snake, since Eve could talk to the serpent and learned sex from it, i.e. they had serpent related fertility rites. The fact God condemned serpent to crawl shows the snake they worshiped before could stand, i.e., the cobra. Later jews move to new locations with no cobras, and also changed their religious practice