The Theosophical serpent means renewal before it means self-destruction
a serpent with his tail in his mouth
The serpent has a concrete contemporary setting in the Theosophical Society's seal. William Q. Judge's “Theosophical Symbolism”, first published in The Path in May 1886 and inspected here in its online collected-articles transcription, lists the tail-biting serpent among the Society's symbols. He explains its closed ring as wisdom and eternity without beginning or end, then connects its many scales with diverse apprehensions of truth and gradual spiritual development.
Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine (1888), inspected in the online transcription preserving original pagination, similarly associates the serpent with regeneration and rejuvenation, volume I, pp. 64–65. Her accompanying image of vision opening in all directions is particularly unlike Chesterton's sealed boxes.
The joke thus reverses an affirmative symbol: continuity becomes confinement, and renewal becomes an animal consuming itself. These sources establish the Theosophical use behind his explicit reference to theosophists; they do not establish his claim that materialists and scientists generally adopted it. His interpretation is a polemical redescription, not a neutral report of what the emblem's users believed.
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