Hi, I'm Tuffy. 
Get it? Get it? Hahahahahahahaha!!! I KILL myself!
Anyway. I wanted to revisit this symbol to consider an intriguing question: Just why are so many SF/fantasy/gamer/anime/etc people drawn to it, anyway?
It’s probably got a lot to do with the adolescent fatalism that runs through all these movements. Most of us attracted to “outsider” pastimes think that only we grasp the grim truths of life that happy normal people ignore.** In the words of that guy who did the Fullmetal Alchemist Yakety Sax clip: “Life is futile yet we still thrive.” (Bahaha! Sorry, I just can’t quote it without laughing.)
A snake that devours itself is nothing if not fatalistic. And yet the way it’s usually rendered, this symbol manages to make fatalism look glamorous. It’s no decaying worm, but a majestic serpent with brilliantly-colored scales. Sure, he’s engaging in a futile exercise, but he’s looking damn good doing it. Which is a fair description of goths, cosplayers, RenFaire-ists and people running avatars in Second Life, Warcraft, etc.
Alas, the description doesn’t apply to die-hard SF readers or genre film buffs; if anything, it’s the reverse. They spend their time on worthwhile stuff, but as for physical charms… well… ahem. Come to think of it, meaningfulness precludes beauty where most occupations are concerned — all occupations, even — which probably says something about our modern world/declining educational standards/Lindsay Lohan etc. The only case I can think of where people manage to be beautiful while doing something worthwhile*** is Hikaru no Go, and I’m not sure that’s entirely true-to-life.
I should say that all of the above is basically the opposite of most people’s interpretation of this symbol. The Wikipedia entry associates it with cyclicality and renewal, “creation out of destruction, Life out of Death. The ouroboros eats its own tail to sustain its life, in an eternal cycle of renewal.” (The entry also has a sexy pic of Scully’s tattoo.)
This guide to symbols has a more modern take: 
It’s “an enfolding where the past (the tail) appears to disappear but really moves into an inner domain or reality, vanishing from view but perhaps still existing in some kind of virtual sense.”
Sitting here thinking about it at 1 a.m., I wonder if we aren’t really just attracted to an image of profound stasis. The snake has abandoned its essential function — to go forward — in favor of curling up and chewing its tail. The tail-chewing is reminiscent of an infant sucking its thumb, an act of primal regression. When you sucked your thumb as a kid (or yesterday), you enjoyed it because it reminded you of feeding off Mom. It reflected your yearning to meld with her, to go back to the womb, where she met all your needs before you were even aware of them — or even self-aware. I think that’s why, as 
this paranormal wiki notes, “the Jungian psychologist Erich Neumann writes of [the ouroboros] as a representation of the pre-ego ‘dawn state,’ depicting the undifferentiated [from the Mother] infancy experience of both mankind and the individual child.” I’ll leave it to you to figure out how metaphorical thumb-sucking and a return to the womb relate to your fandom of choice.
…And by the way, there’s got to be a sexual vibe going on here too, right? As I understand it, all men at one time or another wish they could eat their own “tails.” Haw! No, really, I feel exactly the same way. I hope I’m not alone in this. Ladies?
**We’re right.
***Well, you know. On a sliding scale of worthwhile-ness.
—-
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The concept of “eternal recurrence” is central to the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. As Heidegger pointed out,Nietzsche never speaks about the reality of “eternal recurrence” itself, but about the “thought of eternal recurrence”. The thought of eternal recurrence appears in a few of his works, in particular §285 and §341 of The Gay Science and then in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It is also noted in a posthumous fragment.[8] The origin of this thought is dated by Nietzsche himself, via posthumous fragments, to August 1881, at Sils-Maria. In Ecce Homo (1888), he wrote that the thought of the eternal return as the “fundamental conception” of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.[9]
Several authors have pointed out other occurrences of this hypothesis in contemporary thought. Rudolf Steiner, who revised the first catalogue of Nietzsche’s personal library in January 1896, pointed out that Nietzsche would have read something similar in Eugen Dühring’s Courses on philosophy (1875), which Nietzsche readily criticized. Lou Andreas-Salomé pointed out that Nietzsche referred to ancient cyclical conceptions of time, in particular by the Pythagoreans, in the Untimely Meditations. Henri Lichtenberger and Charles Andler have pinpointed three works contemporary to Nietzsche which carried on the same hypothesis: J.G. Vogt, Die Kraft. Eine real-monistische Weltanschauung (1878), Auguste Blanqui, L’éternité par les astres (1872) and Gustave Le Bon, L’homme et les sociétés (1881). However, Gustave Le Bon is not quoted anywhere in Nietzsche’s manuscripts; and Auguste Blanqui was named only in 1883. Vogt’s work, on the other hand, was read by Nietzsche during this summer of 1881 in Sils-Maria.[10] Blanqui is mentioned by Albert Lange in his Geschichte des Materialismus (History of Materialism), a book closely read by Nietzsche.[11]
Walter Kaufmann suggests that Nietzsche may have encountered this idea in the works of Heinrich Heine, who once wrote:
[T]ime is infinite, but the things in time, the concrete bodies, are finite. They may indeed disperse into the smallest particles; but these particles, the atoms, have their determinate numbers, and the numbers of the configurations which, all of themselves, are formed out of them is also determinate. Now, however long a time may pass, according to the eternal laws governing the combinations of this eternal play of repetition, all configurations which have previously existed on this earth must yet meet, attract, repulse, kiss, and corrupt each other again…[12]
Nietzsche calls the idea “horrifying and paralyzing”, and says that its burden is the “heaviest weight” (“das schwerste Gewicht”)[13] imaginable. The wish for the eternal return of all events would mark the ultimate affirmation of life:
What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more’ … Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’ [The Gay Science, §341]
To comprehend eternal recurrence in his thought, and to not merely come to peace with it but to embrace it, requires amor fati, “love of fate”:[14]
My formula for human greatness is amor fati: that one wants to have nothing different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely to bear the necessary, still less to conceal it–all idealism is mendaciousness before the necessary–but to love it.[14]
In Carl Jung’s seminar on Thus Spoke Zarathustra Jung claims that the dwarf states the idea of the Eternal Return before Zarathustra finishes his argument of the Eternal Return when the dwarf says, “‘Everything straight lies,’ murmured the dwarf disdainfully. ‘All truth is crooked, time itself is a circle.’”
The translation of Nietzsche’s eternal return is from the German ewige Wiederkunft. The German word ewige also means perpetual. Though always translated as eternal it is worth noting this potential dual meaning.
nice post, i have been a big fan of this symbol since I was a kid. I look at it for the firs time in a Mayan archeological site here in Mexico, after a few years I discovered that the same representation appeared in different cultures as a sign of renewal. you have a cool blog here, keep the good posts comming.
and greetings from Mexico
P.s: sorry about my English it’s been rusty since my visa expired