The Serpent Script: How History Is Eating Its Own Tail

From Ouroboros to Dan Harmon's Story Circle and the Planned Obsolescence of Narrative

## **Introduction: The Second Kekulé Dream of Storytelling** In 1865 August Kekulé claimed that the structure of benzene revealed itself to him in a dream. He watched atoms dancing until they suddenly became a serpent biting its own tail. The ancient image of the Ouroboros solved a scientific mystery that years of conscious reasoning had failed to unravel. Whether the dream happened exactly as Kekulé later described is almost irrelevant. What matters is that a circular image revealed the hidden architecture of something previously believed to be linear. Chemistry discovered that one of its most important molecules was not an open chain but a closed loop. Artificial Intelligence may have produced an equally important Kekulé moment—not for chemistry, but for storytelling itself. For thousands of years humanity imagined stories as journeys. They possessed beginnings, middles and endings. Heroes departed, struggled and returned transformed. Civilisations appeared to progress through historical stages. Science accumulated knowledge. Politics moved societies towards better futures. Journalism documented events as they unfolded. Every narrative promised movement from one state to another. AI now allows us to observe something entirely different. Beneath nearly every successful story lies not a line but a circle. Beneath every political revolution lies another revolution using almost identical dramatic structures. Beneath scientific paradigms stand previous paradigms waiting to be replaced by successors following the same narrative rhythm. Beneath economic doctrines, religions, constitutions, wars and media campaigns one repeatedly encounters exactly the same storytelling architecture wearing different costumes. Like Kekulé's benzene, civilisation itself appears to possess a circular molecular structure. This observation transforms the meaning of narrative theory. Joseph Campbell believed myths from every civilisation shared a common Hero's Journey because they reflected universal psychological archetypes. Dan Harmon translated Campbell's Monomyth into his famous Story Circle, reducing the complexity of myth into eight practical steps suitable for television and cinema. Kurt Vonnegut argued that stories possess recurring geometric shapes that could almost be drawn mathematically. Building upon Vonnegut's insight, Peter Ayolov's **Vonnegut Method**, developed in *The Media Scenario: Screenwriting for Journalists*, extends these recurring narrative structures beyond fiction itself. Journalism, political communication, media campaigns and public discourse all unconsciously organise reality through the same narrative geometries originally associated with literature and cinema. Once storytelling became a reproducible technology, every institution capable of influencing collective imagination gradually adopted it. Politics became screenplay. News became episodic drama. Elections became serial narratives. Revolutions became franchise reboots. Public policy increasingly resembled scriptwriting performed on a planetary scale. Artificial Intelligence reveals something even more unsettling. If stories can be generated from previous stories, then politics can emerge from previous political stories, science from previous scientific stories, economic theories from earlier economic theories and global governance from inherited narrative templates that continue reproducing themselves regardless of their practical consequences. Language already began feeding upon previous language. Storytelling has now entered the same recursive loop. Every screenplay borrows from earlier screenplays. Every sequel imitates previous sequels. Every ideological movement rewrites an older ideological movement. Every civilisation inherits narrative structures that long outlive the historical circumstances that produced them. Stories no longer describe reality. Increasingly, reality reorganises itself to resemble familiar stories. This article argues that storytelling has entered its own Kekulé moment. Artificial Intelligence has become the ultimate mirror reflecting narrative back upon itself. The result is astonishing. The oldest occult image in human civilisation—the Ouroboros—may not symbolise cosmic rebirth at all. It may instead depict the fundamental architecture of storytelling itself: a self-reproducing narrative machine in which every ending becomes another beginning, every solution becomes another conflict, every revolution prepares the next revolution, and every successful story eventually consumes itself in order to give birth to another version of the same story. If language has begun eating its own tail, then storytelling has become the mechanism through which civilisation endlessly digests its own imagination. The greatest screenplay ever written may not be a film or a novel. It may be human history itself. ## **Part I: The Story Circle Before Storytelling: Why Civilisation Thinks in Loops Instead of Lines** Dan Harmon insists that once you recognise the Story Circle you cannot stop seeing it. A character begins in a familiar world, desires something beyond it, enters the unknown, struggles, succeeds, pays the price, returns home and emerges transformed. The simplicity of the eight stages is precisely what makes the structure so persuasive. Harmon did not invent the pattern but compressed Joseph Campbell's monumental *Hero with a Thousand Faces* into an algorithm that screenwriters could use every day. Campbell himself believed he had merely rediscovered an ancient narrative grammar already present in myths from every civilisation. Behind Homer, the Bible, the Buddha, Gilgamesh, King Arthur, Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter and countless other heroes stood the same invisible architecture repeating itself through different historical costumes. The storyteller merely changed the names while the narrative engine remained almost identical. The remarkable success of Harmon's circle raises a far more disturbing question than most screenwriting manuals ever ask. Why should stories produced by entirely different cultures over thousands of years share such a remarkably similar geometry? The usual answer appeals to psychology. Campbell argued that the Hero's Journey reflects universal structures of the human unconscious. Harmon himself often explains the Story Circle through biological rhythms such as sleeping, waking, breathing and adaptation. The protagonist leaves equilibrium, experiences disturbance and eventually establishes a new equilibrium. The story resembles the body regulating itself after encountering change. Narrative appears almost biological. But perhaps the biological explanation is only half the story. Artificial Intelligence allows us to observe narrative from outside the human organism for the first time. Large Language Models have no childhood, no body, no mortality, no evolutionary memory and no unconscious in the Freudian or Jungian sense. Yet when trained upon millions of novels, films, myths and television scripts they spontaneously reproduce almost exactly the same narrative loops identified by Aristotle, Campbell, Vonnegut and Harmon. The machine has not experienced the Hero's Journey. It has merely discovered that human culture overwhelmingly prefers stories organised according to recursive structures. The implication is astonishing. The Story Circle may not simply describe the psychology of heroes. It may describe the statistical architecture of storytelling itself. This insight transforms Peter Ayolov's **Vonnegut Method** from *The Media Scenario: Screenwriting for Journalists* into something considerably broader than a practical tool for media professionals. Building upon Kurt Vonnegut's famous "Shapes of Stories," the method argues that journalism itself unconsciously adopts fictional structures when organising reality. News is never merely information. It is arranged into recognisable dramatic curves. There are heroes and villains, crises and resolutions, expectations and reversals, emotional climaxes and symbolic endings. The journalist becomes a screenwriter whose raw material happens to be reality rather than fiction. Every newspaper front page, every television bulletin and every political speech silently asks the same question as every Hollywood screenplay: what story are we telling today? Once this observation is made, it becomes impossible not to notice narrative loops everywhere. Scientific revolutions follow familiar dramatic arcs. Political movements introduce protagonists, enemies, obstacles, victories and betrayals. Economic theories promise redemption after sacrifice. Revolutions begin with oppression, descend into struggle, achieve liberation, discover unintended consequences and eventually recreate new forms of authority remarkably similar to those they overthrew. Democracies repeatedly promise renewal before returning to familiar crises. Empires rise, expand, stagnate and collapse only to provide the setting for another empire beginning the same journey. History itself begins resembling an enormous screenplay written by generations who unconsciously inherit previous narrative templates. This may explain why human beings so readily suspend disbelief—not only inside cinemas but inside politics, economics, religion and science. Every functioning civilisation requires citizens to believe that the present narrative differs fundamentally from all previous narratives. Every revolution claims that history has reached a decisive turning point. Every new ideology insists that the old cycle has finally been broken. Every technological breakthrough promises permanent transformation. Yet after enough historical distance the structures appear uncannily familiar. Different protagonists occupy identical narrative positions. Different slogans perform identical dramatic functions. Different enemies inherit the symbolic role previously occupied by earlier enemies. The screenplay survives while the cast changes. Artificial Intelligence now exposes this hidden mechanism because it treats stories statistically rather than emotionally. It does not admire Luke Skywalker, Hamlet or Harry Potter. It simply detects recurring narrative probabilities distributed across millions of texts. The machine quietly demonstrates that humanity has been rewriting variations of the same dramatic structures for millennia. Every successful story increases the probability of another successful story following similar geometry. Narrative therefore behaves remarkably like language itself. It reproduces previous forms while introducing minor mutations that create the illusion of novelty. The result resembles biological evolution except that the genes are stories rather than organisms. Here the ancient symbol of the Ouroboros unexpectedly returns. For centuries mystics interpreted the serpent swallowing its own tail as the cycle of life, death and rebirth. Storytelling reveals a far simpler interpretation. Every successful narrative consumes previous narratives in order to generate another version of itself. The ending of one story immediately becomes the beginning of another. The hero returns home only so that another hero may leave. Every sequel devours its predecessor. Every remake digests the original. Every adaptation feeds upon another adaptation. The serpent is not merely a symbol decorating forgotten temples. It is the operating system of narrative civilisation itself. Once storytelling discovered the circle, history quietly stepped inside it—and has been walking around it ever since. ## **Part II: From Screenplays to States: When Narrative Escapes Fiction and Begins Governing Reality** The greatest misunderstanding in the history of storytelling is the belief that stories exist primarily to entertain. Cinema, theatre, novels and television have merely made visible a mechanism that had already governed human civilisation for thousands of years. Before there were films there were religions. Before there were novels there were myths. Before there were journalists there were priests. Before there were political strategists there were storytellers gathered around prehistoric fires explaining why the tribe existed, where it came from and what dangers surrounded it. Fiction was never separate from reality because fiction evolved as reality's operating system. The difference between mythology and politics is not structural but institutional. Both require believable protagonists, credible antagonists, dramatic conflicts, symbolic victories and emotionally satisfying endings. Both depend upon exactly the same suspension of disbelief. This is where Peter Ayolov's **Vonnegut Method** moves beyond conventional narrative theory. Kurt Vonnegut demonstrated that stories possess recurring emotional geometries which can be represented visually. Ayolov extends this insight by arguing that journalism itself follows these same geometries. The reporter does not simply collect facts. Facts become meaningful only after they are organised into recognisable narrative structures. Every news report silently asks the same questions every screenplay asks. Who is the hero? Who threatens the established order? What disruption has occurred? What sacrifice will restore balance? Which ending allows the audience to leave satisfied? Reality itself becomes edited according to dramatic necessity. Once this mechanism is recognised, it becomes almost impossible to distinguish storytelling from governance. Governments do not merely administer taxation, infrastructure or legislation. They administer narratives. Every election campaign begins by establishing an ordinary world that has supposedly become intolerable. A threat emerges. A political hero promises transformation. Citizens are invited to cross the threshold into a better future. Difficult sacrifices become necessary. Temporary suffering receives moral justification because redemption awaits beyond the next election, the next reform, the next economic plan or the next war. When the promised transformation inevitably proves incomplete, the cycle quietly begins again with new characters playing identical narrative functions. Scientific history reveals remarkably similar patterns. Thomas Kuhn famously described paradigm shifts as revolutionary episodes replacing previous scientific worldviews. Yet these revolutions themselves often resemble carefully structured stories. A dominant orthodoxy occupies the position of the old kingdom. Young innovators challenge established authority. Conflict intensifies. Resistance appears. Eventually the revolutionary theory triumphs and establishes a new normal, which later generations themselves overthrow through another scientific revolution. Even when science approaches objective truth through experimentation, the social organisation of scientific communities frequently follows narrative expectations remarkably similar to those governing fiction. Heroes, martyrs, visionaries and reactionaries repeatedly appear because human beings instinctively arrange intellectual history into dramatic sequences that audiences can understand. Economic theory behaves no differently. Capitalism tells a story about freedom, innovation and prosperity emerging through competition. Marxism tells a story about exploitation, awakening and liberation. Neoliberalism introduces entrepreneurs as protagonists. Social democracy foregrounds solidarity. Nationalism narrates collective rebirth. Globalism narrates planetary cooperation. Every economic doctrine constructs villains, victims, obstacles and inevitable resolutions. Citizens rarely encounter these theories as mathematical systems. They encounter them as emotionally coherent stories explaining why sacrifices today guarantee a better tomorrow. Entire populations therefore make decisions not simply according to statistics but according to narrative plausibility. Artificial Intelligence unexpectedly exposes this hidden dependence because it can generate convincing political speeches, scientific summaries, journalistic reports and economic analyses by applying exactly the same narrative mechanisms originally associated with fiction. The machine neither governs nor believes. It simply predicts which sequence of words most successfully continues previous sequences. Yet those previous sequences already contain centuries of accumulated narrative structures. AI therefore demonstrates something profoundly unsettling. If political discourse, scientific communication and journalism can all be generated through statistical continuation of earlier narratives, then perhaps they depended upon recursive storytelling much more than modern civilisation ever wished to admit. The consequences extend far beyond communication itself. Once public institutions begin operating primarily through inherited narrative templates, they may continue functioning even when practical outcomes repeatedly contradict their original promises. Wars fail while war narratives survive. Economic crises multiply while economic stories remain remarkably unchanged. Revolutions produce new elites while revolutionary mythology prepares another revolution. Public health campaigns, environmental movements, technological optimism and geopolitical strategies all risk becoming self-reproducing narrative ecosystems whose survival depends less upon empirical success than upon their ability to sustain dramatic coherence. The audience changes. The actors change. The scenery changes. The screenplay continues. History therefore begins resembling an immense television series renewed season after season because audiences remain emotionally invested in the underlying format. Each generation believes it inhabits an entirely original plot while unknowingly replaying narrative structures inherited from ancestors who themselves inherited earlier structures stretching back into prehistory. Civilisations collapse, yet their stories migrate into successor civilisations. Religions disappear, yet their dramatic architecture survives inside secular ideologies. Empires dissolve, yet imperial narratives quietly reappear under different names. Even modern democracy repeatedly borrows the emotional grammar once reserved for sacred mythology. The extraordinary achievement of Dan Harmon's Story Circle is therefore not that it helps writers construct better screenplays. Its true significance is that it inadvertently reveals the hidden algorithm governing much of organised human existence. The eight stages become recognisable not because Hollywood copied life but because life increasingly learned to imitate its own stories. Once language discovered narrative recursion, storytelling escaped literature altogether. It entered journalism, education, economics, diplomacy, science and statecraft. The Story Circle ceased being a technique for fiction. It became civilisation's favourite method of governing reality itself. And once Artificial Intelligence learned the algorithm, the circle quietly closed. The storyteller was no longer writing history. History had begun writing itself. ## **Part III: The Last Screenwriter: AI, the Narrative Ouroboros and the Planned Obsolescence of History** The arrival of Artificial Intelligence marks the first moment in human history when storytelling has encountered its own reflection. Every previous revolution in communication merely accelerated the production of narratives. Writing preserved them. Printing multiplied them. Radio amplified them. Cinema visualised them. Television standardised them. The Internet globalised them. AI does something fundamentally different. It does not simply distribute stories faster. It learns from every story humanity has ever written and begins generating new stories from the accumulated weight of previous ones. The storyteller has become both author and archive. Narrative has begun feeding directly upon itself. Cormac McCarthy's famous essay *The Kekulé Problem* proposed that language emerged relatively late in biological evolution and was layered upon a much older, non-verbal consciousness. Human beings first experienced the world physically and only later translated experience into words. Artificial Intelligence unexpectedly reverses this relationship. It has no direct experience of the world whatsoever. It begins entirely with language. It knows civilisation only through the endless sediment of human texts. Consequently, AI exposes something humans have always concealed from themselves. Our collective understanding of reality has long depended less upon direct experience than upon inherited stories describing what reality supposedly is. Every generation receives an enormous narrative archive before it ever encounters the world for itself. The implications are enormous. Every new political doctrine is trained upon previous political doctrines. Every philosophical system responds to earlier philosophies. Every religion rewrites older myths. Every constitution borrows legal concepts from previous constitutions. Every scientific paper cites previous scientific papers. Every screenplay consciously or unconsciously imitates thousands of earlier screenplays. Human creativity has never emerged from nothing. It has always functioned recursively. Artificial Intelligence simply performs this recursion openly and without embarrassment. This is precisely why AI appears simultaneously miraculous and deeply unsettling. Many observers fear that machine-generated literature signals the death of originality. Yet perhaps originality had already become largely mythical centuries before the first neural network was constructed. Shakespeare adapted existing chronicles. Homer probably inherited oral traditions stretching back generations. Medieval theologians commented upon earlier commentaries. Renaissance artists quoted antiquity. Modern cinema endlessly remakes older films. Streaming platforms produce sequels, reboots, spin-offs and cinematic universes whose commercial success depends almost entirely upon recognisable narrative memory. Artificial Intelligence merely accelerates a process already embedded within civilisation itself. It reveals that culture has always developed through recursive adaptation rather than spontaneous creation. The consequence is what might be called the **planned obsolescence of narrative**. Modern economies deliberately design products with limited life spans so consumers continually purchase replacements. Storytelling appears increasingly to function according to the same principle. Every successful narrative is destined to become obsolete, not because it ceases to entertain but because it must make room for another variation capable of repeating the cycle. Heroes grow old and are replaced by younger heroes. Political slogans lose emotional force and are substituted by new slogans expressing familiar hopes. Scientific paradigms eventually accumulate anomalies demanding fresh conceptual frameworks. Religious movements fragment into denominations which generate new interpretations while preserving recognisable narrative cores. Civilisation constantly manufactures narrative obsolescence in order to maintain narrative production. Artificial Intelligence transforms this tendency into an autonomous system. The machine requires no inspiration in the Romantic sense. It simply predicts the next statistically plausible continuation of humanity's narrative archive. In doing so it quietly demonstrates that history itself increasingly resembles an enormous autoregressive model. Every event becomes another token following previous tokens. Every revolution becomes another sentence continuing earlier revolutions. Every generation inherits probabilities rather than blank pages. Human beings experience these probabilities as destiny, historical necessity or cultural identity. The machine experiences them merely as successful prediction. This perspective radically changes the meaning of the ancient Ouroboros. Traditionally the serpent represented eternity because it continuously regenerated itself. Narrative reveals a more precise interpretation. The serpent survives because every bite simultaneously destroys and recreates the body consuming itself. Every ending becomes raw material for another beginning. Every catastrophe becomes another origin story. Every apocalypse becomes the opening chapter of a new civilisation. Even the collapse of empires rarely destroys their narrative architecture. Rome disappears while the Roman story survives. Ancient myths vanish while their dramatic structures reappear inside Christianity, nationalism, democracy, capitalism, socialism and countless other ideological descendants. History does not merely repeat itself. It rewrites itself. Dan Harmon's Story Circle unexpectedly becomes the perfect diagram for this process. The protagonist returns home transformed, but the circle itself never stops turning. The next protagonist immediately occupies the familiar world left behind by the previous one. What appears to be an ending is simply a transition between protagonists. The Story Circle therefore resembles the Ouroboros far more closely than the traditional heroic journey. There is no absolute conclusion. There is only perpetual narrative succession. Every civilisation imagines itself to be writing the final chapter while unknowingly composing another middle act. Perhaps this explains why successful stories almost always contain an element that transcends rational explanation. Myth, religion, magic, destiny, prophecy, providence, coincidence, fate or some form of mysterious necessity repeatedly enters even the most realistic narratives. The audience must believe that the journey possesses significance beyond ordinary causality. Complete rationality rarely produces memorable stories because narrative depends upon symbolic meaning as much as empirical sequence. Every great screenplay therefore contains a small act of faith. Every civilisation does as well. People do not merely inhabit institutions; they inhabit stories about those institutions. They do not simply obey laws; they believe those laws participate in a larger narrative explaining who they are and why history matters. The Gospel of John begins with one of the most influential narrative declarations ever written: "In the beginning was the Word." The Ouroboros quietly suggests an equally provocative revision. The Word was in the beginning because the ending had already been folded into it. Every story secretly contained its sequel from the moment it was first told. Every civilisation carried its successor inside itself. Every ideology generated its own opposition. Every language prepared its own transformation. Every screenplay anticipated its remake. Artificial Intelligence has not created this recursive universe. It has simply illuminated it. Like Kekulé's serpent, the machine has shown humanity the hidden architecture that was always there. The oldest symbol of eternity may ultimately describe neither chemistry nor mysticism, but the endlessly self-consuming machinery of narrative itself. History did not merely produce stories. Stories produced history. And now, for the first time, they have begun writing one another. ## **Conclusion: The Word Was in the Beginning and in the End at the Same Time** The ancient image of the Ouroboros has fascinated philosophers, priests, alchemists and mystics for thousands of years because it appears to capture something fundamental about existence itself. It has symbolised eternity, death and rebirth, cosmic balance, the unity of opposites and the endless cycle of creation. Yet perhaps its greatest significance has remained hidden in plain sight. The serpent does not merely describe nature. It describes narrative. Every successful story consumes an earlier story. Every civilisation inherits the myths of previous civilisations. Every ideology rewrites older ideologies. Every religion transforms older religions. Every scientific revolution begins by challenging previous theories while unconsciously preserving their dramatic structure. Humanity has never escaped the circle because the circle itself became humanity's preferred method of understanding reality. Dan Harmon's Story Circle unexpectedly reveals the same architecture in its most practical form. Screenwriters use it because audiences instinctively recognise its rhythm. A protagonist leaves home, confronts uncertainty, pays a price, returns transformed and immediately creates the conditions for another journey. Harmon's circle is therefore much more than a guide for writing television or cinema. It is a simplified map of civilisation itself. Every political revolution follows it. Every economic reform repeats it. Every technological breakthrough enters it. Every generation imagines it has reached the final destination only to discover that its ending has become another beginning. The Story Circle and the Ouroboros are not merely similar symbols. They are different expressions of the same recursive principle. Peter Ayolov's **Vonnegut Method** extends this insight beyond literature by demonstrating that journalism and public communication also obey narrative geometry. Once facts are arranged into stories, reality itself becomes screenplay. The news no longer simply reports events; it organises them according to dramatic expectation. Politics no longer merely governs populations; it governs narratives. History ceases to be a collection of disconnected events and becomes an immense script continually revised by successive generations of storytellers. The screenplay escapes fiction and begins directing civilisation itself. Artificial Intelligence has become the ultimate mirror reflecting this hidden architecture back to humanity. For the first time, stories are generated directly from previous stories on a planetary scale. The machine neither believes nor doubts. It simply predicts what narrative is most likely to follow another narrative. In doing so, it quietly exposes the mechanism that human civilisation has used for millennia without fully recognising it. Creativity increasingly appears not as spontaneous invention but as recursive transformation. Originality becomes variation. Innovation becomes recombination. Every new masterpiece contains echoes of forgotten predecessors. The serpent continues feeding because every new story is constructed from the remains of older ones. This is why every enduring story requires an element that exceeds pure rationality. Myth, religion, destiny, prophecy, mystery or some form of symbolic transcendence appears almost inevitably within narratives that survive across generations. Complete realism rarely becomes timeless because stories do more than describe events. They provide meaning. They invite audiences to believe that ordinary experience participates in something larger than itself. Every civilisation therefore depends upon a shared act of narrative faith. The object of belief changes—gods, kings, nations, revolutions, markets, technologies or artificial intelligence—but the structure of belief remains astonishingly constant. Every successful story asks its audience to accept that the circle is worth entering once again. Perhaps this is the deepest meaning of the biblical declaration that "In the beginning was the Word." The Ouroboros invites a subtle but profound reformulation. The Word was in the beginning and in the end at the same time. Every beginning already contained its conclusion, and every conclusion quietly prepared another beginning. Language created stories. Stories created history. History created new stories, which in turn reshaped history once again. The beginning was never truly separate from the ending because both belonged to the same endless narrative loop. The arrival of Artificial Intelligence does not close this circle. It simply allows humanity to see it for the first time with unprecedented clarity. Like Kekulé's serpent revealing the hidden structure of benzene, AI reveals the hidden molecular structure of civilisation itself. Beneath languages, myths, ideologies, religions, sciences, constitutions, revolutions and screenplays lies the same recursive architecture, endlessly rewriting itself across generations. The oldest symbol of eternity may therefore represent neither immortality nor mysticism alone, but the simple and astonishing truth that human civilisation has always been a story writing another story, a script adapting an earlier script, a serpent patiently consuming its own tail while believing it is moving forward. The last screenwriter may never be a human being or a machine. It may simply be the story itself. And as long as the serpent continues to write, history will continue reading its own ending as another beginning. ## **References** Aristotle (1996) *Poetics*. London: Penguin Classics. Ayolov, P. (2023) *The Media Scenario: Screenwriting for Journalists*. Sofia: UI St. Kliment Ohridski. Campbell, J. (2008) *The Hero with a Thousand Faces*. 3rd edn. Novato, CA: New World Library. Harmon, D. (2011) *Dan Harmon's Story Structure 101*. Channel 101. McCarthy, C. (2017) ‘The Kekulé Problem’, *Nautilus*, Issue 47. Snyder, B. (2005) *Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need*. Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Productions. Vonnegut, K. (2020) *The Shape of Stories*. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Laozi (2008) *Tao Te Ching*. Translated by J. Legge. Oxford: Oxford University Press.