Circle & Spiral
closure against return
Two marks that look like neighbours and mean opposite things. The circle comes back to its start and stops; the spiral comes back to its start and refuses to.
- Instances
- Newgrange and the Atlantic megalithic spirals (Neolithic Ireland) · Ensō 円相 (Zen) · Koru (Māori — the unfurling fern) · the mandala (Indic) · petroglyph spirals (Ancestral Puebloan)
- The flip
- The circle is wholeness and it is confinement — the mandala and the wedding ring on one side, the encirclement and the prison yard on the other, with nothing in the figure to tell you which. The spiral splits the same way along direction: outward it is growth, the koru unfurling into new life; inward it is the vortex, the descent, the thing that swallows. One line, and the meaning is set entirely by which way you are asked to travel it.
Sources · 4
- documented The Newgrange entrance stone and the Irish passage-tomb spiral corpus.
- documented Ensō as a practice form in Zen calligraphy.
- documented Hirini Moko Mead, Te Toi Whakairo: The Art of Māori Carving, 1986, on the koru.
- folk Confident readings of what Neolithic spirals meant — solar, cyclical, shamanic. The carvings are real and undated in meaning; every interpretation of them is modern and projected. This is the purest folk material on the site, and it is usually presented as the most ancient wisdom on it.