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Spirals, Spirals Everywhere

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Spirals seem to be cropping up everywhere at the moment.

It is thought that Silbury Hill may have a spiral path leading to the top of it. Spirals occur in ancient cave paintings in many different cultures around the world.

I have been pondering and designing a spiral tattoo for the past two years and the spirals seem to be coming at me from all angles!

It would appear that we have been drawing and using spirals for thousands of years so what is the human fascination with spirals?

What significance do they have?
 
I wonder if it's anything to do with the fact its the first shape that children learn to draw. My two year old spends hours doing spirals.
 
Great minds think alike, Emmy, I was going to start a thread on this one!

Do you think there's any connection with mazes, some of them are a sort of complicated spiral shape.

And it's a common doodle shape, as well as a favourite with children (as Blueswidow said). Maybe it's imprinted on the human brain for some reason, but why?

Carole
 
Many galaxies (including our own) appear as spirals too, although this wasn't seen with the naked eye until the 19 th century.

William Parsons, the 3rd Earl of Rosse, discovered the Whirlpool Galaxy using his 'home-made' 72" reflector. (His home was a castle!) The telescope still exists at Birr Castle in Ireland.
 
I'm totally chuffed with my new tattoo. Its all healed up and looks smashing, its actually a very simple spiral on my left shoulder. I love it.
Click to expand...

Andy Hosk posted this on another thread...
 
Just remembered another, less well known astronomical spiral, sometimes seen in comets.

As comets approach the sun, the heat causes them to 'out-gas' from cracks in the surface, and this gas carries particles of dust with it. Comets, like most astronomical bodies, rotate, so the effect is to produce spiral patterns in the coma around the head of the comet (rather like a lwan sprinkler effect).

This is easily seen in some photos (I'll try to dig out some examples when I have more time), but there is a suggestion that the effect could be seen by the naked eye in large comets passing close enough to the Earth: if that happened in prehistory, it might well have impressed early man, who might have recorded his sightings in rock carvings.

Over to Graham Hancock and friends!
 
See Terence Meaden's The Goddess Of The Stones for an interesting, if heretical, discussion on the origins of the spiral as sacred object.

Another school of thought believes that its one of the entoptic images which are produced in all human minds entering trance states.

Sorry, that's probably frustratingly brief.

(and before anyone else jumps in - yes, I do say that to all the girls!)
 
spirals

Maybe our astral bodies travel in spiral pattern? I don't know if anybody has said that before, but its own of my theories??
 
in a spiral pattern, and one of my theories. I seriously need to spell check before I post
 
rynner said:
Many galaxies (including our own) appear as spirals too, although this wasn't seen with the naked eye until the 19 th century.
Click to expand...

I bet Von Daniken devotees would have fun with that idea!

Carole
 
spirals

Spirals seem to be a natural thing water spirals to lose momentum on a slope ,cyclones spiral,Aboriginals used the spiral to indicate water nearby.It seems to crop up in alot of ancient cultures as well.Does this indicate an ancient link between dissimilar cultures?
 
Spirals are common in nature, people like them. I don't see anything more in it to be honest.
 
They also provide a combination of aesthetic and mathematical appeal- the spiral of most sea shells is based on the fibbonacci numbers, which occur throughout nature and so contain a microcosm of the mathematical form of the world we see around us.

The closer spiral of locations such as Silbury hill (I believe there is a spiral path up Glastonbury Tor as well) is the longest possible route from A to B without going further away from B than you started or crossing your own path. This would mean that they would be ideal for extending rituals based on the site, adding a sense of travel to them and possibly allowing a form of moving meditation in transit.

Feng Shui practitioners believe that straight lines are a bad thing and that curves are much more positive. I seem to remember Janet and Colin Bord suggesting that ancient britons did something similar in some of their books on ancient sites. The Bords' books on ancients sites, not the ancient britons ones.
 
Someone in the pub last night said that on the recent Paul Devereux TV prog about acoustics at ancient sacred sites (which I missed and am still kicking myself for missing) he showed that certain sounds would produce spiral patterns in dust/sand.

I personally go for the entoptic image theory. Notice how often, even nowadays, a spiral is used in films/TV as a means of denoting passage from one reality into another. Time Tunnel etc.
 
spirals

Speaking of spirals ,what way does your water run down the plug hole,its supposed to spiral a different way here to the Northern Hemisphere,mine goesclockwise.Is this an Urban Legend???
 
It's true, mate. It goes straight down on the equator, y'know...but only exactly on it.
 
A very curious book I read recently suggests that the power of the
spiral resides in the fact that we can never decide if it represents a
centre expanding or a universe collapsing to a point.

With regard to the figures produced in sand by sound,
they are known as the Chladni figures and one of my briskest
webpages whizzes past them at the speed of light:

:)

Edit 29.09.2018: The page is now archived here:
Aladdin's Palace, 2001
 
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A simpler demonstration of sound waves is given by fine sand in the bottom of a horizontal glass tube. This was presumably first demonstrated by a Germanic-type person, as the apparatus in my school physics lab went by the evocative name of Kundt's tube....
 
Spirals are indeed one of the earliest symbols in human prehistory. Very common in shamanic cultures. It seems to me that the 'spiral of life ' thing is really quite a good representation of cycled time. That is, if you draw a circle, then in the fourth dimension - time - it appears as a spiral.
A printed circle is a circle, but a line drawn from beginning round to the same spot is... different. Thus a spiral show a cycle, say like the seasons of the year, returning to the beginning while still showing that time has moved on.

Hmm made a bit of a mess of explaining that, but I hope you get the idea.
 
Close your eyes tightly and press your palms against your eyelids. what do you see? Spirals! or tunnels, depending on who you ask.

You're all going to say "nothing" aren't you?
 
Sorry Slytherin, all I saw was a 'negative' image of your Forum post! Must have been staring at the screen for too long!

Seriously though, I once saw spirals after a heavy day on the ale etc.! And I often dream about them, usually in the form of a massive tornado-like vortex, chasing me/us.....Nurse, the screens!....
A few years ago a man placed a classified ad in a new-age mag, wanting info about such things for a book he was planning....so maybe it's a relatively common phenomena.

Near where I live are lots of interesting cup-and-ring marked rocks, showing various spiral-esque patters.


:)
 
I've been trying to find a follow up story on these Russian spirals for some time without success, I have just been reminded of it today, apparently they are modern and not thousands of years old after all. Does anyone have any info on this?


http://www.para-normal.com/nuke/html/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1513

Link and domain are both dead. An archived copy of the 2003 article can be accessed at the Wayback Machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/2003082...l/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1513
 
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Re: spirals

wildman said:
Speaking of spirals ,what way does your water run down the plug hole,its supposed to spiral a different way here to the Northern Hemisphere,mine goesclockwise.Is this an Urban Legend???
Click to expand...

Sorry mate...Urban Legend (dealt with in FT some time ago).

I've noticed that when the two urinals in the Gents toilet at my workplace flush, one drains clockwise and the other drains anticlockwise.
 
My sister lived in Oz for a while and said the beans grow up the poles in the opposite direction to the N hemisphere.
And there is some connection with phi spirals and sacred site geometry or Earth energies but I'm not interested enough in maths to research that further!
 
I was going to mention the Fibonnaci numbers too - but Breakfast beat me to it!
 
Don't fret Xyn. You can just mention the Golden Ratio. :)

I guess that all these things we're seeing (beans on poles, spirals, galaxies, flowers, childrens' drawings), are manifestations of this in our environment. Some like to call it "chi", I like to call it "our environment."
 
Its on telly so it must be true..

Did or do hypnotists ever use spinning spiral cards to hypnotise people or does it just happen in cartoons? If so, what would it be about spirals that could hypnotise you?

I also had a thought that maybe we only have a lot of spirals because we live in a spiral galaxy(morphic fields and all that)? If we lived a a blobby galaxy there might be lots of blobby things.....
 
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