The Spiral

The spiral is one of the visually simplest yet most potent symbols for reality. In the context of the spiritual life, merely invoking it immediately suggests an upward movement. The upwardly moving spiral also happens to resonate with modern, progressive, secular tendencies—and in those, as well, progress is conceived of as unidirectional, like the arrow of time. It can go in one direction only. You might say that the spiral feels right, as it were. The power of the symbol, however, derives from its dualistic character. When people contemplate reality, the universe, the cosmos as an ever rising progression, albeit tracing out a circular path as it encounters resistance, they rarely contemplate descent. But you can go up—or down—a spiral staircase. We picture heavens and God at the apex of the infinitely rising pyramid, but what do we picture at its infinitely sinking extreme in the other direction?

As always, in these matters, the poets have the last word. Perhaps the most famous name associated with the rising spiral is Dante degli Alighieri (1265-1321) author of the Divine Comedy. This three-volume work takes us up through the ranges of reality from earth to hell, to purgatory, to paradise, and finally to heaven. A much more succinct but very powerful image of the descent down the spiral is presented by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) in his poem The City in the Sea. To read the Comedy requires a fair investment in effort—not that it isn’t rewarded; it is. But to read Poe’s poem takes no time at all—and it may have an equally beneficial effect in correcting our routine, reflex reactions to the hypnotic drumbeat of modernity. The poem, in full, is presented here. The first verse follows:

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
There shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers that tremble not!)
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around, by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.

Now, mind you, neither Dante’s nor Poe’s visions resonate at all with the modes of thought that prevail today. Our inclination is to dismiss such takes on reality with a wave of the hand and, possibly, dismissive quotes from Freud. But what if reality really is much more like our poets see it? What if they are just a tiny bit more open at the top of the head than the rest of us? I assert that it is so and, therefore, to “go this way” is wisdom, to ignore it is carelessness. It gets dark and dismal as you descend the spiral.
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Pictures courtesy of Wikipedia articles on Dante and Poe respectively.