Spiral
A line that winds outward from a centre. It is among the oldest carved signs: spirals cover the entrance stone of Newgrange in Ireland, built about 3200 BC, ancestral Pueblo people in the American Southwest carved spirals that sunlight marks at the solstices, and in Māori art the koru spiral is a symbol of creation.
Meaning
No ancient text says what the first spirals meant, so what can be said comes from where they were carved and from traditions still alive. In Ireland, the passage tombs of Brú na Bóinne, Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth, hold Europe’s “largest and most important concentration of prehistoric megalithic art”, in UNESCO’s words; the entrance stone at Newgrange is carved with a large triple spiral, the form that has its own page as the triskele. In the American Southwest, the National Park Service records spiral petroglyphs that the Ancestral Pueblo people placed where a beam of sunlight crosses them on the longest or shortest day. In New Zealand, the koru, based on an unfurling fern frond, is a symbol of creation in Māori art.
Origin and history
Newgrange was long misdated. J. Romilly Allen, writing in 1904, put its carvings in the Bronze Age and thought its spirals might be “the forerunners of the beautifully designed volutes of the Iron Age”. The National Museum of Ireland explains that passage tombs were taken to be Bronze Age monuments until the 1980s, when calibrated radiocarbon dates placed them at about 3200 BC, in the middle Neolithic.
The monument’s best-known feature was rediscovered in the twentieth century. M. J. O’Kelly, excavating for the Office of Public Works from 1962, found the roof-box, a small opening above the entrance. It had long been said locally that the tomb filled with sunlight at sunrise on the winter solstice, and on 21 December 1967 O’Kelly and his team were the first to see it. For two or three days around 21 December, the museum writes, the light travels down the passage into the chamber and falls on the triple spiral on the back stone. Some archaeologists have read spiral motifs as a vortex linking two worlds, and the museum notes the suggestion that the light on the spiral opens the way for the dead into the other world.
In Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, three upright slabs on top of Fajada Butte stand in front of two spirals carved by ancestral Pueblo people. At the equinoxes and solstices, the National Park Service writes, dagger-shaped beams of light fall at various points on the spirals, a planned play of light and shadow that seems to have worked as a calendar. The marker was recognised in 1977, and visitors’ feet loosened the slabs: in 1989 two of them were found to have shifted, and the light no longer falls as it did. The Park Service names the Hopi, the Pueblo peoples of New Mexico and the Navajo as peoples whose history and traditions include Chaco and who continue to respect and honour it. Smaller spiral markers are known elsewhere: near Holly House at Hovenweep, a spiral and concentric circles are crossed by a sunbeam at the summer solstice, and at Puerco Pueblo in Petrified Forest National Park a small spiral on a boulder marks the same day.
The koru in Māori art
The koru is the spiral of Māori art. Te Ara, the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, describes it as “often used in Māori art as a symbol of creation”, based on the shape of an unfurling fern frond. Its circular shape, Te Ara explains, conveys perpetual movement, and its inward coil a return to the point of origin, so that the koru stands for the way life both changes and stays the same.
Spiral or triskele?
A spiral is one line winding round a centre; the triskele is three spirals turning round one centre. The Office of Public Works describes the entrance stone at Newgrange as a large triple spiral engraved with double loops, and another triple spiral in the passage. The triskele page follows the three-armed form from Newgrange to the Isle of Man. Spirals are also among the commonest petroglyphs of the American Southwest.
Read next
- Next in Symbols across culturesCosmic eggThe idea that the world began as an egg: its shell split into sky and earth, or the first god hatched from it. It is told in the Upanishads and the Puranas, in Orphic poetry, in ancient Egypt, in the Finnish Kalevala and in one Chinese account of Pangu.
- In Cave and rock artCave art signsThe dots, lines, grids, zigzags, hands and other non-figurative marks painted and engraved in Ice Age caves, often beside the animals. Genevieve von Petzinger counts 32 signs repeated across Europe over some 30,000 years. What they meant is not known.
See also
Petroglyphs, Labyrinth, Triskele, Tree of life, Crescent moon, Goddesses of love.
Sources
- Brú na Bóinne - Archaeological Ensemble of the Bend of the Boyne, UNESCO World Heritage List, no. 659 (Internet Archive copy, 13 September 2026), UNESCO World Heritage Centre, description
- Brú na Bóinne Visitor Centre: Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth, Heritage Ireland (Office of Public Works), gallery captions
- The Winter solstice at Newgrange, National Museum of Ireland, article
- Celtic Art in Pagan and Christian Times, J. Romilly Allen (1904), via the Internet Archive, Chapter 2
- Fajada Butte Solstice Marker, Chaco Culture National Historical Park brochure (2022), National Park Service and Western National Parks Association (via NPS History), brochure text
- Archeoastronomy in Stone, National Park Service, Holly House; Puerco Pueblo
- The koru (Te Ara), Carl Walrond, “Māori creation traditions”, Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand (Internet Archive copy, 7 September 2026), Manatū Taonga – Ministry for Culture and Heritage, image caption
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from curves and waves.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 8, 2026. How we research
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