divisions between life, death, and rebirth. 8. The whorls represent the continuousness of the creation and dissolution of the world. Creation is not something that occurred once and then stopped. It is ongoing...a never-ending balanced dance of opposing forces: light and dark, life and death, masculine and feminine, "good and evil", etc.. 9. The spiral is an attempt to mirror the macrocosmic order of the heavens, the gyratory movement representing the whirling of the stars above the fixed earth. Everything whirling about a still center, the heart of the universe, or the womb which will give birth and to which all return. 10. A natural form of spiral can be found in some shells such as snail shells and  more notably, the nautilus shell. 11 . One school of thought gives significance to the direction of the spirals. Clockwise or sun-wise circling, a'deasail, is traditional in Gaelic blessing gestures and good-luck practices. To move sun-wise is to be in harmony with the earth. Conversely geis or spells are made with anti-sun-wise motion. This gets a little tricky since spirals may be read as either flowing inwards or outwards. Many spiral arrangements contain equal numbers of whorls going each way and are thus in balance. The numbers of whorls or the number of arms of spirals can be used as number symbols, the most common being three for the Holy Trinity and four for the Four Directions. As a side note which may be of interest to you, I would like