"The divine intelligences are said to move as follows. First they move in a circle while they are at one with those illumination which, without beginning and without end, emerge from the Good and the Beautiful. Then they move in a straight line when, out of Providence, they come to offer unerring guidance to all those below them. Finally, they move in a spiral, for when while they are providing for those beneath them they continue to remain what they are and they turn unceasingly around the Beautiful and the Good from which all identity comes." -psuedo-dionysius the areopagite, late 400s
Quoted in a book im reading on the 6th century theologian Saint Maximus the Confessor, in which he himself writes "all movement is either linear, circular or spiral, that is it is either simple [linear] or complex [circular or spiral]."