Chris Monk wrote:I've been a scientist all my working life and find it impossible to think in the abstract.
Ok I may be totally, embarrassingly, utterly wrong but... the thing about the OTO cover is that it may be partly very scientific, not abstract.
As far as I interpret it, it shows a winter solstice in two ways, scientifically and traditionally:
Here's a scientific daylight (sun hours) diagram over the course of one year. And
here's the same curve, copied left and right for showing several years. Around the area where the "sun wheel" and the daylight curve meet on the cover, Edgar seems to have "capped" the curve. I've no idea why, but doing the same with the daylight curve linked above, we get
this. Looks pretty much the same as the upper part of the red curve on the OTO cover to me.
Remembering that One Times One was (kind of) a Christmas release, here are two links that are interesting regarding the traditional/mystical part of the cover:
Link 1,
Link 2. Just look at the explanation for "Yule" at Link 2 - I've no idea what the Ravenwood church is about, they just had the nicest sun wheel.