888 - from my humble perspective, one of the most significant references for 'a ring' is that of the - you nailed it- the vortex. I listened to Weidner speak in Los Angeles last year -he was talking about how the ancients understood that time was not linear, but Toroid. He then drew a diagram showing how time moved along a Hypersphere.....
and how the 4 (or some say 5) ages moved in a cyclical pattern....the Iron or Lead Age moving through the most dense point in the vortex...the "singularity" ...and then out into the "gold" age (becoming less dense, less density, etc).
In his theory -- the Ancient Alchemical quest to 'turn lead into gold' was actually metaphor for understanding how time moves in this torus vortex...ie from our current age, Lead or Iron, into the Golden Age.
