Why don't we just find the creator and ask him?The original image is named raul-0.gif, so somebody named Raul made the image. (Was this Raul D. Miller [moth@.d.o]?)
What makes me really fear that the image may be a very generic is one image that looks the same except the jaggedness of the spiral was inverted. So the inside of the swirl had the same contour as our outside does, and vice versa.