The Flower of Life: Symbol and Origin

The Flower of Life is one of the most recognisable modern symbols of the sacred geometry tradition. The figure is composed of nineteen equal, overlapping circles arranged in a hexagonal flower, and it is used in the contemporary Western esoteric community as a symbol of the unity of the cosmos, the unity of the spiritual and the material, and the unity of all the religious traditions of humanity. The figure is also the basis of a much larger set of derived figures, including the Metatron’s Cube and, by extension, the five Platonic solids. This article is a tour of the figure’s history, its construction, and the contested claims that have been made for it (Critchlow 1976; Lawlor 1982).

The Pattern

The Flower of Life is built from a smaller figure, the Seed of Life. The Seed of Life is a figure of seven circles, arranged so that each circle is centered on the intersection of two adjacent circles in the surrounding ring of six. The Flower is constructed by extending the Seed outward in a hexagonal pattern, with the second ring of twelve circles completing the figure, until the nineteen circles (one at the center, six in the first ring, twelve in the second) are in place. The figure is the basis of the Metatron’s Cube, which is constructed by drawing lines from the center of each circle to the center of every other circle, and which contains within it the five Platonic solids. The pattern is also the basis of the Egg of Life, a three-dimensional projection of the Seed of Life.

The Flower of Life is a real figure with a real history. The archaeological record places it in several ancient sites, and the figure has been studied by several generations of geometricians. What is contested is the set of larger claims that have been made for the figure in the modern popular literature, and the most useful service a careful article can perform is to keep the two questions distinct.

Historical Appearance

The figure is older than its modern popularization. The most famous early example is the relief at the Osireion at Abydos, the temple of Seti I in Upper Egypt (c. 1290–1279 BCE), which shows a figure of nineteen circles that is recognizably the Flower of Life — although the figure is sometimes disputed as a modern restoration. The figure also appears in the Temple of Hathor at Dendera, in carved stone relief of the Ptolemaic and Roman periods (the building dates to the late first century BCE; the New Kingdom is much earlier, c. 1550–1070 BCE, and the Dendera temple is not from that period).

The figure is also found in the early Christian tradition, in the mosaic floors and carved decoration of several early Christian basilicas in the Mediterranean — for example, the 4th-century mosaic floors at Aquileia in Italy, and the Basilica of Reparatus at Orléansville (modern Cherchell) in Algeria. The figure is also found in the Islamic decorative tradition: the most studied examples are the geometric patterns of the Alhambra in Granada (Nasrid period, 13th–14th century) and the geometric programmes of the madrasas of Fez and Marrakech in Morocco.

A claim that deserves careful treatment is the popular attribution of the Flower of Life to Leonardo da Vinci. The standard Leonardo scholarship (Kenneth Clark, Martin Kemp, Frank Zöllner) does not identify a specific Flower of Life drawing in Leonardo’s notebooks. Leonardo did study geometric patterns derived from Pacioli’s De Divina Proportione (1509) — there is a famous series of illustrations Leonardo produced for Pacioli’s De Divina Proportione — but the Flower of Life specifically is not a standard Leonardo attribution. The popular association derives primarily from Drunvalo Melchizedek’s The Ancient Secret of the Flower of Life (1999).

Modern Popularization

The modern popularization of the Flower of Life is largely the work of the American author and teacher Drunvalo Melchizedek, whose two-volume work The Ancient Secret of the Flower of Life of 1999 (with volume 2 in 2000) brought the figure to a wide popular audience. Melchizedek’s work is the source of many of the most widely circulated claims about the figure.

The claims in Melchizedek’s work are widely repeated in the contemporary popular-esoteric literature, and they are also widely disputed. The figure is genuinely old and is genuinely found in several ancient sites, but the more aggressive scholarly critique argues that the Flower of Life is in part a relatively modern construction that has been retroactively projected onto ancient sites. The most defensible historical position is between these two poles.

The Geometry of the Figure

The Flower of Life is the basis of a number of other sacred geometric figures. The most important is the Metatron’s Cube, constructed by drawing lines from the center of each circle to the center of every other circle, and which contains within it the five Platonic solids. The figure is named after the archangel Metatron, who in the Jewish mystical tradition is sometimes identified with the cosmic principle. The Flower of Life is also the basis of the Egg of Life, and the Fruit of Life, a figure of thirteen circles.

A Critical Note on Attributions

The Flower of Life is a real figure with a real history, and it is genuinely the basis of a wide range of other sacred geometric forms. The figure is also the subject of a wide range of claims that are not supported by the historical evidence. A more defensible position is that the Flower of Life is one of a small set of figures that have appeared in several cultures, studied by several generations of geometricians, and the subject of a wide range of contemplative, artistic, and practical work.

Practical Use of the Figure

The Flower of Life is used in the contemporary Western esoteric community in several ways. The most common is the contemplative use: the figure is drawn and contemplated as a whole. The figure is also used as a basis of meditation: the practitioner traces the figure with the finger, with the eye, or with the mind, and considers the way the circles overlap. The most common practical exercise is the construction of the figure by hand: the practitioner begins with the Seed of Life, draws the seven circles of the Seed, extends the figure to the nineteen circles of the Flower, and considers the way the figure is built.