Flower of life
Also called overlapping circles
The pattern is old; the name and the curriculum are recent
Geometry symbolsFlower of life meaning
The flower of life is a hexagonal lattice of overlapping circles. The pattern is old as ornament. The name, and the claim that it encodes all of physics, are late twentieth-century teaching.
Every circle born on the edge of another.
The name. “Flower of Life” is a late twentieth-century teaching name.
Where it comes from
Overlapping circles in a hexagonal lattice show up as ornament in more than one ancient culture. The graffiti at Abydos are real and debated: some see a deliberate pattern, some a byproduct of cutting. What is not ancient is the packaged claim, popularized in the 1990s, that this drawing secretly contains every Platonic solid and the structure of the universe. The drawing does something quieter and more exact.
Geometry
Relation, repeated
Start with one circle. Put the next center on its rim. Six fit. The next ring is forced. Nothing in the figure is placed by taste. That discipline is the content: a world where position is a consequence. The seed of life is the same rule, stopped at seven circles, before the pattern knows how large it will be asked to become.
Modern
A curriculum is not a ruin
You can learn true geometry from a modern teacher and still refuse the frame that Egypt encoded all of physics in a temple floor. Sigilla keeps the figure and declines the romance. The romance is itself a symbol — of a hunger for one picture that explains the rest. That hunger has a history too.
Near this
Sources
- Overlapping-circle ornament in several ancient cultures
- The “Flower of Life” curriculum is modern, popularized in the 1990s
Named when the entry depends on a text, a date, or a standard. Catalog numbers are not invented.
Your margin
Private. It stays in this browser and never joins the canon.
symbol.wiki, edited as Sigilla. Last reviewed 2 October 2026. A reading of public tradition, not a ruling.