Sacred geometry
Geometric figures given spiritual meaning, from the flower of life to Metatron’s cube, where each figure comes from and when its meanings were attached.
These three figures are drawn from one grid of overlapping circles: the flower of life, the seed of life and Metatron’s cube. Their history has two parts, and the pages keep them apart. The circles are old. The names and the spiritual meanings date from the end of the 20th century: they come from the New Age teacher Drunvalo Melchizedek, whose The Ancient Secret of the Flower of Life was published in 1999, and the pages give those meanings as the beliefs of Melchizedek and his students.
- Flower of lifeA pattern of overlapping circles of the same size, each centred on the rims of its neighbours, usually nineteen of them. Grids of circles like it are ancient, but the name “flower of life” and the spiritual meanings given to it come from the New Age movement of the 1990s, chiefly the teacher Drunvalo Melchizedek.
- Seed of lifeSeven overlapping circles of the same size, one in the middle and six centred on its rim, making a six-petalled flower at the centre. The name is modern, from the New Age teacher Drunvalo Melchizedek, who treats it as the first stage of the flower of life.
- Metatron’s cubeA figure of thirteen points, usually drawn as thirteen circles, with a straight line from each one to every other. It is named after Metatron, an angel of Jewish mystical tradition, but the figure and the name are modern, from the New Age sacred geometry of Drunvalo Melchizedek.
One grid, three figures
MathWorld, Eric Weisstein’s mathematical reference work, defines all three as parts of a single triangular grid of overlapping circles, the radius of each circle equal to the distance between neighbouring centres. The flower of life is a patch of nineteen of those circles. The seed of life is seven: one in the centre and six around it, with six lens shapes round the middle. The fruit of life is thirteen circles taken from a larger version of the pattern, and joining their centres, every one to every other, with 78 lines gives Metatron’s cube. Chosen lines in the cube outline a cube, an octahedron and a tetrahedron; MathWorld adds that claims it shows all five Platonic solids depend on which lines and projections are picked.
Where the names come from
MathWorld says plainly that the name “flower of life” is modern, and gives seed of life, fruit of life and Metatron’s cube as Melchizedek’s terminology, from his book of 1999. The archaeologist Wayne Perkins places the term in the New Age movement of the 1990s. The meanings come from the same teaching. Melchizedek’s publisher, Light Technology Publishing, describes the belief at the centre of the book: that “all life in the universe knew the Flower of Life as the creation pattern”, and that for thousands of years the secret was held in ancient artefacts and carvings around the world. In that teaching sacred geometry “is the form beneath our being and points to a divine order in our reality”. Melchizedek founded the Flower of Life workshops, which, his publisher says, have over three hundred trained facilitators teaching in over sixty countries. Metatron himself is far older: the Jewish Encyclopedia (1906) calls him an angel found only in Jewish literature. The cube that bears his name is Melchizedek’s term.
Older circles
Grids like these are much older than the names. MathWorld cites a Phoenician ivory carving of about 900 BC, now in the British Museum, and a circle construction by Leonardo da Vinci in the Codex Atlanticus. A seven-circle pattern is laid in a mosaic floor from the bathhouse of Herod’s palace at Herodium, of the 1st century BCE; the Israel Museum calls its central rosette the most common motif in Jewish art of the period. Perkins finds the six-petal rosette on objects from Mediterranean funerary deposits from the Late Bronze Age onwards. In English buildings, Historic England says, the hexafoil, or daisy wheel, is the commonest of the marks scribed near doorways, windows and fireplaces, from the early medieval period into the 19th century. What those marks were for is disputed, and Historic England gives ritual protection as the most widely accepted reading.
Is the flower of life at Abydos ancient Egyptian?
Not as far as the evidence goes. The example most often given is a set of circles in red ochre on a stone trilithon in the Osireion at Abydos, part of the complex of the Temple of Seti I. Perkins sets out why they are not original to the temple: they are in one place only and not part of its decoration, Egyptian temple art has no known precedent for them, and they are four metres above the floor, as if drawn after the building was abandoned and had filled with sand. Early Greek graffiti sits beside them. He concludes that they were most likely added in the 1st century BC, possibly by Greek visitors.
Sources
- MathWorld: Flower of Life, Eric W. Weisstein, MathWorld (Wolfram Research), entry and references
- MathWorld: Seed of Life, Eric W. Weisstein, MathWorld (Wolfram Research), entry and references
- MathWorld: Metatron’s Cube, Eric W. Weisstein, MathWorld (Wolfram Research), entry
- The ‘Flower of Life’ Motif at the Temple of Seti I & the Osireion, Abydos, Egypt, Wayne Perkins (archaeologist, ACIfA), 18 October 2025, Ritual Protection Marks & Ritual Practices, article text
- The Ancient Secret of the Flower of Life, Volume One (publisher’s description), Drunvalo Melchizedek, 1999, Light Technology Publishing, book description
- Melchizedek, Drunvalo (author page), Light Technology Publishing, author biography
- Meṭaṭron, Vol. 8, 1904–06, The Jewish Encyclopedia (1906), Joseph Jacobs and Ludwig Blau
- Mosaic floor from a bathhouse in Herod’s palace, Herodian period, 1st century BCE, Herodium, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem (Google Arts & Culture), object description
- What Are Witches’ Marks?, Historic England, Daisy wheels, or hexafoils
Last reviewed October 1, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research