Seed of life
Seven 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.
Meaning
MathWorld defines the seed of life as seven circles of equal radius, six of them centred at equal spaces around the rim of the seventh, with sixfold symmetry and six lens shapes around the centre. Those six lenses are the petals of a six-petal rosette, the figure carvers drew with compasses and English historians of buildings call a daisy wheel or hexafoil. The name “seed of life” comes from Drunvalo Melchizedek’s The Ancient Secret of the Flower of Life (1999), where the seven circles are taken out of the larger flower of life pattern; MathWorld calls the name modern. His publisher lists it among the subjects of that book, under “The Secret of the Flower Unfolds”. Thirteen circles of the same grid give Metatron’s cube.
Origin and history
The six-petal rosette is old. The archaeologist Wayne Perkins finds securely dated examples on objects from Mediterranean funerary deposits of the Late Bronze Age (about 1750 to 1050 BC) onwards; its birthplace, he writes, is still a mystery, believed to be somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean, and it may, he suggests, have arisen with the invention of the drawing compass. He reads it as a motif of rebirth, found in graves, and by the medieval period it was often carved on the fonts of western European churches.
A full seven-circle pattern is laid in a mosaic floor from the bathhouse of Herod’s palace at Herodium in the Judean Desert, of the 1st century BC, now in the Israel Museum; MathWorld lists it among historical seven-circle patterns. The museum describes the centre as a rosette, with palmettes and pomegranates in the corners, and calls the rosette the most common motif in Jewish art of the period. MathWorld also notes related patterns in Italian art of the 13th century.
The daisy wheel in old English buildings
The six-petal flower inside a circle is the commonest of the marks Historic England calls witches’ marks or apotropaic marks, from the Greek for averting evil, which were scribed on stone or woodwork near doorways, windows and fireplaces. Historic England says most research calls them hexafoils, that people told it the hexafoil was by far the most common mark they found, and that they occur in English buildings from the early medieval period up to the 19th century. The National Trust describes the daisy wheel as drawn with a compass, sometimes single and sometimes as a group of interlinked hexafoils, and gives the belief behind it: a demon that saw a line would follow it and become trapped.
What the marks were for is disputed, and Historic England sets out the views. Wiccans, members of a contemporary Pagan religion, read them as sun motifs; another view holds they are secular geometry exercises for apprentices, and they do appear in geometry manuals; the most widely accepted reading at present is ritual protection. None of these readings uses the name seed of life, which belongs to Melchizedek’s teaching.
See also
Flower of life, Metatron’s cube.
Sources
- MathWorld: Seed of Life, Eric W. Weisstein, MathWorld (Wolfram Research), entry and references
- Mosaic floor from a bathhouse in Herod’s palace, Herodian period, 1st century BCE, Herodium, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem (Google Arts & Culture), object description
- 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
- What Are Witches’ Marks?, Historic England, Daisy wheels, or hexafoils
- Warding off evil with witch marks, National Trust, The daisy wheel
- The Ancient Secret of the Flower of Life, Volume One (publisher’s description), Drunvalo Melchizedek, 1999, Light Technology Publishing, book description
Browse symbols formed from circles.
Last reviewed October 1, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research