Flower of Life

The symbol here is one that sparks a lot of different areas of inquiry, and debate on origin. So, modeling a practice I appreciate from Max Dashu*, I’ve collected some photos online - doing my day-off-damndest to find source material that can be credibly posted.

Pattern shown in relief. Relief depicting Ashurbanipal in a chariot, inspecting booty and prisoners from Babylon. By Anthony Huan - https://www.flickr.com/photos/anthonyhuan/45769201572/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=91473390

Chinese Guardian Lions in front of the Gate to Longevity Hill - Yiheyuan Summer Palance, near Beijing
**█ Slices of Light** ✴ **█▀ ▀ ▀** **Lion Paws**

And, haha, there’s some great visual material with no source in the great interactive image hoard of Pinterest, where sometimes it’s just nice to freely let my brain roam.

From these I jump over to the creator of Catan and the pattern he used to develop the geometric game board. Maybe he intended to use this underlying symbol, maybe not. In any case, I see it in there, at a slightly spaced out version of the Flower of Life I’ve seen used most in enlightening art, and new age writings and materials. I’m italicizing the term, however you want to put it, the current manifestation of spiritual systems at work, resonating at different depths and breadths.

This symbol has been included through different eons of civilization, and it’s widespread in its use. The interpretation of its significance today is, well, fun to read up on and weigh out. The interpretation I resonate with the most is the “building blocks of life” telling. Beginning with the Vesica Pisces, replicated to form the Seed of Life, and then the Flower of Life. And outward from there.

Flower of life, triangular- With different radii. By Tomruen - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=46246836 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overlapping_circles_grid#Triangular_grid_of_overlapping_circles

Letting go of the mechanics of the game I seek to deconstruct, and looking more at the components of the game board. If this meaningful symbol, even powerful icon, was co-opted and used as a geometric framework for the game board that has so effectively normalized colony building as a pass-time activity… I don’t see the harm in working with it as a basis for reconstruction thoughtful imagining. Co-opting it back? I can’t say “taking it back” because the symbol itself has no relation in any culture I am tied to, or one that I could call myself a member of for the past several generations.

“Co-opting language and ideas to conform to the status quo is a long used, often invisible tool that White supremacy culture deploys to preserve its dominance.” Language Use - UpEND Movement A movement dedicated to keeping families together and abolishing the practices of surveilling and separating them.

Steps to mindfully not co-opting this symbol again, or plainly just taking something back into another corner of the system of supremacy called White, created by the amalgamation of Europeans in the US - homogenizing generations of millions of people and separating them/us from our historical connection to land, and colonization, either as the enactor, or victim, then repeater.
Oh, steps in that thought.

Steps to not just repeating the pattern of colonizing to get closer to deconstructing the dynamic/mechanics at work in the game that started this.

To the best of my ability, acknowledge the history of where this symbol came from and what its meaning is. I think this series of visual representations, and maybe some identifying locations on a map might do a fairly good job of it.
Look at some of the meaning and associations that can be drawn from the building blocks of this geometric shape.
Hold space for the space created, the ideas generated in the loose versions of game play so far. Throwing off the rules of the original. Stopping at the beginning, analyzing after, doing away with parts, introducing new factors. Mostly, holding the space to workshop ideas.

Pausing at the thresholds wormholes and working from there. Wormholes? Or a complex flower of possibilities encased in overlapping circles, reframed as hexagons? The mechanic at work, or dynamic at play, may be where players’ intentions overlap when we come together with shared goals, or stated purposes for game play. Or, the shared intention to step away from the grind of a problem we’ve invested a lot of time, energy, and compassion in, for some part, some piece of social good, collective social benefit. Or, on the flip side, stepping up to the familiar icons as presented, and stepping into the feeling of the grind compassion asks of us, while playing.

Integral - integrating - with integrity, root “integer” and it’s back to math as some kind of neutral system of communicating. Art, looking at what we see in the pattern at work and considering. Leaving it open for those who would take it seriously, or not, or just play, or take the play seriously and work towards a thing.

Who knows?

Special thanks to Teal Gardener for answering my concerns that the games played in early 2023 felt like work—in our first rounds of the deconstructed version of the first New SUM.

“The "work of play" is a really interesting concept to me. Also, inversely, the "play of work" - like at the garden, there is so much play in the work. It is like inextricable from the experience. Just an observation.” - Teal

I realized it was there when I was putting together a template for creating a bigger version of the game board my partner had made for his use after spilling beer on the paperboard version of the original. He could create it for me, but needed the pattern. Some scrutiny exists around the origin of this pattern, a lot actually, and some would dismiss the spiritual significance of it outright. Noting that it’s possible that people just got bored one day and started drawing circles, and saw some fascination in the overlapping of circles and what exists there.

I would argue, that even with vector building software capable of rotating points on an axis at a specific degree, it’s actually kind of hard to recreate the Flower of Life precisely. It is fun to try though. Attempt deemed *good enough for now*, shown here.

But, the existence of this pattern in an Osirian temple in Abydos Egypt, built by Seti and dedicated to Osiris - as noted by Drunavlo Malchezedek in his book The Ancient Secret of the Flower of Life Volume I. Take or leave the content of that book and source of information what you will. The style of the information presented in it, black and white scanned or xeroxed copies of film photos taken by a woman touring Egypt sometime around 1985-95. Due to the now somewhat archaic form of the book’s publishing, that photo series wasn’t made up in Photoshop, or MidJourney.

It is interesting to note how regularly a shadow covering one of the two visible flowers is also a part of the photos taken of this wall.
“Photograph taken by Ray Flowers and released to the public to use on Wikipedia without worry of copyright. No higher resolution available.”

The Flower of Life is an old symbol with significance from a very long time ago, and again now, in waves of writing about now-time interpretations through various meditative or conversational means of gaining information. “Building blocks of life,” “connection to the cosmos,” etc etc. An icon to play with, consciously.

*Max Dashu “founded the Suppressed Histories Archives in 1970 to document global women’s history. She is internationally known for her visual presentations, dvds, and webcasts.” She holds to a practice of showing images of ancient figurines, reliefs, manuscripts, and architecture. She has noted frequently, that much can be interpreted in just seeing these images themselves.

Sources & References:

History Stack Exchange. What is the origin of the Flower of Life symbol?
upEND Movement. (2022, April 7). The Power of Co-Opting: Language Is Changing, But Will It Change the Status Quo?
Melchizedek, D. (1999). The Ancient Secret of the Flower of Life, Volume 2. Light Technology Publishing.

Image Sources

İnfoCan. (2011, December 20). Girih compass straightedge example [SVG file]. Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17744943
Serhinho. Window Apartments of the Crown Prince in the Topkapi Palace, Istanbul [Photograph]. Wikimedia Commons.
Tomruen. Flower of life, triangular- With different radii [SVG file]. Wikimedia Commons.
Wikipedia. Overlapping circles grid. In Wikipedia. Retrieved January 19, 2024, from
Anthony Huan. The victory stele of Esarhaddon, Ashurbanipal's father [Photograph]. Wikimedia Commons.