Preface
This document is written as a complementary material to the two years old research document entitled Artifacts of the Flower of Life 1. The former research concentrated more to artifacts and historical occurrences of the Flower of Life symbol. The current document will concentrate more on the creation and the meaning of the Flower of Life symbol (later called by the acronym FOL). This document is meant to shed light not only to the geometrical but also to the archetypical principles as background concepts behind the FOL. This is done by using comparative mythology and etymological studies.
The first part of this document will bring the reader through the traditional geometrical introspection 2 to the formation of the FOL. This method is a contemplative, an intuitive, and at the same time a systematic way to understand basic definitions of a point, a line, and a plane. These all are fundamental concepts that are needed to deeply understand the Flower of Life motif. Examination of these concepts can reveal what meaning and function people have tried to express with the FOL motif. Even better, contemplation of the basics of geometry can help us to understand how all things in life evolve from one point, how many things are reducible or groupable to a single instance, and how everything is connected to each other no matter how different and distant in time and space they first seem to be.
The downside of the reduction is that everything starts to look the same which is lethal to the intelligible thinking. The philosophical background of the definitions of sameness and difference, oneness and multitude, or chaos and order is not a new topic. A deep realization of the philosophical concept of identity 3 greatly helps in understanding the brilliant net of concepts that are imprinted within the FOL symbol.
The second part of this document contains new discoveries of artifacts as well as new observations and symbol associations that will be presented together with a classification proposal for several variations of the FOL. This can be found in Appendix 1. Especially, the ivory whorl from Cyprus, which is dated around 1600 – 1100 BC, deserves a mention as a one of the oldest object having the FOL symbol attached on it. Naming and symbolic cognates of the FOL are discussed further in Part 2.
A strong botanical connection from the ground up to the final formation of the symbol, as shown in Part 1 and Part 2, suggests that the modern name “Flower of Life” is not too far from the intended meaning of the symbol by the ancients. At least, we can see how the Flower of Life can be plausibly defended as its modern name. Yet, it can be seen that Drunvalo Melchizedek, who made the Flower of Life symbol so famous in the late 1990s, was actually insightful with ancient myths when associating the FOL with the sequential system of a flower, a fruit, and a tree 4. Unfortunately, his sources were mystified by mediumistic character origins and cannot hold the requirement of verification and testing, which is the requirement, I try to maintain throughout my study.
For the dating of the FOL, my conjecture based on cultural, historical, archeological, and etymological evidence is that the first occurrence of the FOL (class 1 and p) must be timed earlier from my previous cautious estimation of 2000 BC, at least to 2500 BC. To support this dating, the Pre-Indus occurrence of the FOL pattern and certain Hittite symbols are presented and discussed in this document.
Also, some notes about phraseology that is used in this document should be explained. First of all, the ideas presented here have roots in my own thinking unless otherwise stated either in the text or in the footnotes. But that does not mean ideas are solely mine. Many people in many fields have been doing similar research, thinking, and contemplation. In addition, I have made a lot of reflection with hundreds of books, documents, articles, and websites so that the result, this complementary document, is somewhat a mixture of the whole process. A collection of resources, that I have found useful in my investigation, is listed at the end of this monograph.
I have deliberately avoided words such as “certainly”, “evidently”, “must have been”, “supposedly”, “perhaps”, or “maybe” either to convince or to indicate speculative uncertainty of statements. They would just add too much unnecessary repetition to this document. Most sentences in this document could be prefixed with the “possibly” adverb anyway, but I have reserved affirmative words only to certain cases where I specifically want to emphasize the truth value of the expression. Every statement should be regarded as a limited expression of the viewpoint of the one sole investigator, thus always open for deeper analysis, corrections, and critics. For the reader, it would be much better if she / he thinks independently by freely weighing the value of the presented ideas.
The third thing I have tried to bear in mind is that when referring to “commonly accepted”, “well known”, or “supported by most” it is easy to forget relativity of such statements. This kind of imperative or selective phraseology is tempting, sometimes hard to avoid, and it actually can be an important aspect of the presentation. But without specifying a group with details of individuals in it, phraseology like this does not really give much value to the reader. If we do not have specific people and their works to refer to, how do we get into contact with them, or how are we be able to know about their background and the starting point of their interpretation? How can we come up with our own conclusion then? So, I have provided a lot of references to academic sources, websites, and books to show my sources. The outcome, a style of this monograph, is loosely scholarly and I hope it is beneficial for the most of the readers.
By these forewords, I think it is time to plunge into the topic.
Flower of Life mystery 