Part 2: Meaning of the symbol

Since my research in autumn 2014, a lot has happened. In the summer of 2015, I made another research trip to Cyprus and Malta. This is because these islands were mentioned on many occasions when I read about the history of Neolithic cultures and their use of geometrical art and symbols. Although not as numerous as in the previous research document, the new items discovered on my new trips are still interesting and valuable for further speculation. Especially, the old ivory item found from Cyprus with the FOL class 2 motif on a pitted background gives evidential weight for an argument for the wider existence of the symbol in around 1500 BC. In the summer of 2016, I visited museums in Latvia, Poland, and Great Britain, which confirmed the later progressions of the FOL symbol in wood carving works.

I have prepared a classification system for different variations of the symbol to improve categorization and in order to better define discussion field for the topic. This new classification is already used in this complementary document. I have placed all previous items from the original research document (2014) to the new classification system presented in this document to help to see interrelations between them.

Previous work

Due to some publicity, I got via channels where the research was published, a few persons interested in the topic gave me more FOL items to catalog. Flower of Life mystery¹ WordPress site is still the main blog type site for this research. The Flower of Life history Pinterest² board is continuously used to collect new pictures of items containing the FOL. A Facebook page³ created for the FOL community actions was kindly promoted a few times by Jamie Janover who works on the Resonance project⁴. In addition to these, my first book was published on academia.edu⁵ and issuu.com⁶. All channels together have given previous research document around 10000 views for the during the past year.

The Wikipedia page that I was referring to two years back as a source for collecting occurrences of the Flower of Life symbol was deleted by Wikipedia moderators on May 2015, and the site is now having a totally different content related to Manga comic. The reason for deletion is given on the discussion page as "delete due to a lack of notability"⁷. Supposedly, the page was seen as a promotion page for the controversial ideas of D. Melchizedek, but it still was a very valuable source on the FOL topic. Now gone, but only from the space of Wikipedia. For curious readers with referential interest, the archive.org⁸ site has somewhat readable version of the old page. Also more recently, Wikipedia moderators accepted to use part of the old Flower of Life Wikipedia content as a part of the Overlapping circles Wikipedia page⁹.

The FOL symbol is found all around the modern world on T-shirts, jewelry¹⁰, lamps, decoration, and even on technological inventions. The FOL pattern as well as the Cownose pattern¹¹ was studied by Leonardo da Vinci and hopefully my research can show it was studied by ancient people already 3500 - 4000 years ago. Maybe not exactly with the name "Flower of Life", but because people are already using that popularized name, it would be a shame if Wikipedia could not provide exact information about the symbol using the most commonly used term. I am sure that alternative names that have been formally constructed like concave equilateral triangle tiling or just intersecting circles will never be as conducive.