Crop Circle Symbols

Crop circles are often tied at once to stories of UFOs. Flattened designs in standing crops are older than that modern association. Academic notices of them go back to the late seventeenth century. Whatever makes them, the designs are intricate, and more than two hundred different ones have been recorded in England and elsewhere. They use straight lines, complicated glyphs, and circles set inside circles. They have been found in wheat, barley, corn, rye, and rice. Little is agreed about what each figure means. Many of them repeat designs already known from older cultures.

A crop formation is not always a circle. From the 1970s onward, documented cases increased sharply. In the last third of the twentieth century, about ten thousand were reported from twenty-six countries.

The Fruit of Life

This figure is thirteen circles: six arms of circles branching from one circle in the middle. It is treated as a blueprint of the universe, and it is often compared to an atom. Inside it is the geometric base of Metatron's Cube. The circles are nodes. If each node is joined to the others by a straight line, the figure contains 78 lines.

The Tree of Life

Formations repeat the Tree of Life, which is taken from the Flower of Life. Christians, Jews, and pagan traditions have all claimed the sign. In Kabbalah it is a map of creation, and it is also read as the tree of life in Genesis.

The Seed of Life

The Seed of Life turns up often. Large examples were recorded near the Devil's Arrows in Britain in 2003. The shape is close to the omphalos, the dome-like stone set at places such as Delphi and read as the navel of the world. Seven circles in sixfold symmetry make a pattern of circles and lenses. The Seed of Life appears in both Christian and Jewish art.

The Egg of Life

The Egg of Life is also seven circles, taken from the Flower of Life. It is said to be the shape of an embryo in the first hours after conception. It is one of the most common crop formations in Britain.

Borromean rings

Three linked rings are another common formation. They are close to the triquetra. They are drawn from the vesica piscis by placing the center of a third circle on the intersection of the first two, so the rings look locked together. Many cultures read the figure as sky, moon, or fate. The Borromean rings page follows that sign into Norse art.