A Modern Name, and What the Embryo Claim Is Worth

The name is modern, and should be given as such. Egg of Life, along with Seed of Life and Fruit of Life, belongs to the sacred-geometry literature of the later twentieth century, above all to Drunvalo Melchizedek's The Ancient Secret of the Flower of Life and the workshop tradition around it; none of these terms is attested in any ancient source, whatever the age of the circle lattice they are applied to.

The gloss usually attached to the figure is embryological: the eight spheres are said to represent the eight-cell stage of a dividing embryo, the last moment at which the cells are supposedly identical and undifferentiated, so that the geometry is presented as the pattern of life itself. That claim does not survive contact with developmental biology. Cleavage in mammals is not a tidy sequence of simultaneous equal doublings, the blastomeres divide asynchronously and pass through odd-numbered stages, and molecular differences between cells are detectable well before the eight-cell stage. The figure is worth study as a construction and as a piece of modern esoteric symbolism; the biology attached to it is decoration.