Snowflake Pattern

The following exercise illustrates a beautiful pattern known throughout the world. It can be found in every culture on every continent. You may know it by another name, but in the Academy for Sacred Architectural Studies we refer to it as the Snowflake Pattern.

The seed pattern for all snowflakes is based on the regular polygon known as the hexagon. The hexagon is a unique shape with six equal sides and six equal interior angles.

Remember from the Sunflower Mandala exercise that to create a perfect hexagon you start with a central point and construct a circle, and then using the radius as unity, cut six equal arcs around the circumference. You then connect opposite points through the center and adjacent points around the circumference. This will reveal the perfect hexagon as well as the three axes of the hexagram, or six pointed star, which is the basis for all snowflake patterns.

If you allow the symmetry of the six-fold geometry to be your guide, virtually any image you create will show forth the essential nature of the snowflake. See what you can do. There are many other examples in the nature kingdom where you can observe this hexagonal geometry and two cases are shown below. See what you can find.

We hope you have enjoyed this exercise and we leave you with two thoughtful questions which we often contemplate at the Academy:

Who carved the nucleus, before it fell, into six horns of ice? Johannes Kepler
Have you entered into the treasures of the snow? The Book of Job 38:22