Nymphaea lotus Coptic flag. Claire Waight Keller included the flower to represent Malawi in Meghan Markle's wedding veil, which included the distinctive flora of each Commonwealth country. In some parts of Africa the rhizomes and tubers are eaten for the starch they contain either boiled, roasted or ground to a flour after drying. The young fruits are sometimes consumed as a salad. The seeds are turned into a meal. The tubers or the seeds are used as a famine food in India. The ancient Egyptians cultivated the white lotus in ponds and marshes. This flower often appears in ancient Egyptian decorations. They
White Lotus Day (See Part II., “The Lotus Flower as a Universal Symbol.”) This explains the sentence “The Mother had not yet swollen” — the form being usually sacrificed to the inner or root idea in Archaic symbology. The Lotus, or Padma, is, moreover, a very ancient and favourite simile for the Kosmos itself, and also for man. The popular reasons given are, firstly, the fact just mentioned, that the Lotus-seed contains within itself a perfect miniature of the future plant, which typefies the fact that the spiritual prototypes of all things exist in the immaterial world before those things become materialised on