Swastika

A "right-facing" Swastika in decorative Hindu form

For the town in Ontario, see Swastika, Ontario.The swastika (from Sanskrit स्वस्तिक ) is an equilateral cross with its arms bent at right angles in either left-facing () or right-facing () direction. The swastika is a holy symbol in Hinduism and Jainism. In the West, it is most widely known and used as a symbol of Nazism. It is traditionally oriented so that a main line is horizontal, though it is occasionally rotated at forty-five degrees. The Hindu version is often decorated with a dot in each quadrant.

Overview

The motifs seems to have first been used in Neolithic Eurasia. The swastika is used in religious and civil ceremonies in India. Most Indian temples, entrance of houses, weddings, festivals and celebrations are decorated with swastikas. The symbol was introduced to Southeast Asia by Hindu kings and remains an integral part of Balinese Hinduism to this day, and it is a common sight in Indonesia. The symbol has an ancient history in Europe, appearing on artifacts from pre-Christian European cultures. It was also adopted independently by several Native American cultures.
In the Western world, the symbol experienced a resurgence following the archaeological work in the late nineteenth century of Heinrich Schliemann, who discovered the symbol in the site of ancient Troy and associated it with the ancient migrations of Proto-Indo-Europeans ("Aryan" people). He connected it with similar shapes found on ancient pots in Germany, and theorised that the swastika was a "significant religious symbol of our remote ancestors," linking ancient German, Greek and Vedic culture.Schliemann, H, Troy and its remains, London: Murray, 1875, pp. 102, 119-20 Sarah Boxer. "One of the world's great symbols strives for a comeback". The New York Times, July 29, 2000. By the early 20th century it was widely used worldwide and was regarded as a symbol of good luck and auspiciousness.

The work of Schliemann soon became intertwined with the völkisch movements, for which the swastika was a symbol of "Aryan" identity, a concept that came to be equated by theorists like Alfred Rosenberg with a Nordic master race originating in northern Europe. Since its adoption by the Nazi Party of Adolf Hitler, the swastika has been associated with fascism, racism (white supremacy), World War II, and the Holocaust in much of the West. The swastika remains a core symbol of Neo-Nazi groups, and is also regularly used by activist groups to signify the supposed Nazi-like behaviour of organizations and individuals they oppose.

Etymology and alternative names

The word swastika is derived from the Sanskrit (in Devanagari, ), meaning any lucky or auspicious object, and in particular a mark made on persons and things to denote good luck. It is composed of su- (cognate with Greek ευ-, "eu-"), meaning "good, well" and asti a verbal abstract to the root as "to be"; svasti thus means "well-being". The suffix -ka forms a diminutive, and svastika might thus be translated literally as "little thing associated with well-being", corresponding roughly to "lucky charm", or "thing that is auspicious"."The Swastika". Northvegr Foundation. Notes on the etymology and meaning of Swastika The suffix -tika also literally means mark; therefore a sometimes alternate name for swastika in India is shubhtika (literally good mark). The word first appears in the Classical Sanskrit (in the Ramayana and Mahabharata epics).

Alternative historical English spellings of the Sanskrit word include suastika and svastica. Alternative names for the shape are:
Black Spider, to various peoples in middle and western Europe
crooked cross
cross cramponned, ~nnée, or ~nny (in heraldry), as each arm resembles a crampon or angle-iron. (Compare Winkelmaßkreuz in German)
cross gammadion, tetragammadion or just gammadion, as each arm resembles the Greek letter �" (gamma). (Compare crux gammata in Latin, croiz gammée in Old French and croix gammée in French; cruz gamada or esvástica in Spanish)
fylfot (meaning "four feet", chiefly in heraldry and architecture). (See Fylfot for a discussion of the etymology)
hooked cross (Dutch: hakenkruis; Serbian: kukasti krst; Icelandic: hakakross; German: Hakenkreuz; Finnish: hakaristi; Estonian: haakrist; Greek: αγκυλωτός σταυρός (agylotos stavros); Norwegian: hakekors; Italian: croce uncinata; Romanian: Cruce încârligată; Swedish: hakkors; Danish: hagekors; Hungarian: horogkereszt; Czech: hákový kříž)
sun wheel (German Sonnenrad), (Greek ηλιοτροχός (iliotrochos)), a name also used as a synonym for the sun cross
tetraskelion, Greek "four legged", especially when composed of four conjoined legs (compare triskelion)
Thor's hammer, from its supposed association with Thor, the Norse god of thunder, but this may be a misappropriation of a name that properly belongs to a Y-shaped or T-shaped symbol. (See Thomas Wilson, below.) The Swastika shape appears in Icelandic grimoires wherein it is named Þórshamar.
thunder cross (Latvian: perkonkrusts)
twisted cross
unexpected cross (Polish krzyżyk niespodziany) or highlander cross (Polish góralski krzyż), swarge, swarzyca,

History

A mola (art form) showing a swastika, based on the Kuna flag.

In antiquity, the swastika was used extensively by the Indo-Aryans, Hittites Celts and Greeks, among others. In particular, the swastika is a sacred symbol in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. It occurs in other Asian, European, African and Native American cultures – sometimes as a geometrical motif, sometimes as a religious symbol.

Origin hypotheses

part of the Han Dynasty silk comet atlas

The ubiquity of the swastika symbol is easily explained by it being a very simple symbol that will arise independently in any basketweaving society. The swastika is a repeating design, created by the edges of the reeds in a square basket-weave. Other theories attempt to establish a connection via cultural diffusion or an explanation along the lines of Carl Jung's collective unconscious.

While the existence of the swastika symbol in the Americas may be explained by the basket-weave theory, its American presence weakens the cultural diffusion theory. While some have proposed that the swastika was secretly transferred to North America by an early seafaring civilization on Eurasia, a separate but parallel development is considered the most likely explanation.

Yet another explanation is suggested by Carl Sagan in his book Comet. Sagan reproduces an ancient Chinese manuscript that shows comet tail varieties: most are variations on simple comet tails, but the last shows the comet nucleus with four bent arms extending from it, recalling a swastika. Sagan suggests that in antiquity a comet could have approached so close to Earth that the jets of gas streaming from it, bent by the comet's rotation, became visible, leading to the adoption of the swastika as a symbol across the world.

Two owl-like vases from Schliemann's book Ilios

Bob Kobres in Comets and the Bronze Age Collapse (1992) contends that the swastika-like comet on the Han Dynasty silk comet atlas was labeled a "long tailed pheasant star" due to its resemblance to a bird's foot., and further suggests that many swastika and swastika-like motifs may have been representations of bird tracks, including many of those found by Schliemann.

Barbara G. Walker, author of The Woman's Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects, claims that the crux dissimulata, an early swastika, represented the four winds. Concerning the short-armed version of this symbol, known as the gammadion because it is made up of four Greek gammas, Walker says this symbol was an emblem of the ancient goddess and probably represented "the solstices and equinoxes, or the four directions, four elements, and four divine guardians of the world."

Archaeological record

The earliest swastika symbols of the archaeological record date to the Neolithic.The symbol was found on a number of shards in the Khuzestan province of Iran and as part of the "Vinca script" of Neolithic Europe of the 5th millennium BC.

Seals from Indus Valley Civilization

In the Early Bronze Age, it appears as part of the "Indus script" and on pottery found in Sintashta [1].

Swastika-like symbols also appear in Bronze and Iron Age designs of the northern Caucasus (Koban culture), and Azerbaijan, as well as of Scythians and Sarmatians [2]. In all these cultures the swastika symbol does not appear to occupy any marked position or significance, but appears as just one form of a series of similar symbols of varying complexity.

Historical use

In Zoroastrian Persia, the swastika symbolized the revolving sun (Garduneh-e Khorshid), Mithra's Wheel (Garduneh-e Mehr), fire, infinity, or continuing recreation. There is no reference to the swastika in the Vedas, the term svastika first appearing in Epic Sanskrit, but the symbol rose to importance in Hinduism and Buddhism in Maurya and Gupta India.

The use of the swastika by the indigenous Bön faith of Tibet, as well as syncretic religions, such as Cao Dai of Vietnam and Falun Gong of China, is thought to be borrowed from Buddhism as well. Similarly, the existence of the swastika as a solar symbol among the Akan civilization of southwest Africa may have been the result of cultural transfer along the African slave routes around AD 1500.

Adoption of the swastika in the West

This Iranian necklace was excavated from Kaluraz, Guilan, first millennium BC, National Museum of Iran.

The discovery of the Indo-European language group in the 1790s led to a great effort by archaeologists to link the pre-history of European peoples to the ancient "Aryans" (variously referring to the Indo-Iranians or the Proto-Indo-Europeans). Following his discovery of objects bearing the swastika in the ruins of Troy, Heinrich Schliemann consulted two leading Sanskrit scholars of the day, Emile Burnouf and Max Müller. Schliemann concluded that the Swastika was a specifically Indo-European symbol. Later discoveries of the motif among the remains of the Hittites and of ancient Iran seemed to confirm this theory. This idea was taken up by many other writers, and the swastika quickly became popular in the West, appearing in many designs from the 1880s to the 1920s.

These discoveries, and the new popularity of the swastika symbol, led to a widespread desire to ascribe symbolic significance to every example of the motif. In Scandinavian and Germanic countries examples of similar shapes in ancient European artifacts and in folk art were interpreted as emblems of good-luck linked to the Indo-Iranian meaning.

Western use of the motif, along with the religious and cultural meanings attached to it, was subverted in the early twentieth century after it was adopted as the emblem of the Nazi Party. This association occurred because Nazism stated that the historical Aryans were the forefathers of modern Germans and then proposed that, because of this, the subjugation of the world by Germany was desirable, and even predestined. The swastika was used as a conveniently geometrical and eye-catching symbol to emphasize this mythical Aryan-German correspondence and instil racial pride. Since World War II, most Westerners know the swastika as solely a Nazi symbol, leading to incorrect assumptions about its pre-Nazi use in the West and confusion about its sacred religious and historical status in other cultures.

Geometry and symbolism