The swastika ( , , Sanskrit Devanagari: स्वस्तिक ; 卐 or 卍) is an ancient cross-cultural geometrical symbol that has been used in many cultures and religions of Eurasia, as well as a few in Africa and the Americas, for thousands of years. The swastika was and continues to be used as a symbol of divinity and spirituality in several religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. In the Western world, it is predominantly associated with Nazism, being appropriated and widely displayed in Nazi symbolism. Most notably, it was used in the flag of Nazi Germany. This appropriation continues with the symbol's popularity among neo-Nazis around the world.
The English word swastika is originally of the Sanskrit language (, ). In Hinduism, the right-facing symbol () is called , symbolizing , prosperity, and good luck; while the left-facing symbol () is sometimes called , symbolising night or tantric aspects of Kali. In Jain symbolism, it is a part of the Jain flag, and represents Suparshvanatha—the seventh of 24 Tirthankaras (spiritual teachers and saviours). In Buddhist symbolism, it represents the auspicious footprints of the Buddha. In different Indo-European traditions, the swastika symbolises fire, lightning bolts and the Sun. The symbol is found in the archaeological remains of the Indus Valley Civilization and the Neolithic-era Samarra culture of Mesopotamia. It has also been recorded in early Byzantine and Christian artwork.
The swastika was seen as a symbol of auspiciousness and good luck for most of the Western world until the 1930s. It was first used as a symbol of international antisemitism by far-right Romanian politician A. C. Cuza prior to World War I. Wider public perception would only change once the German Nazi Party adopted the swastika as an emblem of the so-called Aryan race. As a result of World War II and the Holocaust, Western societies continue to strongly associate the symbol with Nazism, antisemitism, white supremacism, or simply evil. As a consequence, displaying it is prohibited by law in several countries, with exceptions for religious symbolism. However, the swastika remains a symbol of good luck and prosperity in Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and other Asian communities. It continues to be a peaceful cultural symbol in countries like Sri Lanka, Mongolia, India, Japan, China and Nepal. It carries various other meanings for people around the world, such as the Akan, Hopi, Navajo, and Tlingit peoples.
Etymology and nomenclature
The word swastika is derived from the Sanskrit root , which is composed of 'good, well' and 'is; it is; there is'. The word occurs frequently in the Vedas as well as in classical literature, meaning 'health, luck, success, prosperity', and it was commonly used as a greeting.A Vedic Concordance, Maurice Bloomfield, Harvard University Press, pp. 1052–1054 The final is a common suffix that could have multiple meanings.
According to the 19th-century Sanskrit scholar Monier Monier-Williams, most scholars consider the swastika to have originally been a solar symbol. The sign implies well-being, something fortunate, lucky, or auspicious. It is alternatively spelled in contemporary texts as svastika, and other spellings were occasionally used in the 19th and early 20th century, such as suastika.First recorded 1871 (OED); alternative historical English spellings include suastika, swastica, and svastica; see, for example: It was derived from the Sanskrit term (Devanagari ), which transliterates to under the commonly used IAST transliteration system, but is pronounced closer to swastika.
The earliest known use of the word swastika is in Pāṇini's Aṣṭādhyāyī, which uses it to explain a Sanskrit grammar rule, in the context of a type of identifying mark on a cow's ear. Pāṇini lived in or before the 4th century BCE, possibly in 6th or 5th century BCE.
An early use of swastika in a European text was in 1871, in the publications of Heinrich Schliemann, who discovered more than 1,800 ancient instances of swastikas and variants while excavating the Hisarlik mound near the Aegean Sea coast to study the history of Troy. Schliemann linked his findings to the Sanskrit .
By the 19th century, the term swastika was adopted into English, replacing the previous gammadion from Greek . In 1878, the Irish scholar Charles Graves used swastika as the common English name for the symbol, after defining it as equivalent to the French term a cross with arms shaped like the Greek letter gamma (Γ). Read by Graves to the Royal Irish Academy on 13 May 1878. Shortly thereafter, the British antiquarians Edward Thomas and Robert Sewell separately published their studies about the symbol, using swastika as the common English term.
The "reversed" swastika was probably first conceived by Eugène Burnouf among European scholars in 1852 and later taken up by Schliemann in Ilios (1880), based on a letter from Max Müller quoting Burnouf. The term is used in the sense of 'backward swastika' by Eugène Goblet d'Alviella (1894): "In India it [the gammadion] bears the name of , when its arms are bent towards the right, and when they are turned in the other direction."The Migration of Symbols , by Eugène Goblet d'Alviella, (1894), p. 40 at sacred-texts.com
Other names for the symbol include: (Greek: ) or cross gammadion (; French: ), as each arm resembles the Greek letter Γ () hooked cross (German: ), angled cross (), or crooked cross () cross cramponned, cramponnée, or cramponny in heraldry, as each arm resembles a crampon or angle-iron () fylfot, chiefly in heraldry and architecture (Greek: ), literally meaning 'four-legged', especially when composed of four conjoined legs (compare triskelion/triskele [Greek: ]) (Latvian for 'fire cross, cross of fire"; other names ('cross of thunder', 'thunder cross'), cross of Perun or of Perkūnas), cross of branches, cross of Laima) whirling logs (Navajo): can denote abundance, prosperity, healing, and luck
In various European languages, it is known as the fylfot, , , or (a term in Anglo-Norman heraldry); German: ; French: ; Italian: ; Latvian: . In Mongolian it is called () and mainly used in seals. In Chinese it is called 卍字, pronounced in Mandarin, manji in Cantonese, in Japanese, (만자) in Korean and or in Vietnamese. In Balti/Tibetan language it is called .
Appearance
All swastikas are bent crosses based on a chiral symmetry, but they appear with different geometric details: as compact crosses with short legs, as crosses with large arms, and as motifs in a pattern of unbroken lines. Chirality describes an absence of reflective symmetry, with the existence of two versions that are mirror images of each other. The mirror-image forms are typically described as left-facing or left-hand (卍) and right-facing or right-hand (卐).
The compact swastika can be seen as a chiral irregular icosagon (20-sided polygon) with fourfold (90°) rotational symmetry. Such a swastika proportioned on a 5×5 square grid and with the broken portions of its legs shortened by one unit can tile the plane by translation alone. The main Nazi flag swastika used a 5×5 diagonal grid, but with the legs unshortened."Swastika Flag Specifications and Construction Sheet (Germany) ". Flags of the World.
Written characters
The swastika was adopted as a standard character in Chinese, "" () and as such entered various other East Asian languages, including Chinese script. In Japanese, the symbol is called or .
The swastika is included in the Unicode character sets of two languages. In the Chinese block, it is U+534D 卍 (left-facing) and U+5350 for the swastika 卐 (right-facing); , The Unicode Standard, Version 4.1. Unicode, Inc. 2005. The latter has a mapping in the original Big5 character set,Big5: C9_C3, according to Wenlin but the former does not (although it is in Big5+Big5+: 85_80, according to Wenlin). In Unicode 5.2, two swastika symbols and two swastikas were added to the Tibetan block: swastika , , and swastikas , .
Origin
European uses of swastikas are often treated alongside cross symbols in general, such as the sun cross of Bronze Age religion. Beyond its certain presence in the "proto-writing" symbol systems, such as the Vinča script,Paliga S., The tablets of Tărtăria Dialogues d'histoire ancienne, vol. 19, n°1, 1993. pp. 9–43; (Fig. 5 on p. 28) which appeared during the Neolithic,Freed, S. A. and R. S., "Origin of the Swastika", Natural History, January 1980, 68–75. nothing certain is known about the symbol's origin.
North Pole
According to René Guénon, the swastika represents the North Pole, and the rotational movement around a centre or immutable axis (), and only secondly it represents the Sun as a reflected function of the North Pole. As such, it is a symbol of life, of the vivifying role of the supreme principle of the universe, the absolute God, in relation to the cosmic order. It represents the activity (the Hellenic , the Hindu , the Chinese , 'Great One') of the principle of the universe in the formation of the world. According to Guénon, the swastika in its polar value has the same meaning of the yin and yang symbol of the Chinese tradition, and of other traditional symbols of the working of the universe, including the letters Γ (gamma) and G, symbolising the Great Architect of the Universe of Masonic thought.
According to the scholar Reza Assasi, the swastika represents the north ecliptic North Pole centred in ζ Draconis, with the constellation Draco as one of its beams. He argues that this symbol was later attested as the four-horse chariot of Mithra in ancient Iranian culture. They believed the cosmos was pulled by four heavenly horses who revolved around a fixed centre in a clockwise direction. He suggests that this notion later flourished in Roman Mithraism, as the symbol appears in Mithraic iconography and astronomical representations.
According to the Russian archaeologist Gennady Zdanovich, who studied some of the oldest examples of the symbol in Sintashta culture, the swastika symbolises the universe, representing the spinning constellations of the celestial north pole centred in α Ursae Minoris, specifically the Little and Big Dipper (or Chariots), or Ursa Minor and Ursa Major.Gennady Zdanovich. "О мировоззрении древних жителей «Страны Городов»" . Русский след, 26 June 2017. Likewise, according to René Guénon-the swastika is drawn by visualising the Big Dipper/Great Bear in the four phases of revolution around the pole star.
Comet
In their 1985 book Comet, Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan argue that the appearance of a rotating comet with a four-pronged tail as early as 2,000 years BCE could explain why the swastika is found in the cultures of both the Old World and the . The Han dynasty Book of Silk (2nd century BCE) depicts such a comet with a swastika-like symbol.
Bob Kobres, in a 1992 paper, contends that the swastika-like comet on the Han-dynasty manuscript was labelled a "long-tailed pheasant star" (dixing) because it resembled a bird's foot or footprint. Similar comparisons had been made by J.F. Hewitt in 1907, as well as a 1908 article in Good Housekeeping. Kobres goes on to suggest an association of mythological birds and comets also outside of China.
Four winds
In Native American culture, particularly among the Pima people of Arizona, the swastika is a symbol of the four winds. Anthropologist Frank Hamilton Cushing noted that among the Pima, the symbol of the four winds is made from a cross with the four curved arms (similar to a broken sun cross) and concludes "the right-angle swastika is primarily a representation of the circle of the four wind gods standing at the head of their trails, or directions."Frank Hamilton Cushing: "Observations Relative to the Origin of the Fylfot or Swastika", American Anthropologist vol 9, no. 2, June 1907 p. 335 at JSTOR
Historical uses
Prehistory