Swastika
The swastika is a 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. In the Western world, it is predominantly associated with the Nazi Party, which appropriated and widely displayed it on the flag of Germany and in other official capacities. This appropriation continues with the symbol's popularity among neo-Nazis around the world. The swastika was and continues to be used as a symbol of divinity and spirituality in several Indian religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. It generally takes the form of a cross, the arms of which are of equal length and perpendicular to the adjacent arms, each bent midway at a right angle.
The English word swastika is originally of the Sanskrit language. In Hinduism, the right-facing symbol is called swastika, symbolizing surya, prosperity, and good luck; while the left-facing symbol is sometimes called sauvastika, 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. 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, as well as 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, but this did not change public perceptions about the symbol until 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. However, the swastika remains a symbol of good luck and prosperity in Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and other communities across Nepal, India, Thailand, Mongolia, Sri Lanka, China, and Japan, and carries various other meanings for peoples around the world, such as the Akan, Hopi, Navajo, and Tlingit peoples. It is also commonly used in Hindu marriage ceremonies and Diwali celebrations.
Etymology and nomenclature
The word swastika is derived from the Sanskrit root swasti, which is composed of su 'good, well' and asti 'is; it is; there is'. The word swasti occurs frequently in the Vedas as well as in classical literature, meaning 'health, luck, success, prosperity', and it was commonly used as a greeting. The final ka is a common suffix that could have multiple meanings.According to 19th century Sanskrit scholar Monier Monier-Williams, a majority of scholars consider the swastika to originally be 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. It was derived from the Sanskrit term, 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 with the publications of Heinrich Schliemann, who discovered more than 1,800 ancient instances of swastikas and variants while digging the Hisarlik mound near the Aegean Sea coast for the history of Troy. Schliemann linked his findings to the Sanskrit swastika.
By the 19th century, the term swastika was adopted into English, replacing the previous gammadion from Greek γαμμάδιον. 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 croix gamméea cross with arms shaped like the Greek letter gamma. 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 among European scholars by Eugène Burnouf in 1852 and taken up by Schliemann in Ilios, based on a letter from Max Müller that quotes Burnouf. The term sauwastika is used in the sense of 'backward swastika' by Eugène Goblet d'Alviella : "In India it bears the name of swastika, when its arms are bent towards the right, and sauwastika when they are turned in the other direction."
Other names for the symbol include:
- tetragammadion or cross gammadion, as each arm resembles the Greek letter Γ
- hooked cross, 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
- tetraskelion, literally meaning 'four-legged', especially when composed of four conjoined legs
- ugunskrusts, cross of branches, cross of Laima)
- whirling logs : can denote abundance, prosperity, healing, and luck
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 and right-facing or right-hand.The compact swastika can be seen as a chiral irregular icosagon with fourfold 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.
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 and U+5350 for the swastika 卐 ; The latter has a mapping in the original Big5 character set, but the former does not. 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 in conjunction with 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, which appeared during the Neolithic.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 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 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 Ursa Minor and Ursa Major. 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 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" because of its resemblance to 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.