Encyclopedia
- For the town in Ontario, see Swastika, Ontario.
The
swastika is an
equilateral cross with its arms bent at
right angles in either left-facing or right-facing direction. The swastika is a sacred symbol in
Hinduism,
Buddhism and
Jainism. The
Hindu version is often decorated with a dot in each quadrant.
However, in the Western world, it is most widely known and used as a symbol of
Nazism and this political association has eclipsed its historical status as the
fylfot.
It is traditionally oriented so that a main line is horizontal, though it is occasionally rotated at forty-five degrees.
Overview
The motif 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 . 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. 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 ,
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 , 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- , 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 suffix
-tika also literally means
mark; therefore a sometimes alternate name for swastika in India is
shubhtika . The word first appears in the Classical Sanskrit .
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 , as each arm resembles a crampon or angle-iron.
- cross gammadion, tetragammadion or just gammadion, as each arm resembles the Greek letter G .
- fylfot .
- hooked cross ; Slovak: hákový krí)
- sun wheel , , a name also used as a synonym for the sun cross
- tetraskelion, Greek "four legged", especially when composed of four conjoined legs
- 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. The Swastika shape appears in Icelandic grimoires wherein it is named Ţórshamar.
- thunder cross
- twisted cross
- unexpected cross or highlander cross , swarge, swarzyca,
History
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
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.
Bob Kobres in 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 , 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.
In the
Early Bronze Age, it appears as part of the "
Indus script" and on pottery found in
Sintashta .
Swastika-like symbols also appear in Bronze and
Iron Age designs of the northern
Caucasus , and
Azerbaijan, as well as of
Scythians and
Sarmatians . 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 ,
Mithra's Wheel , 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
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" . 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 National Socialist German Workers Party , also known as 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
|
|-
|
|-
|
|}
Geometrically, the swastika can be regarded as an irregular
icosagon or 20-sided
polygon. The arms are of varying width and are often rectilinear . However, the proportions of the Nazi swastika were fixed: they were based on a 5x5 grid.
Characteristic is the 90°
rotational symmetry and chirality, hence the absence of reflectional
symmetry, and the existence of two versions which are each other's mirror image.
The mirror-image forms are often described as:
"Left-facing" and "right-facing" are used mostly consistently. Looking at an upright swastika, the upper arm clearly faces towards
the viewer's left or right . The other two descriptions are ambiguous as it is unclear if they refer to the direction of the bend in each arm or to the implied rotation of the symbol. If the latter, whether the arms lead or trail remains unclear. The terms are used inconsistently which is confusing and may obfuscate an important point, that the rotation of the swastika may have symbolic relevance.
Nazi
ensigns had a through and through image, so each version was present on one side, but the
Nazi flag on land was right-facing on both sides .
The swastika is, after the simple equilateral cross , the next most commonly found version of the cross.
Seen as a cross, the four lines emanating from the center point to the four
cardinal directions. The most common association is with the
Sun. Other proposed correspondences are to the visible rotation of the night sky in the
Northern Hemisphere around
Polaris.
Sauwastika
The name
sauwastika is sometimes given for the supposedly "evil", left-facing, form of the swastika . A common myth is that the left-facing swastika is generally regarded as evil in Hindu tradition. This is because the much more common form in India is the right-facing swastika. Indians of all faiths sometimes use the symbol in both orientations - mostly for symmetry. Buddhists, outside of India, generally use the left-facing swastika over the right-facing swastika although, again, both can be used. Despite this, the misconception that the left-facing swastika is evil is widespread, even among some contemporary Indian communities.
Some contemporary writers — Servando González, for example — confuse matters even further by asserting that the right-facing swastika, used by the
Nazis is in fact the "evil" sauwastika. This inversion – whether intentional or not – might derive from a desire to prove that the Nazis' use of the right-handed swastika was expressive of their "evil" intent. But the notion that
Adolf Hitler deliberately inverted the "good left-facing" swastika is wholly unsupported by any historical evidence.
Art and architecture
The swastika is common as a design motif in current
Hindu architecture and Indian artwork as well as in ancient Western
architecture, frequently appearing in
mosaics,
friezes, and other works across the
ancient world. Ancient Greek architectural designs are replete with interlinking swastika motifs. Related symbols in classical Western architecture include the
cross, the three-legged triskele or
triskelion and the rounded
lauburu. The swastika symbol is also known in these contexts by a number of names, especially
gammadion.
In
Chinese,
Korean, and
Japanese art, the swastika is often found as part of a repeating pattern. One common pattern, called
sayagata in Japanese, comprises left and right facing swastikas joined by lines. As the negative space between the lines has a distinctive shape, the sayagata pattern is sometimes called the "key fret" motif in English.
The swastika symbol was found extensively in the ruins of the ancient city of
Troy.
In
Greco-Roman art and architecture, and in
Romanesque and
Gothic art in the West, isolated swastikas are relatively rare, and the swastika is more commonly found as a repeated element in a border or tessellation. The swastika often represented perpetual motion, reflecting the design of a rotating windmill or watermill. A design of interlocking swastikas is one of several
tessellations on the floor of the cathedral of
Amiens, France. A border of linked swastikas was a common Roman architectural motif, and can be seen in more recent buildings as a neoclassical element. A swastika border is one form of
meander, and the individual swastikas in such border are sometimes called
Greek keys.
The in
Yuma, Arizona was built in 1905 by the
U.S. Reclamation Department and is decorated with a row of swastikas.
The
Canadian artist has attempted to rehabilitate the "".
Swastika Tiles
Ceramic tiles with a swastika design have appeared in many parts of the world including the United State in the early part of the 20th century. When originally installed, the tiles are typically a minor decorative element. The durable tiles have been a source of controversy when they are assumed to be
Nazi symbols.
Swastika tiles adorn the
New Jersey Statehouse in Trenton, built in the 1930's. A in The Press of Atlantic City notes that the statehouse tiles were created by the local Mueller Tile Mosaic Company, using an innovative technique that combined glazing and deep carving to create a photographic-like sense of depth. The tiles were installed throughout the US and Canada.
Reprints of tile catalogs, including the 1930 Mueller Tile
Faience Inserts catalogue are available from the non-profit
California based 's website. At least two other US tile manufacturers also produced swastika tiles among their many designs. The Tile Heritage Foundation website features sample pages from more than 90 tile catalogs, including two that include swastika designs. The 1920 Wheatley Pottery Company of
Cincinatti Ohio, and the 1928 catalog from the Cambridge-Wheatley Company of
Covington, Kentucky, which marketed Wheatley tiles.
- The Mueller tiles with swastika design can be found at the in Los Angeles.
- In May of 2006, five terra cotta tiles were removed from in St. Cloud Minnesota, the oldest parish in the community. The upper church, constructed in the late 1920's, included a number of decorative tiles including a series of ten that depicted ancient forms of the cross. Located near the eaves, the tiles represented the crux gammata, also known as the Gammadion, "hooked cross". The swastika tiles alternated with a related design featuring the Lauburu or "Basque cross". The building was designed in the Italian Romanesque style by a local architect who added Art Deco features, including the ancient symbols, sunburst brick patterns and zig zag details.
- Three of the tiles were destroyed in the process of removal, one was put on permanent display at the church. The removal was prompted in part by criticism from some current and former faculty at St. Cloud State University, where featured a series of articles, including a that claimed that the swastika by 1920 was already "the symbol of Aryan conquest and mastery". At the time of construction, the church was under the control of the Benedictine Monks at St. Johns University in Collegeville, who arrived in Central Minnesota in 1851 from Pennsylvania.
- According to documents at the in St. Cloud, approximately ten years before St. Mary's was designed, there were 2000 local residents from the heavily German Catholic community serving in the US military, fighting against Germany. President Wilson wrote a letter to the local Catholic bishop thanking him for his support of the war effort.
- The removal coincided with the sesquicentennial anniversary for the city, St. John's University and St. Mary's church.
- Other Catholic Cathedrals that include swastika tiles among their decorations include: , Wheeling, West Virginia, a Romanesque design by architect Edward J. Weber of Pittsburgh, completed in 1925. , built between 1868 and 1925 overlooking the port city of Cobh
...
Ireland. ,
New Zealand, constructed in the 1880's.
- In November 1998 the Rome, New York reported that swastika tiles were removed from the Gansevoort Elementary School where they had survived on a school floor for 84 years. The responded: "School officials lost a chance to enlighten the public. A recommendation earlier this year by a committee of Gansevoort staff and parents to "leave the floor as is" and install a display about the history of the swastika was ignored. Instead, at the risk of being viewed by a small, uninformed segment of the community as being politically incorrect, they knuckled under to pressure rather than educate. How unfortunate!"
- The World Jewish Briefing that Commissioners in Idaho Falls ordered swastika tiles removed from a courthouse floor that was built in 1921. The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
- Swastika tiles are visible at the San Diego , which opened in 1925.
- A swastika design is visible on the exterior of the Detroit, Michigan downtown public library, built in 1931. A "They were a popular item in certain Deco designs, and many are used in architecture throughout Downtown Detroit. They also can be seen quite often on floor tiles in church buildings."
- "When shown in a counterclockwise direction, an ancient religious symbol that represented a sign of good luck."
- "Prior to the Nazis co-opting this symbol, it was known as a good luck symbol and was used by various religious groups. Hitler made the Nazi swastika unique to his party by reversing the normal direction of the symbol so that it appeared to spin clockwise."
- Using the ADL definition, most of the tiles listed above would be classified as extremist symbols.
Religion and mythology
Hinduism
In
Hinduism, the two symbols represent the two forms of the creator god
Brahma: facing right it represents the
evolution of the universe , facing left it represents the involution of the universe . It is also seen as pointing in all four directions and thus signifies stability and groundedness. Its use as a sun symbol can first be seen in its representation of
Surya, the Hindu Sun God. The swastika is considered extremely holy and auspicious by all Hindus, and is regularly used to decorate all sorts of items to do with Hindu culture. It is used in all Hindu yantras and religious designs. Throughout the subcontinent of India it can be seen on the sides of temples, written on religious scriptures, on gift items, and on letterhead. The Hindu God
Ganesh is often shown as sitting on a lotus flower on a bed of swastikas.
The swastika is found all over
Hindu temples, signs, altars, pictures and iconography where it is sacred. It is used in all Hindu weddings, festivals, ceremonies, houses and doorways, clothing and jewelry, motor transport and even decorations on food items like cakes and pastries. Amongst the Hindus of
Bengal, it is common to see the name "swastika" applied to a slightly different symbol, which has the same significance as the common swastika, and both symbols are used as auspicious signs. This symbol looks something like a stick figure of a human being. "Swastika" is a common given name amongst Bengalis and a prominent literary magazine in Calcutta is called the
Swastika. The stick figure, however, is not mainstream usage in India.
The
Aum symbol is also sacred in Hinduism. While Aum is representative of a single primordial tone of creation, the Swastika is a pure geometrical mark and has no syllabic tone associated with it. The Swastika is one of the 108 symbols of
Lord Vishnu and represents the sun's rays without which there would be no life.
Buddhism
Buddhism was founded by a Hindu Prince and has thus inherited the swastika. These two symbols are included, at least since the Liao Dynasty, as part of the
Chinese language, the symbolic sign for the character ? or ? meaning "all", and "eternality" and as ? which is seldom used. A swastika marks the beginning of many Buddhist scriptures. The swastikas appear on the chest of some
statues of
Gautama Buddha and is often incised on the soles of the feet of the Buddha in statuary. Because of the association with the right facing swastika with
Nazism, Buddhist swastikas after the mid-20th century are almost universally left-facing: ?. This form of the swastika is often found on Chinese food packaging to signify that the product is
vegetarian and can be consumed by strict Buddhists. It is often sewn into the collars of Chinese children's clothing to protect them from evil spirits.
In 1922, the Chinese syncretist movement Daoyuan founded the philanthropic association
Red Swastika Society in imitation of the
Red Cross. The association was very active in China during the 1920s and the 1930s.
The swastika used in Buddhist art and scripture is known in
Japanese as a
manji , and represents Dharma, universal harmony, and the balance of opposites. When facing left, it is the
omote manji, representing love and mercy. Facing right, it represents strength and intelligence, and is called the
ura manji. Balanced
manji are often found at the beginning and end of Buddhist scriptures .
Jainism
Jainism 
