The swastika or sauwastika (as a character, 卐 or 卍,
respectively) is a geometrical figure and an ancient religious icon in the
cultures of Eurasia. It is used as a symbol of divinity and spirituality in Indian
religions.
In the Western world, it was a symbol of auspiciousness and
good luck until the 1930s, when it became a feature of Nazi symbolism as an
emblem of Aryan identity. As a result of World War II and the Holocaust, most
people in Europe and the Americas associate it with Nazism and antisemitism.
The word swastika comes from Sanskrit (Devanagari: स्वस्तिक) meaning
'conducive to well-being' or 'auspicious'. In Hinduism, the symbol with arms pointing
clockwise (卐)
is called swastika, symbolizing surya ('sun'), prosperity and good luck, while
the counterclockwise symbol (卍) is called sauvastika, symbolizing night or tantric
aspects of Kali. In Jainism, a swastika
is the symbol for Suparshvanatha – the seventh of 24 Tirthankaras (spiritual
teachers and saviors), while in Buddhism it symbolizes the auspicious footprints
of the Buddha. In several major
Indo-European religions, the swastika symbolizes lightning bolts, representing
the thunder god and the king of the gods, such as Indra in Vedic Hinduism, Zeus
in the ancient Greek religion, Jupiter in the ancient Roman religion, and Thor
in the ancient Germanic religion.
The swastika is an icon which is widely found in both human
history and the modern world. In various
forms, it is otherwise known (in various European languages) as the fylfot,
gammadion, tetraskelion, or cross cramponnée (a term in Anglo-Norman heraldry);
German: Hakenkreuz; French: croix gammée. In China it is named wàn 卐 / 卍 / 萬,
meaning 'all things', pronounced manji in Japanese. A swastika 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 symbol is found in the archeological
remains of the Indus Valley Civilization and Mesopotamia, as well as in early
Byzantine and Christian artwork.
The swastika was adopted by several organizations in
pre–World War I Europe, and later by the Nazi Party and Nazi Germany before
World War II. It was used by the Nazi Party to symbolize German nationalistic
pride. To Jews and the enemies of Nazi Germany, it became a symbol of
antisemitism and terror. In many Western countries, the swastika is
viewed as a symbol of racial supremacism and intimidation because of its
association with Nazism. Reverence for
the swastika symbol in Asian cultures, in contrast to the West's stigmatization
of the symbol, has led to misinterpretations and misunderstandings.
Etymology and
nomenclature
The word swastika has been used in the Indian subcontinent
since 500 BCE.[17] Its appearance in English dates to the 1870s, replacing
gammadion from Greek γαμμάδιον. 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
(Devanagari स्वस्तिक),
which transliterates to svastika under the commonly used IAST transliteration
system, but is pronounced closer to swastika when letters are used with their
English values. The first use of the word swastika in a European text is found
in 1871 with the publications of Heinrich Schliemann, who discovered more than
1,800 ancient samples of the swastika symbol and its variants while digging the
Hisarlik mound near the Aegean Sea coast for the history of Troy. Schliemann
linked his findings to the Sanskrit swastika.
The word swastika is derived from the Sanskrit root swasti,
which is composed of su ('"good, well') and asti ('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
Monier-Williams, a majority of scholars consider it a solar symbol. The sign implies something fortunate, lucky,
or auspicious, and it denotes auspiciousness or well-being.
The earliest known use of the word swastika is in Panini's
Ashtadhyayi which uses it to explain one of the Sanskrit grammar rules, in the
context of a type of identifying mark on a cow's ear. Most scholarship suggests that Panini lived in
or before the 4th-century BCE, possibly in 6th or 5th century BCE.
Other names for the symbol include:
·
tetragammadion (Greek: τετραγαμμάδιον) or cross
gammadion (Latin: crux gammata; French: croix gammée), as each arm resembles
the Greek letter Γ (gamma)
·
hooked
cross (German: Hakenkreuz), angled cross (Winkelkreuz), or crooked cross
(Krummkreuz)
·
cross cramponned, cramponnée, or cramponny in
heraldry, as each arm resembles a crampon or angle-iron (German:
Winkelmaßkreuz)
·
fylfot, chiefly in heraldry and architecture
·
tetraskelion (Greek: τετρασκέλιον), literally
meaning 'four-legged', especially when composed of four conjoined legs (compare
triskelion/triskele [Greek: τρισκέλιον])
·
whirling logs (Navajo, Native American): can
denote abundance, prosperity, healing, and luck[31]
Appearance
Left: the left-facing sauwastika is a sacred symbol in the
Bon and Mahayana Buddhist traditions. Right: the right-facing swastika appears
commonly in Hinduism, Jainism and Sri Lankan Buddhism.
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.
One distinct representation of a swastika, as a double swastika or swastika
made of squares, appears in a Nepalese silver mohar coin of 1685, kingdom of
Patan (NS 805) KM# 337.
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 (卍) and right-facing (卐);
·
left-hand (卍) and right-hand (卐).
The left-facing version is distinguished in some traditions
and languages as a distinct symbol from the right-facing and is called the
"sauwastika".
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
Nazi Hakenkreuz used a 5 × 5 diagonal grid, but with the legs unshortened.
Varieties of
swastikas
·
Croix gammée
·
Kruszwica's mursunsydän
·
Broken sun cross
·
Fylfot
·
Tetraskelion
·
Manji
·
Battersea Shield Thames swastika
·
Nazi Hakenkreuz
·
Sauwastika
·
Gammadion
·
Cross cramponnée
·
Lauburu
·
Double-arm swastika
·
Aztec swastika
Written characters
卍 and 卐 characters.
The sauwastika was adopted as a standard character in
Chinese, "卍"
(pinyin: wàn) and as such entered various other East Asian languages, including
Chinese script. In Japanese the symbol is called "卍" (Hepburn: manji)
or "卍字"
(manji).
The sauwastika 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 latter has a mapping in the original Big5 character
set,[37] but the former does not (although it is in Big5+). In Unicode 5.2, two
swastika symbols and two sauwastikas were added to the Tibetan block: swastika
U+0FD5 ࿕ RIGHT-FACING SVASTI SIGN, U+0FD7 ࿗ RIGHT-FACING SVASTI SIGN WITH DOTS, and sauwastikas U+0FD6 ࿖ LEFT-FACING SVASTI SIGN, U+0FD8 ࿘
LEFT-FACING SVASTI SIGN WITH DOTS.
Meaning of the symbol
European hypotheses of the swastika 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 (axis
mundi), 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 Logos, the Hindu Om, the Chinese
Taiyi, "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, symbolizing the Great
Architect of the Universe of Freemasonic thought.
According to the scholar Reza Assasi, the swastika
represents the north ecliptic North Pole centered 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 that 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 symbolizes the universe, representing the spinning constellations of
the celestial north pole centered in α Ursae Minoris, specifically the Little
and Big Dipper (or Chariots), or Ursa Minor and Ursa Major. Likewise, according to René Guénon the
swastika is drawn by visualizing the Big Dipper/Great Bear in the four phases
of revolution around the pole star.
Comet
Carl Sagan in his book Comet (1985) reproduces a Han-dynasty
Chinese manuscript (the Book of Silk, 2nd century BCE) 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 his 1992 paper Comets and the Bronze Age
Collapse contends that the swastika-like comet on the Han-dynasty silk comet
manuscript was labeled a "long tailed pheasant star" (dixing) because
of its resemblance to a bird's foot or footprint, the latter comparison also
being drawn by J.F.K. Hewitt's observation on page 145 of Primitive Traditional
History: vol. 1. as well as an article concerning carpet decoration in Good
Housekeeping. Kobres goes on to suggest
an association of mythological birds and comets also outside China.
Prehistory
The earliest known swastika is from 10,000 BCE – part of
"an intricate meander pattern of joined-up swastikas" found on a late
Paleolithic figurine of a bird, carved from mammoth ivory, found in Mezine,
Ukraine. It has been suggested that this swastika may be a stylized picture of
a stork in flight. As the carving was
found near phallic objects, this may also support the idea that the pattern was
a fertility symbol.
The Samarra bowl, at the Pergamonmuseum, Berlin. The
swastika in the centre of the design is a reconstruction.
In England, neolithic or Bronze Age stone carvings of the
symbol have been found on Ilkley Moor, such as the Swastika Stone.
Mirror-image swastikas (clockwise and anti-clockwise) have
been found on ceramic pottery in the Devetashka cave, Bulgaria, dated to 6,000
BCE.
Some of the earliest archaeological evidence of the swastika
in the Indian subcontinent can be dated to 3,000 BCE. Investigators have also found seals with
"mature and geometrically ordered" swastikas that date to before the
Indus Valley Civilization (3300–1300 BCE). Their efforts have traced references
to swastikas in the Vedas at about that time. The investigators put forth the
theory that the swastika moved westward from India to Finland, Scandinavia, the
British Highlands and other parts of Europe.
Swastikas have also been found on pottery in archaeological
digs in Africa, in the area of Kush and on pottery at the Jebel Barkal temples,
in Iron Age designs of the northern Caucasus (Koban culture), and in Neolithic China
in the Majiabang, Majiayao, Dawenkou and Xiaoheyan cultures.
Other Iron Age attestations of the swastika can be
associated with Indo-European cultures such as the Illyrians, Indo-Iranians,
Celts, Greeks, Germanic peoples and Slavs. In Sintashta culture's "Country
of Towns", ancient Indo-European settlements in southern Russia, it has
been found a great concentration of some of the oldest swastika patterns.
The swastika is also seen in Egypt during the Coptic period.
Textile number T.231-1923 held at the V&A Museum in London includes small
swastikas in its design. This piece was found at Qau-el-Kebir, near Asyut, and
is dated between CE 300 and 600.
The Tierwirbel (the German for "animal whorl" or
"whirl of animals") is a characteristic motif in Bronze Age Central
Asia, the Eurasian Steppe, and later also in Iron Age Scythian and European
(Baltic and Germanic) culture, showing rotational symmetric arrangement of an
animal motif, often four birds' heads. Even wider diffusion of this
"Asiatic" theme has been proposed, to the Pacific and even North America
(especially Moundville).
Historical use
In Asia, the swastika symbol first appears in the
archaeological record around[55] 3000 BCE in the Indus Valley Civilization. It also appears in the Bronze and Iron Age
cultures around the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. In all these cultures, the
swastika symbol does not appear to occupy any marked position or significance,
appearing as just one form of a series of similar symbols of varying
complexity. In the Zoroastrian religion of Persia, the swastika was a symbol of
the revolving sun, infinity, or continuing creation. It is one of the most common symbols on Mesopotamian
coins.
The icon has been of spiritual significance to Indian
religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. The swastika is a sacred symbol in the Bön
religion, native to Tibet.
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