Saturday, November 23, 2019

History and Meaning of the Swastika (Part I)


The swastika or sauwastika (as a character, or , 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 () is called swastika, symbolizing surya ('sun'), prosperity and good luck, while the counterclockwise symbol () 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  /  / , 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 () and right-facing ();
·         left-hand () and right-hand ().

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
and characters.
The sauwastika was adopted as a standard character in Chinese, "" (pinyin: wàn) and as such entered various other East Asian languages, including Chinese script. In Japanese the symbol is called "" (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 (left-facing) and U+5350 for the swastika (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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