Till now, I have thought of swastika only in the indian context, as just another auspicious symbol. I have never wondered why it is considered so, where it has originated from, and if hundus are the only one to use it. This research made me understand how swastika, an important and widely adopted symbol has been underrated. Honestly, this research was a bit difficult and confusing for me since there was an abundance of information available, which sometimes differed across websites. I found myself astonished by the amount of history attached to it. There is a lot more than what i have been able to accommodate here.
Introduction
Swastika is a symbol that has an Equilateral cross with arms bent at 4 right angles, all in the same rotary direction, usually clockwise. The word “swastika” originated from Sanskrit language: “swa” is “higher self”, “asti” meaning ” being” and “ka” as a suffix, so the translation can be interpreted as “being with higher self”.
It has been found being used in many different ways across the ancient world, signifying numerous meanings.
Various meanings and uses of swastika
The symbol has been used by Hindus, Buddhists and Jains for millennia as an auspicious sign and is commonly assumed to be Indian. Early Western travelers to Asia were inspired by its positive and ancient associations and started using it back home. By the beginning of the 20th Century there was a huge fad for the swastika as a benign good luck symbol. It was enthusiastically adopted in the West as an architectural motif, on advertising and product design.
Most of these benign uses came to a halt in the 1930s as the Nazis rose to power in Germany.
The Nazi use of the swastika stems from the work of 19th Century German scholars translating old Indian texts, who noticed similarities between their own language and Sanskrit. They concluded that Indians and Germans must have had a shared ancestry and imagined a race of white god-like warriors they called Aryans.
For the Jewish people the swastika is a symbol of fear, of suppression, and of extermination.The swastika was banned in Germany at the end of the war.
Origin of swastika
The irony is that the swastika is more European in origin than most people realise. Archaeological finds have long demonstrated that the swastika is a very old symbol, but ancient examples are by no means limited to India. It was used by the Ancient Greeks, Celts, and Anglo-Saxons and some of the oldest examples have been found in Eastern Europe, from the Baltic to the Balkans .
Swastika was used in Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Age cultures
and its probable origin is from Astrology.
The first known archeological Swastika was “Mezine Swastika”, the earliest swastika ever
found was uncovered in Mezine, Ukraine, carved on an ivory figurine (a mammoth tusk), which dates to anincredible 12,000 years.
One of the earliest cultures that are known to have used the Swastika was a Neolithic culture in Southern Europe, in the area (that is now Serbia, Croatia,Bosnia and Herzegovina), known as the Vinca Culture, which dates back around 8,000 years.
One of the oldest known Swastikas was painted on a Paleolithic cave at least 10,000 years
ago.
Fernando Coimbra stated in his paper on Swastika and emphasized its astronomical origin:
“The discovery of a Chinese comet Atlas at Mawangdui, dating from the 4th century BC, is
surely a turning point regarding the interpretation of the swastika. In fact, one of the
depicted comets has the shape of that symbol. This discovery was made in 1978.”
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