THE SWASTIKA— A MYSTIC SYMBOL OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN

Manawatu Times, Volume 64, Issue 308, 30 December 1939, Page 12

THE SWASTIKA— A MYSTIC SYMBOL OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN

JQURING these troubled years It may well be said that the shadow of the swastika is looming over Europe. As the sign of Nazi-ism it has risen inescapably into the world’s limelight. It is painted on a thousand buildings, wrought into badges, carried on millions of uniformed arms. More than any other symbol, except perhaps the cross, it has become known to the furthermost corners of the earth. Whence did it come? Who originated this crj’ptic intermingling of line s and called it “swastika”? And for what does it stand? Strangely enough, no one knows. There is a mystery about the swastika that will probably never be lifted. The German nation claims that it is an Aryan symbol, but that is only a limited chapter in its incredibly long history. Do you know that it ha s been found inscribed on the walls of Stone Age caverns, that Bronze Age men had it beaten into shields, that terra-cotta work of the first civilisations is decorated with its crossed arms? Strangely enough to us who know it a s symbolic of Germany, it is only in recent years that it has been used in modern Europe. The name “swastika” is a Sanskrit one, meaning “good luck,” but long before this name was given to it it was known by others. Our ancestors the Saxons called it “fylfot”; in Greece it was the gammadion, and in the Roman Empire the crux ansata. This “good luck” meafcing is a common one, possibly the original one, in the dark ages when the swastika was first designed. In spite of theory, there is no satisfactory thesis as to the idea first behind the swastika. Practically every nation has known it and used it extensively at some time of its history. Maybe it dates back to the time when all races were one, in which case it open s avenues extending back hundreds of thousands of years to the dawn of civilisation. Possibly it was invented independently by primitive artists in different parts of the world; perhaps successive emigrations brought it to the tribes who already did not know it. But wherever it is found, and its knowledge extends from the Red Indians to deepest Asia, its shape is always basically the same, and it always means “good luck.” The swastika may certainly claim the name of the world’s most mysterious symbol. In China it is a definite hieroglyphic. Enclosed in a circle, it becomes a pictograph meaning “the sun.” It is reverently painted on sacred and lonourable things and embroidered on he garments of high caste people. In India it is widely used in the cerenonies of two conflicting religions, 3uddhist and Brahmin. You often see it in metal work from Indian craftsnen, and occasionally around the base of a statue of Buddha. Indian children have it painted on their shaven heads as a mark of consecration and protection. In Japan it is often used in it s ipost common form, but in another shape it is as much a symbol of Japan as the

far-famed rising sun. Looked at closely the tomoye, the banner of Japanese universities, is a graceful and sweeping form. It is like two commas tail tc head, forming a bi-coloured circle, and is the universal sign of triumph and honour. More than any other people, the lone extinct Minoan civilisation used the swastika. Thousands of years ago they populated Crete and the other Greek islands, passing mysteriously away, leaving only buried towns, barbaric pottery and a thousand traces of their long-established civilisation. Terracotta vases of that period are decorated with the swastika as we know it today, giving rise to wonderful conjectures as to its incredible antiquity. On the walls of houses in buried Pompeii we find it again, and, formal, ised and conventionalised, in the familiar “Greek key pattern.” Coming back to Britain, there is the odd threecornered badge of the Isle of Man. This is composed of three human legs conjoined. The same symbol is, by the way, used as an emblem in the island of Sicily. No one really knows where the Three Legs of Man came from, but is it not likely that this symbol, too, is but a variation of the ever-recurring swastika? When Columbus first met the Red j Indians on a North American shore, they offered him beaded belts and head bands and quill embroidery, the main pattern of which was a geometrically designed swastika. It was not new amongst them. Their women had been drawing swastikas for anything up to 1000 years before Columbus’ ship reached the Bahamas. In Mexico it was the same. Practically every clay pot was ornamented by a crude “crux ansata.” In Peru, land of unconsidered jewels, the emerald and the diamond were passed by for the carved wooden swastika, which brought good fortune as well as the protection of the gods. It is generally held that the sign was introduced into America by red-skinned emigrants from Asia. The North American Indian is now the last remnant of an unknown prehistoric race, but it is practically certain that his ancestors were Asiatic. If the swastika did originate in one centre it was probably from Central Europe in the late Stone Age period. From this centre it spread across Asia, and was carried, as related before, with the emigrating red-skinned tribes to America. It is an interesting question whether this migration was before or after the introduction of Buddhist teaching, for in prehistoric Indian burial mounds there have been found small shell carvings of a sitting figure remarkably like Buddha. This gives rise to the thought that possibly the swastika was originally Buddhist—but theories as to its source are endless, and whether it represents the sun, a running man, or some primitive thing of which even the legend has been lost, we shall never know.