SWASTIKA: Symbol Of Blessedness!

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 77, 13 December 1940, Page 7

SWASTIKA: Symbol Of Blessedness!

One Superstition Leads To Another = And Another

T is a symbol of good fortune. It describes, symbolically, the proper method for circumnavigating a shrine, keeping the right hand always turned toward the sacred building. It represents a god who takes the souls of children under his care. Or it can be the felloe of the wheel in movement, representing the culminating Buddhist or Brahmin philosophy. And it appears on the title page of all books published for Rudyard Kipling before Hitler happened. And now it appears marked clearly on all the bombers flying out of Germany over much-bombed Europe, It watched the Poles scattered from their undefended roads, villages and cities. It astonished the dairy herds in Denmark and surprised the unready Norwegians. It was mirrored in the dykes and flooded fields of the Netherlands, and lent horror to the picture of the sky above the refugees streaming out of Belgium, through the Ardennes, across the Meuse, the Somme, round Paris, and all across France. It spun crookedly over London’s crowded dockland and watched the dead of Coventry buried in a common grave. It has been the symbol of many different sorts of worshipping, of tmuch superstition; and now it is the symbol of a mass hysteria that has taken up a whole great nation in its path and swept them out of the bounds of sense and order into the unbounded spaces of chaos and disorder. It is the swastika. VERY cult must have its symbol. For some, when emotion distorts reason, the colour of a shirt must be changed. For others, badges must be worn. And such is the power of thought gone awry that any symbol, any badge, any colour-of material, can be made to represent whatever the wearer wishes. It is all symbolism, and all essentially unreasonable; but it seems to matter a great deal to the people concerned. It is difficult, however, to see exactly | how Hitler decided that the swastika, the emblem of blessedness, was typical of Nazism. Although it may have originated closer home-many Grecian frescoes contain its form as the base of: their design-the swastika travelled: quickly eastwards.

To the Brahmins it came to represent the doctrine of eternal metempsychosis -exactly the sort of thing, we should imagine, which would impress such a victim of his own psychoses as Herr Hitler. Through India generally it is a symbol of good fortune, imprinted commonly on a trader’s books, or above the doorway of a house. Theory of Origin Its ultimate origin is doubtful, but one, theory is that it represented, with its suggestion of a turning movement, the course of the sun, which governed all .sorts of, actions in its turn-the correct method for walking round a temple, for example. In Japan, the Indian name for the God who cares for Children (Bodhisattva Kshitigarbha) was shortened, very conveniently,. to Jizo, and the swastika appeared again as Jizo’s symbol. Of this reference, Herr Hitler probably had not heard. Although it must be remembered that most of his actions are intended to protect the peoples he bombs, kills, starves, and despoils, including children whose souls the Japanese believe to be in the care of Jizo. Kipling was Fascinated Kipling’s reason for having it on all his books was probably that he saw it so often and was always so engrossed in the metaphysical eastern philosophy which it represented. Of this it is easy to find an example. In " Kim," his wise old lama talks about the Wheel of Life as often as the Irish swear "by the Powers of Darkness Below." His native characters are always philosophising about Kismet, and in "Kim" it is the mission of the lama to travel until he finds an imagined sacred river whose waters will release him from the inescapable destiny towards which the Wheel carries all mankind. Kipling’s publishers (Macmillan) have removed the symbol from their title pages since Hitler adopted it. The ‘form of swastika derives from the simple square cross which probably represented man’s attempt to rationalise his superstitious regard for the sky and the heavens by dividing them in his thought and his symbolism into four quarters. But this was a stationary device, and man was always most anxious that the stars should appear regularly each night, the sun regularly each day, the crops and the seasons, the rain and the dry, all in their due rotation. So the plain. cross was given wings to help it, turn as the. sun turned when they in. their northern hemisphere faced it looking south-to the right, or ‘clockwise. With four extra arms attached in this fashion, the cross became an excellet representation of movement. In some varieties the arms became curved, and the effect of movement was intensified. When it:turned to the left the swas-

tika represented curses. Hitler had heard of that, and turned it to the right. Not Semetic For Nazi Germany it has been accepted (but only by the misled disciples of Professor Rosenberg) as a symbol having an essentially Aryan origin. Perhaps the reasoning here is that it must be Aryan since it was never Semetic; just as Hitler probably reasoned that Czechoslovakia must be German since it was never Chinese. In that respect, their historical justification is correct; the swastika was never used as a symbol by Semetic peoples. The solar or heavenly cults of ancient Egypt had the winged disk for their emblem. The swastika occurred in the early civilisations of Crete, Troy, Cyprus. Pottery from the lands bordering the Aegean carried it commonly, and it was carried on from these peoples through into the art of Hellenic times. Specimens of it have been found at a non-Aryan place called Susa, long before the Persians, first Aryan representatives there, penetrated Iran. Even in the very ancient civilisations of America before Columbus, the swastika was in fairly common. use. And wherever it was in use it meant, by some means or another, that the heavens revolved and brought life with each revolution. It was the symbol of all blessing, for all races, of all colours. But superstition is a very adaptable affair, and can adapt its symbols to its thought. The superstitious Nazi needed something a little more divinely obscure than a brown shirt to colour his misdeeds in his imagination. The swastika was handy, and he adopted it. In Retaliation However, what one superstition can do, another can undo. In retaliation for the Nazi superstition, we are already developing many of our own. The writer came across a curious one quite recently. It is founded, as so many of these curiosities are, on a curious interpretation of a Bible passage. In the Book of Revelation, Chapter 13, the Beast and the Mark of the Beast are described. The chapter contains the famous passages: He that leadeth into captivity shall g0 into captivity; He that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword, Here is the penitence and ay faith of saints. And: . And he causeth all ... to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: and that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

But it is from the last verse (18) that the Mark of the the Beast is discovered metaphorically imprinted on a modern character. The verse is: Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six. With this magic number Hitler is easily discovered as the villain of the piece. The recipe is this: Write the alphabet down the length of a sheet of paper. Number each letter, starting with 100 for A. It will now be found that the letters in Hitler’s name are represented numerically as follows: 104 107 108 111 117 119 HOH ir by Hitler = 666 It was pretty clever of Hitler to adopt the symbol of the God who cares for the souls of small children; but we seer to have countered him to good effect.

THID