Swastika across cultures

This ancient Indian symbol also appears on objects from cultures as varied as the
Persian, Greek, Chinese, Celt, Hittite and Slav, writes B. N. Goswamy

TO anyone reading this, it would appear odd — it appears a bit odd to me, too — that I should open this short piece on the Swastika with drawing attention to an imperial robe from 18th century China. But that is how I was led to it. For I was intrigued to find representations of that ancient, hoary old, symbol lurking among the folds of a magnificently designed vesture that featured in a recent show of Chinese Imperial robes — ‘Dressed to Rule’ — at Melbourne. Among the luxuriant floral and abstract patterns that fill the garment, there it appeared: that "mystical cross with the extremities of each of the four arms bent at right angles in the same direction", which in our own land we simply speak of as Swastika, or Svastika.

One has known the symbol from one’s childhood when one used to refer to it loosely as ‘Ganesh’. It appeared on account books and manuscripts, on flags and textiles, on mud-walls and floor decorations, on amulets and at the top of letters. The Swastika, it seemed, was everywhere. And was auspicious.

However, the effort to learn more about it now, at this stage, brought with it both surprise and delight. A few things one, of course, knew. Thus, the fact that the word comes from Sanskrit svasti, combining su with asti, and thus means "good being, fortune, or augury", literally in fact, that which is "conducive to well-being". Also the fact that it represents in some manner a cycle, the course of the sun, through its clock-wise orientation, but that the other version of it, with its left-hand or anti-clockwise orientation, was connected with the vama or Shaktic cults. One had seen it as in use from very early times in India: a seal from the Harappan site, Dholavira, has a very clear rendering of it. That it figured not only in Hindu but also in Buddhist and Jain art and literature and practice, one was also aware of. Among the Jainas, for instance, it is one of the ashtamangalas — ‘eight great signs of auspiciousness’ –— and is the designated symbol of the seventh among their 24 tirthankaras — redeemers or saviours — Suparshvanath. It appears again and again in Buddhist art and thought, signifying not only auspiciousness but also infinity: one sees it marked sometimes on the chest of the Buddha, most often as one of the signs that appear on the footprints of the Buddha. These things one knew.

Vaguely, one also was conscious of its having been widely known and used — as a sign, or design, not necessarily as a symbol, and not by the Sanskrit name, Swastika — in the ancient world, appearing on objects from cultures as varied as the Persians, Greeks, Celts, Hittites and Slavs. At the same time one knew that the Swastika had also a very negative association in the more recent European mind, essentially because it stood for the much-hated Nazism, or Fascism, having been adopted by Germany under Adolf Hitler as its symbol. It appeared on the red and black and white flag of the Third Reich — the hakenkreuz inside a circle, at a slight angle even though with the usual right-hand orientation — not only because "those revered colours" were expressive of "our homage to the glorious past", in the Fuehrer’s own words, but also because in the Swastika he saw "the mission of the struggle for the victory of the Aryan man".

I did not know, however, a great many other things about the symbol. The many names under which it was referred to, for one. The Greeks knew it, I learnt, as gammadion, because each arm of it resembled the form of the Greek letter, gamma. Among the old Norsemen, it was called the mundilfari; also Thor’s hammer because of its association with Thor, one of their many gods.

In English heraldry and architectural decoration, it was known as fylfot, meaning ‘four feet’; among the Latvians and Lithuanians as Laima’s cross. In Japan, the sign is always referred to as manji, and in China, where it certainly came from India together with Buddhism, the Swastika is considered to be a Chinese character with the reading of "wan" in Mandarin.

Again, I was not aware of the different theories that seek to explain the incredibly widespread of this sign or symbol. Some part of it is easy to understand: cultural contacts, for instance, such as those in early times between China and India, must have led to it. But independent development is what some scholars believe in. It has been suggested thus that the shape being very simple, it might have been born independently in basket-weaving societies: the repeated design could have been created by the edges of the reeds in a square basket-weave. The ‘collective unconscious’ that C.G. Jung believed in could also, in the thinking of others, have created what is almost a universal symbol or shape. The most ingenious of the explanations comes, however, from Carl Sagan. Basing himself upon an ancient Chinese text that shows comet tail varieties, he speaks of the image of a comet nucleus with four bent arms extending from it, recalling a Swastika. If such 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, the image might have impressed upon the minds of those then living and adopted as a symbol that we know as the Swastika. Unlikely, but interesting.

Whatever the case, it is certain that, at two diametrically opposite ends, the Swastika remains firm in minds: a symbol of light as seen in India, and as one of eddies of darkness in Nazi Germany. Memories of the holocaust remain engraved. As in this little poem by William Heyen (Erika: Poems of the Holocaust), written from the point of view of a Jewish family living in Germany on whose dwelling the dreaded signs appear one night — foreboding persecution and death — painted evidently by National Socialist ruffians:

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