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The noun swastika has one meaning:
Meaning #1: the official emblem of the Nazi Party and the German Third Reich; a cross with the arms bent at right angles in a clockwise direction
Synonym: Hakenkreuz
The swastika (Sanskrit: स्वस्तिक) is an equilateral cross with its arms bent at right angles either clockwise or counterclockwise (卐). It is traditionally oriented so that a main line is horizontal, though it is occasionally rotated at forty-five degrees, and the Hindu version is often decorated with a dot in each quadrant.
Overview
The swastika is a holy symbol in Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism. In the West, it is more widely known as symbol of Nazism.
The motif seems to have first been used by early inhabitants of Eurasia. However, it was also adopted in Native American cultures, seemingly independently. The swastika is now used universally in religious and civil ceremonies in India. Most Indian temples, wedding, festivals and celebrations are decorated with swastikas. The symbol was introduced to Southeast Asia by Hindu kings and remains an integral part of Balinese Hinduism to this day, and a common sight in Indonesia. By the early 20th century it was widely used worldwide, and was regarded as a symbol of good luck and auspiciousness.
Since the rise of the National Socialist German Workers Party and Adolf Hitler, the swastika has been associated with fascism, racism (white supremacy), World War II, and the Holocaust in much of the Western world. Before this, it was particularly well-recognized in Europe from the archaeological work of Heinrich Schliemann, who discovered the symbol in the site of ancient Troy and who associated it with the ancient migrations of Indo-European ("Aryan") peoples.[1] Nazi use derived from earlier German völkisch movements, for which the swastika was a symbol of "Aryan" identity, a concept that came to be equated by theorists like Alfred Rosenberg with a Nordic master race originating in northern Europe. The swastika remains a core symbol of Neo-Nazi groups, and is also regularly used by activist groups to signify the supposed Nazi-like behaviour of organizations and individuals they oppose.
Etymology and alternative names
Boreyko Coat of Arms of Polish nobility.The word swastika is derived from the Sanskrit स्वस्तिक, svastika, meaning any lucky or auspicious object, and in particular a mark made on persons and things to denote good luck. It is composed of su- (cognate with Greek ευ-), meaning "good, well" and asti a verbal abstract to the root as "to be"; svasti thus means "well-being". The suffix -ka forms a diminutive, and svastika might thus be translated literally as "little thing associated with well-being", corresponding roughly to "lucky charm", or "thing that is auspicious".[2] The suffix -tika also literally means mark; therefore a sometimes alternate name for swastika in India is shubhtika (literally good mark). The word first appears in the Classical Sanskrit (in the Ramayana and Mahabharata epics).
Alternative historical English spellings of the Sanskrit word include suastika and svastica. Alternative names for the shape are:
Black Spider, to various peoples in middle and western Europe.
crooked cross
cross cramponned, ~nnée, or ~nny (in heraldry), as each arm resembles a crampon or angle-iron. (Compare Winkelmaßkreuz in German.)
cross gammadion, tetragammadion or just gammadion, as each arm resembles the Greek letter Γ (gamma). (Compare croiz gammée in Old French and croix gammée in French; cruz gamada in Spanish.)
fylfot (meaning "four feet", chiefly in heraldry and architecture). (See Fylfot for a discussion of the etymology.)
hooked cross, (Dutch: hakenkruis,Serbian: kukasti krst, Icelandic: Hakakross German: Hakenkreuz, Finnish: hakaristi, Norwegian: Hakekors Italian: croce uncinata Romanian: Cruce încârligată and Swedish: Hakkors, Danish: Hagekors, Hungarian: horogkereszt)
sun wheel (German Sonnenrad), a name also used as a synonym for the sun cross.
tetraskelion, Greek "four legged", especially when composed of four conjoined legs (compare triskelion).
Thor's hammer, from its supposed association with Thor, the Norse god of thunder, but this may be a misappropriation of a name that properly belongs to a Y-shaped or T-shaped symbol. (See Thomas Wilson, below.) - The Swastika shape appears in Icelandic grimoires where in it is named Þórshamar
thunder cross (Latvian: perkonkrusts)
cross surprise or highlander cross (Polish : krzyzyk niespodziany lub/oraz goralski krzyz)
History
The earliest swastika-like symbols preserved appear on pottery dating to the 5th millennium BC, as part of the "Vinca script". Pottery dating to ca. 2000 BC found at Sintashta is also decorated with the swastika symbol [3]. Swastika-like symbols also appear in Bronze and Iron Age designs of the northern Caucasus (Koban culture), and Azerbayjan, as well as of Scythians and Sarmatians [4]. In all these cultures, the swastika symbol does not appear to occupy any marked position or significance, but appears as just one form of a series of similar symbols of varying complexity.
In antiquity, the swastika was used extensively by Hittites,[5] Celts and Greeks, among others. It occurs in other Asian, European, African and Native American cultures – sometimes as a geometrical motif, sometimes as a religious symbol. The swastika is the sacred symbol in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism.
The ubiquity of the swastika symbol is easily explained by it being a very simple symbol that will arise independently when people incise patterns on pottery or stone. Other theories attempt to establish a connection via cultural diffusion or an explanation along the lines of Carl Jung's collective unconscious.
part of the Han dynasty "silk comet atlas"Yet another explanation is suggested by Carl Sagan in his book Comet. Sagan reproduces an ancient Chinese manuscript 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.
The swastika symbol is sacred in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, both dating from about the sixth century BC. In Hinduism, the swastika symbolizes, in various contexts: luck, the sun, Brahma, or the concept of samsara. Buddhism in particular enjoyed great success, spreading eastward and taking hold in southeast Asia, China, Korea and Japan by the end of the first millennium. The use of the swastika by the indigenous Bön faith of Tibet, as well as syncretic religions, such as Cao Dai of Vietnam and Falun Gong of China, is thought to be borrowed from Buddhism as well. Similarly, the existence of the swastika as a solar symbol among the Akan civilization of southwest Africa may have been the result of cultural transfer along the African slave routes around AD 1500.
The existence of the swastika symbol in the Americas is a clear challenge to the diffusion theory. While some have proposed that the swastika was secretly transferred to North America by an early seafaring civilization on Eurasia, a separate but parallel development of religious symbolism is considered the most likely explanation.
Adoption of the swastika in the West
This Iranian necklace was excavated from Kaluraz, Guilan,first millennium BCE, National Museum of Iran.
The discovery of the Indo-European language group in the 1790s led to a great effort by archaeologists to link the pre-history of European peoples to the ancient Aryans (Indo-Iranians). Following his discovery of objects bearing the swastika in the ruins of Troy, Heinrich Schliemann consulted two leading Sanskrit scholars of the day, Emile Burnouf and Max Müller. Schliemann concluded that the Swastika was a specifically Indo-European symbol. Later discoveries of the motif among the remains of the Hittites and of ancient Iran seemed to confirm this theory. This idea was taken up by many other writers, and the swastika quickly became popular in the West, appearing in many designs from the 1880s to the 1920s.
The religious meanings of the symbol were subverted in the early twentieth century when it was adopted as the emblem of the National Socialist German Workers Party. This association occurred because Nazism stated that the historical Aryans were the forefathers of modern Germans and then proposed that, because of this, the subjugation of the world by Germany was desirable, and even predestined. The swastika was used as a convenient symbol to emphasize this mythical Aryan-German correspondence. Since World War II, some Westerners see the swastika as solely a Nazi symbol, leading to incorrect assumptions about its pre-Nazi use and confusion about its sacred religious status in Hinduism.
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