SWASTIKA’S ORIGIN

Greymouth Evening Star, 15 January 1941, Page 8

SWASTIKA’S ORIGIN

THE CROOKED CROSS. For us in these latter days the swastika has gained a sinister meaning. It led the mob in many a pogrom; it waved over the bonfire of the books that opened Hitler’s reign; it is the marking on the wings of the mechanical birds of prey that sweep upon our cities. But, as several recent letters have reminded us, never before and nowhere else in the wide world has the swastika carried these evil associations. It is widely used in India in ceremonies of benediction and consecration. The Buddhist missionaries who bore it thence to China and Japan felt that its meaning fitted their gentle religion. What was it before the Nazis distorted it and made it the militant symbol of their racial pride and racial hatred. To begin with, it was almost certainly a cross, as its names in the French and German languages recognise (croix gammee and hackenenkreuz). Archaeologists have discovered it in Troy and Crete in the ruins of civilisations that flourished a thousand years and more before the Crucifixion. The simple equal-limbed cross, of which it is in all likelihood a development, must be the oldest and the most widely diffused of all religious symbols. But why was the cross elaborated into a swastika? That Sanskrit word by the way, is used both for the simple cross and its more complicated form. Religion in those days was nothing if not practical. It was social magic. Men had no assurance that the Great Bear, or, in a reformed and enlightened age, the sun, would without encouragement continue by their revolutions to make the seasons. Something had to be done about it. The essential thing was by human agency to impart to them a circular motion. You might, as German peasants lately did, encourage the sun by rolling a blazing wheel or barrel down a hill. You might light candles or bonfires. But perhaps the most widely approved method was to dance or to walk in a processional circle. It had to ,be done, of course, the right way round, with, the sun, or, as moderns say, clockwise.

TWO DIRECTIONS. The swastika is the sign of this magical circular movement. Look at it: it visibly turns round —an effect intensified in its curved varieties. But we must never forget that there are two swastikas: one looks to the left with curses, the other to the right with blessings. To call it a “sign” is an inadequate description. One guesses that it may have originated in these round dances or circular ritual movements. But one must not think of the swastika as a mere sign in a primitive dance-notation. It was a prayer that ensured its own fulfilment. To paint it on a Trojan pot or to carve it on a Polynesian canoe was to ensure their luck. On a Greek vase it often indicated the sanctity of an animal, much as the solar halo indicated a saint in the later ages. When a priest wore it embroidered on his robe, it bestowed on him the divinity of the god he represented. You may see it on a Chinese statue of the Budda, his godhead manifest. It may have protected bales of merchandise from theft, for like the cross it brought down Heaven to earth. It was the sky-world, not static, as the cross represented it, but moving and dynamic, divinity in action, charged with blessings.

Who first drew down the heavens to earth in this revolving cross? The question haS not been answered yet with certainty, but some scholar’s spade may solve it to-morrow. . In the negative sense the speculations from which Hitler drew his shoddy creed were not mistaken. The distribution of the swastika is all but world-wide, but there is a singular group of exceptions. It was unknown, up to a relatively late period, in Egypt, Sumeria and Babylon, though the pre-dynastic Egyptians had the equal cross. What the solar cult used in Egypt was not the swastika but the winged disc. This holds of the entire area of the great river cultures, and neither the Jews nor any other Semitic people knew the swastika.

To that extent the Nazis are not mistaken. But to conclude that the “Aryans” (meaning people who spoke an Indo-European tongue) either originated this symbol, or have any special right of ownership in it, is the merest nonsense. It was-popu-lar in the early civilisations of the Eastern Mediterranean, in Minoan Crete, in Troy and Cyprus. It occurs on pottery all over the Aegean. From these sunny and genial cultures it passed to the Dorian builders of the Mycenaean Age and with much else to" the art and faith of Hellenic times. The Hittites, who traded with Crete, were fond of it, but, as Professor Sayce guessed, they may have brought it with them into Asia Minor. It was at home in'the Caucasus. A single specimen has been found at Susa on a painted vase that belongs to the earliest proto-Elamite period —long before the Aryan Persians penetrated Iran. This may be the oldest swastika. —H. C. Brailsford, in “The New Statesman and Nation.”