The Swastika

The swastika is an extremely powerful symbol. The Nazis used it to murder millions of people, but for centuries it had positive meanings. What is the history of the swastika? Does it now represent good or evil?
The Oldest Known Symbol
The swastika is an ancient symbol that has been used for over 3,000 years. (That even predates the ancient Egyptian symbol, the Ankh!) Artifacts such as pottery and coins from ancient Troy show that the swastika was a commonly used symbol as far back as 1000 BCE.
During the following thousand years, the image of the swastika was used by many cultures around the world, including in China, Japan, India, and southern Europe. By the Middle Ages, the swastika was a well known, if not commonly used, symbol but was called by many different names:
* China - wan
* England - fylfot
* Germany - Hakenkreuz
* Greece - tetraskelion and gammadion
* India - swastika
Though it is not known for exactly how long, Native Americans also have long used the symbol of the swastika.
Archaeological evidence of swastika-shaped ornaments dates from the Neolithic period. An ancient symbol, it occurs mainly in the cultures that are in modern day India and the surrounding area, sometimes as a geometrical motif and sometimes as a religious symbol. It has long been widely used in major world religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism.
The swastika (from Sanskrit svástika स्वस्तिक ) is an equilateral cross with its arms bent at right angles, in either clockwise (卐) or counterclockwise (卍) forms. The swastika can also be drawn as a traditional swastika, but with a second 90° bend in each arm.
The word swastika is derived from the Sanskrit svastik (in Devanagari, स्वस्तिक), 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-, eu-), meaning "good, well" and asti, a verbal abstract to the root as "to be" (cognate with the Romance copula, coming ultimately from the Proto-Indo European root *h1es-); svasti thus means "well-being." The suffix -ka intensifies the verbal meaning or confers the sense of 'beneficial', and svastika might thus be translated literally as "that which is associated with well-being," corresponding to "lucky charm" or "thing that is auspicious."[1] The word first appears in the Classical Sanskrit (in the Ramayana and Mahabharata epics).
The Sanskrit term has been in use in English since 1871, replacing gammadion (from Greek γαμμάδιον).
Alternative historical English spellings of the Sanskrit word include suastika and svastica. Alternative names for the shape are:
* crooked cross
* cross cramponned, ~nnée, or ~nny (in heraldry), as each arm resembles a crampon or angle-iron (German: Winkelmaßkreuz)
* double cross, by Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, on the April 6, 1941 edition of his radio program The Catholic Hour, not only comparing the Cross of Christ with the swastika, but also implying that siding with fascism was a "double-crossing" of Christianity
* fylfot, possibly meaning "four feet", chiefly in heraldry and architecture (See fylfot for a discussion of the etymology)
* gammadion, tetragammadion (Greek: τέτραγαμμάδιον), or cross gammadion (Latin: crux gammata; Old French: croiz gammée), as each arm resembles the Greek letter Γ (gamma)
* chopped cross (German: Hackenkreutz);
* sun wheel, a name also used as a synonym for the sun cross
* tetraskelion (Greek: τετρασκέλιον), "four legged", especially when composed of four conjoined legs (compare triskelion (Greek: τρισκέλιον))
* Thor's hammer, from its supposed association with Thor, the Norse god of the weather, but this may be a misappropriation of a name that properly belongs to a Y-shaped or T-shaped symbol[2]. The swastika shape appears in Icelandic grimoires wherein it is named Þórshamar.
* The Tibetan swastika is known as nor bu bzhi -khyil, or quadruple body symbol, defined in Unicode at codepoint U+0FCC ࿌.