Right-facing swastika in the decorative form, used to evoke sacred force (shakti)

The swastika (卐) (Sanskrit: स्वस्तिक) is an equilateral cross with four arms bent at 90 degrees. The earliest archaeological evidence of swastika-shaped ornaments dates back to the Indus Valley Civilization as well as the Mediterranean Classical Antiquity. Swastikas have also been used in various other ancient civilizations around the world including China, Japan, Korea, India, Nepal and Southern Europe. It remains widely used in Indian religions, specifically in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, primarily as a tantric symbol to evoke shakti or the sacred symbol of auspiciousness. The word “swastika” comes from the Sanskrit svastika – “su” meaning “good” or “auspicious,” “asti” meaning “to be,” and “ka” as a suffix. The swastika literally means “to be good”. Or another translation can be made: “swa” is “higher self”, “asti” meaning “being”, and “ka” as a suffix, so the translation can be interpreted as “being with higher self”.^[1]

The symbol has a long history in Europe reaching back to antiquity. In modern times, following a brief surge of popularity as a good luck symbol in Western culture, a swastika was adopted as a symbol of theNazi Party of Germany in 1920, who used the swastika as a symbol of the Aryan race. After Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, a right-facing 45° rotated swastika was incorporated into the Nazi party flag, which was made the state flag of Germany during Nazism. Hence, the swastika has become strongly associated with Nazism and related concepts such as antisemitism, hatred, violence, death, and murder in many countries, and is now largely stigmatized there due to the changed connotations of the symbol.^[1] Notably, it has been outlawed in Germany and other countries if used as a symbol of Nazism in certain instances. Many modern political extremists and Neo-Nazi groups such as the Russian National Unity use stylized swastikas or similar symbols.

Name

The word swastika came from the Sanskrit word svastika,, meaning any lucky or auspicious object, and in particular a mark made on persons and things to denote auspiciousness, or any piece of luck or well-being.

It is composed of su- meaning “good, well” and asti “to be”. Suasti thus means “well-being.” The suffix -ka, meaning “soul”, suastika might thus be translated literally as “that which is associated with well-being,” corresponding to “lucky charm” or “thing that is auspicious.”^[2] The word in this sense is first used in the Harivamsa. The Ramayana does have the word, but in an unrelated sense of “one who utters words of eulogy”.

The most traditional form of the swastika’s symbolization in Jainism is that the four arms of the swastika remind us that during the cycles of birth and death we may be born into any one of the four destinies: heavenly beings, human beings, animal beings, (including birds, bugs, and plants) and hellish beings.

The most traditional form of the swastika’s symbolization in Hinduism is that the symbol represents the purusharthas: dharma (that which makes a human a human), artha (wealth), kama (desire), and moksha (liberation).

The Mahabharata has the word in the sense of “the crossing of the arms or hands on the breast”. Both the Mahabharata and the Ramayana also use the word in the sense of “a dish of a particular form” and “a kind of cake”. The word does not occur in Vedic Sanskrit. As noted by Monier-Williams in his Sanskrit-English dictionary, according to Alexander Cunningham, its shape represents a monogram formed by interlacing of the letters of the auspicious words su-astí (svasti) written in Ashokan characters.^[3]

Hindu child with head shaven and red Svastika painted on it. Upanayana is a very popular Hindu-tradition, a Samskara or Sanskar (consecration).

The Sanskrit term has been in use in English since 1871, replacing gammadion (from Greek γαμμάδιον). Alternative historical English spellings of the Sanskrit phonological words with different meanings to includesuastika, swastica, and svastica.

Other names for the shape are:

• crooked cross, hook cross or angled cross (Hebrew: צלב קרס, German: Hakenkreuz).
• cross cramponned, ~nnée, or ~nny, in heraldry, as each arm resembles a Crampon or angle-iron (German: Winkelmaßkreuz).
• fylfot, chiefly in heraldry and architecture. The term was coined in the 19th century based on a misunderstanding of a Renaissance manuscript.
• gammadion, tetragammadion (Greek: τετραγαμμάδιον), or cross gammadion (Latin: crux gammata; French: croix gammée), as each arm resembles the Greek letter Γ (gamma).
• tetraskelion (Greek: τετρασκέλιον), literally meaning “four legged”, especially when composed of four conjoined legs (compare triskelion (Greek: τρισκέλιον)).
• The Tibetan swastika (࿖) is known as g.yung drung

The Buddhist sign has been standardized as a Chinese character 卍 (pinyin: wàn) and as such entered various other East Asian languages such as Japanese where the symbol is called 卍字 (manji). The swastika is included as part of the Chinese script in the form of the character “萬” (pinyin: wàn) and has Unicode encodings U+534D 卍 (left-facing) and U+5350 卐 (right-facing);^[4] the latter has a mapping in the original Big5character set,^[5] but the former does not (although it’s in Big5+^[6]). In Unicode 5.2, four swastika symbols were added to the Tibetan block: U+0FD5 ࿕ (right-facing), U+0FD6 ࿖ (left-facing), U+0FD7 ࿗ (right-facing with dots) and U+0FD8 ࿘ (left-facing with dots).

Geometry

Geometrically, the swastika can be regarded as an irregular icosagon or 20-sided polygon. The proportions of the Nazi swastika were fixed based on a 5 × 5 diagonal grid.^[7]

Characteristic is the 90° rotational symmetry and chirality, hence the absence of reflectional symmetry, and the existence of two versions of swastikas that are each other’s mirror image.

A right-facing swastika might be described as “clockwise” or “counter-clockwise”.

The mirror-image forms are often described as:

• clockwise and anti-clockwise;
• left-facing and right-facing;
• left-hand and right-hand.

“Left-facing” and “right-facing” are used mostly consistently referring to the upper arm of an upright swastika facing either to the viewer’s left (卍) or right (卐). The other two descriptions are ambiguous as it is unclear whether they refer to the arms as leading or being dragged or whether their bending is viewed outward or inward. However, “clockwise” usually refers to the “right-facing” swastika. The terms are used inconsistently in modern times, which is confusing and may obfuscate an important point, that the rotation of the swastika may have symbolic relevance, although ancient vedic scripts describe the symbolic relevance of clock motion and counter clock motion.^{[citation needed]} Less ambiguous terms might be “clockwise-pointing” and “counterclockwise-pointing.”

Nazi ensigns had a through and through image, so both versions were present, one on each side, but the Nazi flag on land was right-facing on both sides and at a 45° rotation.^[8]

The name “sauwastika” is sometimes given to the left-facing form of the swastika (卍).^[9]

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