The swastika meant good fortune for thousands of years before its hijacking
Across much of Eurasia and beyond, the hooked cross was a sign of luck, the Sun and holiness for millennia. Hindus, Buddhists and Jains still treat it as sacred. In the West it read as a harmless charm until the 1930s, when the Nazi Party turned it into an emblem of racial hatred.
The name is Sanskrit. It builds on swasti, from su, good, and asti, it is, a word the Vedas use for health, success and prosperity and one people once used as a greeting. The earliest recorded use of swastika appears in the grammarian Pāṇini, who lived in or before the 4th century BCE and mentions it as a kind of identifying mark on a cow's ear. The 19th-century Sanskritist Monier Monier-Williams reported that most scholars saw it as a solar sign at root.
Its meanings within Indian religions are precise. In Hinduism the right-facing form signals the sun, prosperity and good luck, while the left-facing form, sometimes called sauvastika, can stand for night or tantric aspects of the goddess Kali. Jains place it on their flag for Suparshvanatha, seventh of the 24 Tirthankaras. For Buddhists it marks the auspicious footprints of the Buddha. Elsewhere among Indo-European peoples it stood for fire, lightning and the Sun.
Europe met the word largely through archaeology. In 1871 Heinrich Schliemann, digging the Hisarlik mound in search of Troy, published more than 1,800 ancient swastikas and variants and connected them to the Sanskrit term. In 1878 the Irish scholar Charles Graves made swastika the standard English name, displacing the Greek-derived gammadion. German speakers called it Hakenkreuz, the hooked cross.
The turn came early in the 20th century. Before World War I the far-right Romanian politician A. C. Cuza used it as a sign of international antisemitism, and public perception shifted decisively once the Nazi Party adopted it as a badge of a supposed Aryan race and put it on the flag of Nazi Germany. After World War II and the Holocaust, Western societies came to see it as shorthand for antisemitism, white supremacism or plain evil. Several countries ban its display, while allowing exceptions for religious use.
Source: Swastika
