Skip to main content

Where the Swastika Was Found 12,000 Years Before Hitler Made Us Uncomfortable About I




Minoan pottery from Crete. The Minoan civilization flourished from 3,000 to 1,100 B.C. (Agon S. Buchholz/Wikimedia Commons)
)



Swastika from a 2nd century A.D. Roman mosaic. (Maciej Szczepańczyk/Wikimedia Commons



A srivatsa (swastika) sign at Nata-dera Temple, Japan. (Cindy Drukier/Epoch Times)



From the Sican/Lambayeque civilization in Peru, which flourished 750 to 1375 A.D. (Wikimedia Commons)




Ancient Macedonian helmet with swastika marks, 350-325 B.C., found at Herculanum. (Cabinet des Medailles, Paris/Wikimedia Commons)



A Buddha statue on Lantau Island, Hong Kong with a swastika symbol on the chest. (Shutterstock*)

A 3,000-year-old necklace found in the Rasht Province of Iran. (Wikimedia Commons)

The aviator Matilde Moisant(1878-1964) wearing a swastika medallion in 1912; the symbol was popular as a good luck charm with early aviators. (Wikimedia Commons)

A mandala-like swastika, composed of Hebrew letters and surrounded by a circle and a mystical hymn in Aramaic. Appears in the Kabbalistic work "Parashat Eliezer" by Rabbi Eliezer ben Isaac Fischel of Strizhov, 18th century. (Wikimedia Commons)

Bronze Age Mycenaean "doll" with human, solar and tetragammadion (swastika) symbols. (Louvre Museum/Wikimedia Commons)

Swastika on a Greek silver stater coin from Corinth, 6th century BC. (Wikimedia Commons)

Gold weight used by the Akan, specifically Ashanti, people of Ghana to measure gold. (Wikimedia Commons)


Mosaic swastika in excavated Byzantine church in Shavei Tzion, Israel. (Wikimedia Commons)


Bone comb with swastika found in the Nydam Mose as depicted in the 19th century book “Nydam Mosefund.” Nydam Mose, also known as Nydam Bog, is an archaeological site located near Sonderborg, Denmark. It contains many artifacts from 200 to 400 A.D. (Wikimedia Commons)


The “Iron Man” statue. The 1,000-year-old Buddha statue from Tibet was carved from a rare meteorite that landed on Earth about 15 millennia ago. (Elmar Buchner)

The earliest known swastika was found in 10,000 B.C. in the Ukraine, carved on mammoth ivory.
Its meaning has been a good one for thousands of years. However, Adolf Hitler appropriated it in the 20th century, establishing its association with tragedy, death, and destruction. The symbol is found not only in one ancient civilization, but in ancient civilizations all over the world, bespeaking its deep connection with humanity and human culture.
Aztecs and Mayans used the symbol on burial mounds, clothing and jewelry. In Europe, such symbols can be found in Roman catacombs, in churches, on plaza stones, and graves.
The word swastika is Sanskrit: swa means “higher self,” asti means “being,” and ka is a suffix. The word may be understood as “being with higher self.” It is also known as srivatsa.
It has an especially strong connection to Buddhism in India, which was then transmitted to China. The srivatsa is often found on Buddha sculptures, and it is believed to be a sign displayed by Buddhas to the people who first depicted it—a symbol with profound and heavenly meanings. It has been understood over the ages as a symbol of good luck, a symbol of purity, and other positive attributes. Hitler sought to connect the symbol’s power and purity to his doctrine of establishing a “pure” race.
The shadow cast on the symbol by the Nazis is slowly being lifted. The Jewish Virtual Library, an American-Israeli Enterprise, has addressed the history of the Swastika positively.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

This strange mineral grows on dead bodies and turns them blue

If you were to get up close and personal with Ötzi the Iceman – the 5,000-year-old mummy of a  tattooed ,  deep-voiced  man who died and was frozen in the Alps – you’d notice that his skin is flecked with tiny bits of blue. At first, it would appear that these oddly bluish crystal formations embedded in his skin are from freezing to death or some other sort of trauma, but it’s actually a mineral called  vivianite  (or blue ironstone) and it happens to form quite often on corpses left in iron-rich environments. For Ötzi, the patches of vivianite are  from him resting  near rocks with flecks of iron in them, but other cases are way more severe. According to Chris Drudge at Atlas Obscura , a man named John White was buried in a cast iron coffin back in 1861. During those days, coffins often had a window for grieving family members to peer inside even if the lid was closed during the funeral. Sometime after he was buried, that window broke, allow...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Dark Side Of The Love Hormone Oxytocin

New research shows oxytocin isn't the anti-anxiety drug we thought it was. Oxytocin, the feel-good bonding hormone released by physical contact with another person, orgasm and childbirth (potentially encouraging  monogamy ), might have a darker side. The  love drug  also plays an important role in intensifying  negative emotional memories  and increasing feelings of fear in future stressful situations, according to a new study. Two experiments performed with mice found that the hormone activates a signaling molecule called extracellular-signal-related kinases (ERK), which has been associated with the way the brain  forms memories   of fear . According to Jelena Radulovic, senior author on the study and a professor at Northwestern University's medical school, ERK stimulates fear pathways in the brain's lateral septum, the region with the highest levels of oxytocin. Mice without oxytocin receptors and mice with even more oxytocin receptors tha...
Post a Comment
Read more

It's Official: Time Crystals Are a New State of Matter, and Now We Can Create Them

Peer-review has spoken. Earlier this year , physicists had put together a blueprint for how to make and measure time crystals - a bizarre state of matter with an atomic structure that repeats not just in space, but in time, allowing them to maintain constant oscillation without energy. Two separate research teams managed to create what looked an awful lot like time crystals  back in January,  and now both experiments have successfully passed peer-review for the first time, putting the 'impossible' phenomenon squarely in the realm of reality. "We've taken these theoretical ideas that we've been poking around for the last couple of years and actually built it in the laboratory,"  says one of the researchers , Andrew Potter from Texas University at Austin. "Hopefully, this is just the first example of these, with many more to come." Time crystals  are one of the coolest things physics has dished up in recent months, because they point to a...
Post a Comment
Read more