Sacred Symbols
The visual vocabulary of the tradition: Om, the lotus, the trishula and conch, the swastika, the tilaka and the great diagrams, and what each one actually means.
The sacred symbols of Hinduism are the paradox of a tradition that argues endlessly about whether the divine has form, and has produced an extraordinary quantity of it. The mark on a forehead names the wearer’s stream before a word is spoken. The objects a deity holds are a sentence in a language readers were once expected to know: conch and discus for Vishnu, trident and drum for Shiva.
Some of these symbols travelled badly. The swastika was a mark of auspiciousness across Eurasia for four thousand years before the twentieth century made it unusable in the West, and the collision of those two facts is genuinely difficult rather than easily resolved.
These pages read the symbols as the tradition reads them, and give the documentary history alongside. Where a meaning is a later attribution rather than an ancient one, that is said.