The Swastika: An Ancient Symbol and Its Meaning

There is a symbol drawn in red paste on the doorways of homes across India, pressed into the first page of a shopkeeper’s new account-book, traced in rice flour at the threshold before a wedding. It means good luck. It has meant good luck for thousands of years. And outside India it has become almost impossible to see clearly, because in the middle of the twentieth century it was stolen and turned into the most hated emblem on earth.

To understand the svastika honestly, you have to do one difficult thing: hold its ancient meaning and its modern theft apart, and refuse to let the second erase the first.

A name that is a blessing

Start with the word, because the word settles the meaning. Svastika comes from svasti, a Sanskrit term made of su, good, and asti, it is. Svasti means, roughly, “may it be well.” It is a benediction, and it is genuinely ancient: it runs all through the Vedas as a word of blessing. A verse of the Rigveda strings the word through a whole prayer, in Griffith’s translation:

“Svasti to us be Indra famed of old: svasti to us be Pushan, Lord of all wealth.”

The note is unmistakable, a plain asking that things go well. The symbol is that blessing given a shape.

So the svastika is, at root, a drawn wish for well-being. That is why it lives where it does, at beginnings. On the threshold, where you enter. On the first page of the ledger, where the year’s trade starts. At the wedding, at the start of worship, at the opening of anything that one hopes will go well. The great nineteenth-century lexicographer Monier-Williams recorded the scholarly view of his day that the figure was a solar symbol, a sign of the sun and its turning, and noted its link to the four directions. Layered onto that are its associations with Ganesha, the remover of obstacles, invoked at every auspicious start.

Older than almost everything

The symbol is staggeringly old and staggeringly widespread. It appears on seals of the Indus Valley civilisation, four thousand years ago and more. It turns up, independently, in ancient cultures across the world, on Greek pottery, in Roman mosaics, among peoples who never met. It is one of those few shapes, like the circle and the cross, that human hands seem to find on their own.

In India it never stopped being sacred. It is one of the eight auspicious signs, the ashtamangala, in the Jain tradition, where it is the emblem of one of the tirthankaras. It marks Buddhist art across Asia. It remains, today, in daily devotional use by Hindus, Jains and Buddhists alike, drawn fresh on countless doorways every morning.

Four arms, and what they turn

Look closely at the figure and its logic is in the arms. A cross with its four ends bent at right angles, most often clockwise, with a dot frequently set in each of the four quadrants. The bent arms read as motion, a wheel caught mid-turn, which is why the oldest scholarly reading, the one Monier-Williams recorded, ties it to the sun and its daily circuit and to the four directions of space gathered around a still centre. The clockwise form, turning in the direction of the sun’s course and of ritual circumambulation, is the auspicious svastika proper. Its mirror image, turning the other way, is sometimes distinguished as the sauvastika and read as its darker or nocturnal counterpart, though in practice both are drawn and both are used. The shape is, in the end, a small diagram of an ordered cosmos. A fixed point, and everything turning rightly around it.

Drawn at every beginning

The svastika lives in the ordinary devotional day far more than in any temple’s high theology. It is traced in red kumkum or rice flour at the threshold of the home, set at the head of the wedding canopy, marked on pots and lamps and the first page of the new ledger. Its single busiest day is Diwali, when traders across India open fresh account-books for the year with a svastika and the name of Lakshmi and Ganesha at the top of the first page, asking that the year’s accounts run well. It is one of the eight auspicious signs, the ashtamangala, shared with the Jain and Buddhist traditions. Wherever the tradition wants to say “let this begin well,” it reaches for this mark. That is the whole of its meaning, repeated millions of times a morning.

The theft, named plainly

And then there is the other thing, which has to be faced directly. In 1920 the Nazi Party in Germany adopted a hooked cross as its emblem, and in 1935 it became the national flag, and under that sign were committed the crimes that made it a symbol of genocide. This is real, and it is not to be softened.

But two facts have to be held alongside it. First, the German emblem has its own German name. They called it the Hakenkreuz, the hooked cross, not the svastika. The Sanskrit name belongs to the older, sacred thing. Second, and more importantly, the sacred symbol predates the Nazi one by thousands of years and means the opposite of it: not hatred and death, but well-being and good fortune. The Nazis took an ancient sign and inverted everything it stood for. They did not invent it, and they do not own it.

It is sometimes said that the two can be told apart by their angle, the Hindu one flat, the Nazi one tilted. This is not reliable. Hindu svastikas are drawn both ways and are often set on a diagonal. The honest distinction is one of context and history, the millennia of sacred use against a single poisoned decade, rather than a neat rule about orientation.

A sign with no single owner

Part of what makes the svastika hard to think about is that no one tradition invented it. The same bent cross turns up on Greek pottery and Roman mosaic, in Celtic and Slavic and Native American work, among peoples separated by oceans and millennia who never traded a single idea. It belongs to that tiny set of shapes, with the circle and the cross and the spiral, that human hands seem to arrive at on their own. In India it was given a Sanskrit name and a place in the rites, and it became one of the eight auspicious signs across the Hindu, Jain and Buddhist worlds. But it was never patented and never owned. That is exactly why the twentieth-century claim on it rings so false. A party that lasted a few decades cannot own a mark that the species has been drawing since before it kept records.

Seeing it again

For most of the world the svastika may never fully recover its innocence, and in much of the West it cannot be shown without causing real pain, which deserves respect. Inside its own home, it remains exactly what it always was, a small daily prayer drawn at the edge of things: let what begins here begin well.

The wish is older than the wound. In the places where it was born, it is still only a wish.