Swastikas: The Wheels of Time
by C. Adam Volle
Just this past January, Ms. Kim Young-sook got into a bit of trouble. The Korean owner of a jewelry shop in New York City, she seemingly turned the entire metropolis against herself by selling a pair of earrings that looked like swastikas. A city councilman personally demanded she remove the offending earrings from her shelves, despite her protests that in Tibet – the country from which she’d purchased them – the swastika signifies a Buddhist’s conception of eternity.
In the R.O.K., migukin are necessarily more understanding. Yes, many do raise their eyebrows the first time they notice a Korean poster or temple emblazoned with that stylized shuriken shape. But that’s mainly just due to the novelty of seeing those four equilateral blades with their own two eyes, since the symbol they form is so despised in their part of the world that it’s nearly nonexistent outside their books and films. They nevertheless grasp that in East Asia, the last thing any emblem is likely to represent is the racist ideology of a twentieth-century German named Adolf Hitler. What they don’t grasp is how much it means instead, how far back its traditions go. If they did, they might go so far as to advocate its return.
As with so much else, the swastika, or man (Hangul: 만, from 만자) is said to have arrived in Korea with the Buddha, who supposedly bore the sigil upon both his heart and his feet. This is why the swastika marks the location of Buddhist temples on modern maps, including Google Earth. It was introduced by the Chinese missionaries as indicative of “good fortune” and “well-being”, two interrelated concepts in any theology involving karma. The Chinese – and by extension, Korea – soon also adopted its left-facing version as a hanja character meaning “countless”, which was highly appropriate since that was how many other meanings it seemed to have. Depending on its context and direction, you may still today hear someone describe it as a design for truth, mercy, love, strength, intellect, eternity, the sun, the Buddha/Buddhism, and more.
To weed out whichever of these beliefs are extraneous hangers-on, we might consider looking to India. It is, after all, the home of the language from which the word “swastika” comes (in Sanskrit, “sua-” means “good”, “-asti” to be; “-ka” is a suffix), as well as Hinduism, the mother of most swastika-associated faiths. The region’s history with the sign is long, too – extraordinarily long. The residents of the Indus Valley were etching the suastika into their buildings’ surfaces while Mesopotamians were developing the world’s first written language. They must have possessed it for far longer than that, too, because during that same period of history, their blood relations – a nameless people whom scholars have dubbed the “Proto-Indo-Europeans” – were flooding into Europe to become the ancestors of every race living there today. With them, they carried the swastika-adorned pottery which Adolf Hitler would find so inspirational 5,400 years later.
And yet when these ancestors of swastika-loving Celts, Norsemen, Greeks, and Romans migrated into the Balkans, they found an aboriginal people living there who’d already incorporated that mark into their own primitive script, an entire millennium earlier. Nor were they alone: tribes in Egypt, Crete, the Ukraine, and China were all apparently familiar with the “wheel” as far back as 10,000 years ago. One archaeological dig has unearthed a small swastika-festooned statue cut from the ivory of a mammoth tusk.
Even that discovery doesn’t represent the end of the trail, however. For when the descendants of the Proto-Indo-Europeans sailed to the continents of North and South America, what do you think they found? Yes – the spinning wheel appeared throughout the Northeast, along the Mississippi River, and deep into the American Southwest, among First Nations as diverse as the Navajo and Hopi. According to the latter, the spiral represents their physical migration to their current home.
If the Native Americans received the swastika design by cultural transmission, that makes its use as old as human migration across the land which once bridged Russia and Alaska 15,000-40,000 years ago. It would be one of the oldest symbols devised by the human race; homo sapiens may have drawn it while Neanderthal Man still walked the Earth.
Or maybe they didn’t. Maybe the Native Americans came up with their version independently. We just don’t know, because for now and possibly forever, the swastika is a symbol with a history extending so far back into our collective past that its origin and initial meaning are lost to us.
But that being the case, Ms. Kim Young-sook’s definition of “eternity” seems quite fitting, doesn’t it?