My “favorite” theory about what the swastika symbolized comes from the works of my favorite crackpot, Wilhelm Reich. In his book The Mass Psychology of Fascism, he proclaims that it’s obvious what the swastika represents: a couple Doing It doggy style. The woman is lying prone with her knees bent and her arms flopping down over the edge of the bed. The man is kneeling behind her with his groin up against hers and (apparently) his head craning forward in what must be a rather painful position. (Either that, or he likes to stick his arms out in front of him like a walking mummy or zombie or Frankenstein’s monster.)
Note that this was the same Wilhelm Reich who believed he’d discovered abiogenesis and omnipresent sexual energy.
It was in the work of Carl Sagan that I read one very appealing hypothesis about the figure and its apparent universality, i.e. why it seems to pop up in diverse cultures around the globe in roughly the same time frame:
It might be a comet, positioned so humans were looking at it head on, the tail streamers behind it forming a long curl that in the foreshortened point of view would look like a spiral.
Or it might just be a cognitive artifact of the widespread human habit of dividing things into twos and then twos again to make squares and crosses. No conspiracy necessary.
I definately don’t aggree with the swastika originating in Thor’s Hammer. The original Nordic rune doesn’t really look like it, (nordic runes generally weren’t as symmetric as the swastica is, with rare exceptions like the powerful Helm of Awe ) and there are much older instances of icons that look much more like the Swastika, for example on these Roman carvings (12). The only times I’ve seen Thor’s Hammer depicted otherwise than in the link above is when it is shown as his actual hammer like so. There is, however, a huge ‘swastika’ on the front of one of our most notable downtown buildings (causing delightful misunderstandings and infuriation ), which must be derived from Thor’s hammer, so I might be communicating via my rectum, as usual.
The Akan/Ashanti occupy a large part of West Africa including parts of Ghana and the Ivory Coast and include many sub-ethnic groups such as the Baule and the Asante (Ashanti). The Akan were producing swastika gold weights to weigh gold dust which was their currency, thus the name ‘gold weights’. When used on the gold weight, the swastika was a symbol of currency, expressing power, money, wealth and integrity. The idea and the implementation of gold-based currency came from the Akan people of modern-day Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. https://selfuni.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/swastika-akan.jpg?w=246
The swastika is also one of the Akan people’s famous Adinkra symbols. Look at number 12 below:
[ul]
[li]According to one source, the swastika is referred to by the Akan as a monkey’s foot. [/li][li]Another source says it is called Kode Emower Ewa (‘talons of the eagle’), represents devotion and service and is shaved on the back of the heads of the Queen Mother’s servants.[/li][li]Still another source names it Nkotimsefuopua, claiming similarly that certain attendants on the Queen Mother who dressed their hair in this fashion.[/li][/ul]
Below is a kinte cloth symbol called Apremo-Canon. It is a symbol of resistance against foreign domination, and superior military strategy. This motif represents the superior military strategy with which Akan nations such as the Asante and Akwamu defeated the West Asians who had superior arms.
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Since someone reanimated this thread, I just want to point out that a swastika has a very simple look.
Consider if you take two sticks, tie them together at the center and onto a third stick to make a handle. Then tie a streamer to each end of the sticks. Now twirl the sticks about the handle. The streamers will follow the sticks as tails.
I used to have a bulls-eye lantern that was packed into a relatively thin, square package (similar in size and shape to a Mac Mini) by using a fresnel lens and installing the four D batteries swastika-wise.
