Can we still use the swastika? Hindus and Buddhists genuinely wonder. They know that in the West they can count on negative reactions when displaying their age-old symbol of good luck. For this reason, the Jaina community has removed the swastika from its official symbol, leaving only a hand-- at least for international usage. They fear, interiorizing the suspected opinion of most Westerners, that Adolf Hitler and his National-Socialists gave the swastika such an unfathomably bad name that it is now beyond the pale, at least outside Hindu-Buddhist countries.

The hooked cross

The Nazi flag was designed by Adolf Hitler himself. He was fairly gifted as a visual artist, and historians wonder how different history would have looked like if he had succeeded in getting admitted to Vienna’s academy for painting. His creation was a black swastika standing in an angle of 45°, surrounded by a white circle on a red background. The Nazi flag was not ‘a’ swastika, but this very specific swastika, without counterpart anywhere or at any time.

In English, because of the contact with India, the swastika was routinely called ‘swastika’. Elsewhere, other names prevailed. In French it was called croix gammée, i.e. ‘cross with gamma-s’, gamma being a Greek letter with the shape of a perpendicularly bent leg. That likeness also gave rise to the term tetraskel, ‘four-legged’. This is similar to triskel, ‘three-legged’, the same whirling shape but with only three tentacles, used in the flag of the Isle of Man and in many Celtic designs.

There is also a dodekaskel or twelve-legged swastika, roughly the ‘Black Sun’ design found on the floor of the central hall in the Wewelsburg castle, chosen by the SS, Heinrich Himmler’s elite corps in Nazi Germany, as its headquarters. This has a similar troubled history as the swastika: found, though sparsely, on premodern European floors and walls, and thus historically legitimate, it supposedly ‘lost its innocence’ when it became associated with the SS. Today it is sparsely used and mostly in a political context, as a symbol of European ethnic assertion, though there are neo-Pagan groups trying to rehabilitate it. They face a far more uphill battle than defenders of the four-legged swastika, who have the whole Hindu-Buddhist world as ally.

A variation on this symbol is the Arabic zawba’a or “whirlwind”, with shorter arms but suggestive of the same whirling motion. The Syrian National Socialist Party (Hizb al-Suri al-Qaumi al-Ijtima’i), formed in 1932 as part of the general Arab enthusiasm for the Hitlerian model, but still existing and quite prominent in the Syrian-cum-Russian struggle against the Islamic State, has it in its flag.

In Germany, only Sanskritists and Theosophists called the swastika symbol a ‘swastika’. The usual term was Hakenkreuz. The Haken is simply a hook, or specifically a hooked cloth-hanger. Kreuz means ‘cross’, and the whole is rendered in English as ‘hooked cross’.

A hooked cross from India?

There exists a popular genre of myth-making around the Nazis. Thus, they are believed to have built a rocket base on Antarctica, there to make their escape to Aldebaran or so. It is likewise fabulated that they were into Oriental religions, and even, by Ivy League Sanskrit professor Sheldon Pollock (‘Deep Orientalism’, 1993), that the Hindu philosophy called Purva Mimansa, ‘the first hermeneutic (of the Vedas)’, was the backbone of the National-Socialist worldview.

In reality, Hinduism had little to offer to the Nazis. Among Adolf Hitler’s own rare utterances on the Hindus, each of them negative, was a racial interpretation of the Aryan Invasion Theory: ‘We know that the Hindus in India are a people mixed from the lofty Aryan immigrants and the dark-black aboriginal population, and that this people is bearing the consequences today; for it is also the slave people of a race that almost seems like a second Jewry.’ (Warum sind wir Antisemiten?, 1920)

In one sentence, he calls the Hindus “mixed”, half “dark”, “slave people” and “second Jewry”: in his worldview these were not compliments. He told Subhas Bose to his face that Germany was not interested in his independence for India, a cold shower for Bose after Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, more of a diplomat, had given him a different impression. Indeed, Hitler thought it was better for the Hindus to be governed by the racially purer and hence superior Aryans from Britain.

Hitler was a post-religious modern European, forged in the smithy of a Catholic upbringing but no longer believing in the defining doctrines of Catholicism. (That description would count for many millions of 20^th-century Europeans, including myself.) What he had taken along from it was its deep anti-Semitism. He patronized the Catholic tradition of the Passion Play in Oberammergau: Jesus’ passion (suffering) on Good Friday, supposedly engineered by the Jewish Council of Elders (Sanhedrin) and clamoured for by the Jewish crowd (‘His blood come over us and our kin’), formed the hard core of the Christian enemy-image of the Jews.

He also retained an admiration for the Church’s achievements in mass psychology and in organization. Thus, he modelled his elite corps SS (Schutz-Staffel, ‘Protection Squad’) on the Teutonic Order that had waged a successful Christian crusade against Europe’s last Heathens in the Baltic and forged the conquered territories into the new German dominion of Prussia. Also, he expressed his appreciation for the Catholic institution of a celibate priesthood, necessarily recruited from the common people and therefore naturally in solidarity with it. The contrast is with a hereditary priesthood, which sees its interest as separate, as is always alleged against the Brahmins: count him in for anti-Brahminism. The handful of Nazi Indologists (a mere handful, fewer than e.g. Nazi philosophers such as Martin Heidegger) thought the Brahmins had mixed the glorious culture of the Aryan invaders with the superstitious ritualism of the natives (with the Buddha as a restorer of pure ‘Aryan humanism’). At any rate, the Nazis had an over-all contempt for Hinduism.

With this contempt, it would seem bizarre that they borrowed a symbol that is Hindu par excellence. The explanation is that they didn’t. They considered the hooked cross as originating in Europe and then brought into India by the Aryan invaders.

The hooked cross’s European roots

All over the world, the hooked cross motive is found here and there. It is quite common among various Amerindian nations, who speak of rolling logs. There are synagogues and churches with hooked cross patterns as floor design. As an image of cosmic motion, it is obviously universal.

Only those with a narrow vision would identify it with their own little world. The Nazis saw it as typically European. The two areas of highest concentration of these swastika designs in Europe were the Greek world and the Baltic. The excavated city of Troy was particularly rich in them. Like many Germans of his days, Hitler was a great lover of Greek culture. Thus, a main difference between Nazi and Stalinist art is the Nazi preference for nakedness, in the footsteps of Greek art.

The Baltic was one area where German military effort made the difference, and where the hooked cross flourished (and does so till today). During WW2, Germans came to the aid of the Finns to ward off Soviet aggression. The Finns used the swastika as emblem, and even now this war is commemorated with swastika insignia. A particularly fitting use of the hooked cross was as emblem of the air force, because it was the weapon of the thunder god (Lithuanian Perkunas, Latvian Perkons, Slavic Perun, all related to Sanskrit Parjanya; Germanic Thor/Donar). Indeed, in the Baltic the hooked cross was also ‘Thor’s hammer’, the lightning thrown by the storm god, equivalent to Indra’s vajra. In Tibetan Buddhism, the vajra signifies sudden Enlightenment, and in the Vedic age, it may already have had this meaning, but at a more physical level it simply meant a lightning strike.

But more important for Hitler’s design were the Freikorps militias in 1919. Returning from the WW1 frontlines, they didn’t feel ready to rejoin civilian life (like Vietnam veterans in the US), so they made themselves useful where Soviet aggression had started: in the newly independent Baltic provinces of the Russian empire, viz. Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. After forcing the Soviets to give up their annexation efforts, the German soldiers went home, fired up with nationalism and anti-Bolshevism. They were among the pioneers of the new Deutsche National-Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei (German National-Socialist Workers’ Party), the Nazi party. And they brought the hooked cross with them.

Colour design

As swastikas go, Hitler’s version really stands out. It was red, white and black, the flag colours of the second German empire (1871-1914) under which Hitler himself had fought in WW1. This was based on the flags of the Hansa, a trade network uniting most North European harbour cities since the Middle Ages, and therefrom of the Prussian-led North-German Confederacy in the 19^th century. It differs from the red-gold-black tricolour of the Weimar Republic and the post-war Federal Republic.

It is tempting to see in this tricolour scheme, with origins in the mists of time, an ancient cosmological model of which the three poles are symbolized by white-red-black, or more broadly light-reddish-dark. It is usually called the ‘Indo-European tri-fuctionality’, a term we owe to the mid-20^th-century French scholar Georges Dumézil. In fact, like many other motifs identified with the Indo-European worldview, it possibly extended beyond, e.g. this tricolour scheme also appears in the Turkic myth of Boğac Han. Possibly it is an older version preserved in Turkic mythology, where the hero Boğac’s father as a young man is lodged in a black tent, reserved for men without children, the pit of oblivion; whereas red tents are for men with daughters, the hopefuls; and white tents for men with sons, then considered the blessed ones. There we have a purely vertical scheme of bad-better-good.

We find it back in some Indo-European instances, e.g. the Edda’s chapter Rigsthula (‘Song of Rig’) contains a story about the classes of society: thraells (thrall), productive serfs, who are black-haired; karls (churl), brave freemen with red hair; and white-haired jarls (earl) or rune-literate noblemen. The hair-colour in the case of the Scandinavians has varieties that can express the different symbol colours; peoples with uniformly black hair don’t have that option.

We find the societal dimension back in South Asia, though extended to four: the Iranian pistras or the Indian varnas, both ‘colours’: white the clergy, red the aristocracy, black the “third estate”, which was then split into the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. In India: Brahmins, Kshatriyas, and the commoners split into the entrepreneurs or Vaishyas (allotted the symbol colour yellow) and the labourers or Shudras (black). It bears emphasis that these are symbol colours, not skin colour.

In its mature form, this scheme acquires a circular and dynamic form. We know it best as the Hindu scheme of triguna, “the three qualities”. These three are tamas, the “darkness”, inertial but productive, black; rajas, “floating dust particle”, turbid, dynamic, passionate, partisan, red; and sattva, “realness” or “goodness”, transparent, truthful, white. In modern terms, they correspond to the triad matter, energy and information.

But Hitler probably didn’t think or even know about this tricolour cosmology. That these were the colours of the Kaiser’s empire’s flag, is in his case explanation enough. They did not refer to skin colour, for if they did, he would not have put black in the centre. He won’t have consciously used them in the societal symbolic meaning either, though this reading would actually have made sense: black as the colour of the “Shudras” would be a logical choice for a Socialist party of the Workers.

At any rate, from a Hindu viewpoint, the colour arrangement in the Nazi flag is plain wrong and inauspicious. As a solar symbol, the swastika should have a bright colour: yellow, gold, orange or red. Only in black-and-white print could the colour be black, but here the red background colour shows that the option red is available. It so happens that the Syrian National Socialist Party had the inverse colour scheme, which is more correct at the symbol level. For them, black in the background signifies the ignorant state from which they proudly emerge, with the central red symbol signifying the crowning achievement.

Orientation

Some good-natured people try to reconcile saving the swastika with demonizing the swastika in its Nazi form. They say that the evil lies in its clockwise orientation, and that it would have been alright if it were counter-clockwise oriented. This is a mistake.

To be sure, there are cases where orientation makes all the difference. During the Hajj, the pilgrimage to the Ka’ba in Mecca, the polytheist Arabs used to imitate the circular-looking motion of the heavenly bodies as seen from their own northern hemisphere by going around the Ka’ba in clockwise direction. But then Mohammed appeared on the scene and wrested the pilgrimage from the Pagans. In order to emphasize that he was making a clean break with the Pagan worship of the sun or other heavenly bodies (the same reason why he placed one of the five daily prayers during night time), he reversed the direction of circumambulation to counter-clockwise. This had the following unintended effect. Formerly the skilled right hand was turned towards the object of veneration, but now the unclean left hand pointed to the centre of the circumambulation. That was ritually a step backwards.

But cosmic cycles have no such problems. The same motion may be clockwise or counter-clockwise depending on whether it is seen from the northern or the southern hemisphere. That is why both are common in any of the civilizations concerned. Many temples all over Asia have alternations of both types of swastika, just as they have alternations between the swastika and the sri chakra or six-pointed star. So, there was nothing wrong with the orientation of Hitler’s hooked cross.

A related question is how this square wheel is posited. In Asia, a swastika is normally standing straight. For a symbol of eternal motion, this position of stability is only fitting. The Nazi version, however, was balancing on one angle. Maybe a titanic Western superman spurns the comforts of a stable position, but this constant balancing is tiring. Maybe that is why the Nazi empire, intended to last a thousand years, only held out for twelve years.

Upholding tainted symbols

There is a Canadian town called Swastika, part of the municipality Kirkland Lake in Ontario, founded in 1908 (coincidentally 1800 + 108, Hindu sacred numbers), originally named after a mining company that had adopted the name and logo. During WW2, it was under pressure to change its name. All it could pit against this pressure was self-respect. They were secure in the knowledge that they and their town’s name had done no wrong, that it had been established before there was any Nazi association with the name, and that there was more to the swastika than its use in an enemy flag. They were not superstitious nor willing to believe that some inherent magical power in the swastika had mesmerized the German people into becoming the enemy. So, they succeeded in keeping the name.

A similar symbol figured in another flag. Since 1843, the Swiss canton of Sankt-Gallen has a fasces in its flag, an axe around which eight sticks are tied. In the Roman republic, this was a weapon carried by servants in front of the lictor, the overseer of law and order, symbolizing his power over life and death. The Fascist movement named itself after it and used it as its emblem. Before and during WW2, proposals to disown this symbol were firmly turned down. But to make a distinction with the Fascist flag, a Swiss cross on the axe’s blade was added to the flag. After the war, the old design was restored.

In spite of Josef Stalin’s order to use the term “Fascist” whenever “National-Socialist” was meant, most people knew the difference between the fairly ordinary dictatorship that Fascism had been and the horrors wrought by National-Socialism. It was therefore far easier to continue the use of the fasces when compared to the hooked cross. The latter was surrounded with magical beliefs, as if some evil power emanated from the symbol itself. Nevertheless, like for the Canadian town Swastika, it was and remains possible to resist these superstitions and uphold the hooked cross.

Moreover, the time of the negative enchantment by the swastika is slipping away. In spite of Hitler-centric dirty minds who try to keep on living in an eternal 1940, this absolutization of the Nazi period as the zero hour of history is giving way to a saner view where things are put in perspective. Emerging globalism is ensuring that today, more or less everybody knows that the swastika is much more than the use the Nazis made of it.

What is to be done?

There is nothing wrong with the swastika. The demolition of buildings just because aerial photography shows them to be swastika-shaped, is a ridiculous waste of money. The problem is only that people with a limited view identify it with the use one political movement in one corner of the world made of it, and this during hardly more than a quarter-century, a mere blip in world history.

And even then, the Nazi movement used only a version of the hooked cross that simply cannot be confused with the legitimate swastikas used in the rest of the world. This, then, ensures an easy solution. The generic swastika should never be demonized or forbidden. Even the Nazi swastika is innocent of what happened under its aegis, but as a temporary compromise, as a sensitive concession to those who have suffered under it, Hindus could agree not to use the specific Nazi design.

That is an easy promise to abide by, for Hindus have never ever opted, nor will ever opt, for Hitler’s hooked cross. It pushes the bright solar colour into the background and features darkness instead; and it symbolizes an uneasy balancing act that cannot last long, let alone be sanâtana, eternal.