Real Crime Stories/Paranormal Hauntings

History and Meaning of the Swastika (Part I)

The earliest known use of the word swastika is in Panini's Ashtadhyayi which uses it to explain one of the Sanskrit grammar rules, in the context of a type of identifying mark on a cow's ear. Most scholarship suggests that Panini lived in or before the 4th-century BCE, possibly in 6th or 5th century BCE.

Other names for the symbol include:

· tetragammadion (Greek: τετραγαμμάδιον) or cross gammadion (Latin: crux gammata; French: croix gammée), as each arm resembles the Greek letter Γ (gamma)

· hooked cross (German: Hakenkreuz), angled cross (Winkelkreuz), or crooked cross (Krummkreuz)

· cross cramponned, cramponnée, or cramponny in heraldry, as each arm resembles a crampon or angle-iron (German: Winkelmaßkreuz)

· fylfot, chiefly in heraldry and architecture

· tetraskelion (Greek: τετρασκέλιον), literally meaning 'four-legged', especially when composed of four conjoined legs (compare triskelion/triskele [Greek: τρισκέλιον])

· whirling logs (Navajo, Native American): can denote abundance, prosperity, healing, and luck[31]

Appearance

Left: the left-facing sauwastika is a sacred symbol in the Bon and Mahayana Buddhist traditions. Right: the right-facing swastika appears commonly in Hinduism, Jainism and Sri Lankan Buddhism.

All swastikas are bent crosses based on a chiral symmetry – but they appear with different geometric details: as compact crosses with short legs, as crosses with large arms and as motifs in a pattern of unbroken lines. One distinct representation of a swastika, as a double swastika or swastika made of squares, appears in a Nepalese silver mohar coin of 1685, kingdom of Patan (NS 805) KM# 337.

Chirality describes an absence of reflective symmetry, with the existence of two versions that are mirror images of each other. The mirror-image forms are typically described as:

· left-facing (卍) and right-facing (卐);

· left-hand (卍) and right-hand (卐).

The left-facing version is distinguished in some traditions and languages as a distinct symbol from the right-facing and is called the "sauwastika".

The compact swastika can be seen as a chiral irregular icosagon (20-sided polygon) with fourfold (90°) rotational symmetry. Such a swastika proportioned on a 5 × 5 square grid and with the broken portions of its legs shortened by one unit can tile the plane by translation alone. The Nazi Hakenkreuz used a 5 × 5 diagonal grid, but with the legs unshortened.

Varieties of swastikas

· Croix gammée

· Kruszwica's mursunsydän

· Broken sun cross

· Fylfot

· Tetraskelion

· Manji

· Battersea Shield Thames swastika

· Nazi Hakenkreuz

· Sauwastika

· Gammadion

· Cross cramponnée

· Lauburu

· Double-arm swastika

· Aztec swastika