It is indeed much older than their own cultural existence. It is time to let go of it.
Dr. Robert Rozett, director of the library at Yad V'Shem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, said that Prince Harry's costume choice "represents a lack of sensitivity and trivialization of the events of the Holocaust."
Rozett said the fact that Prince Harry is a symbol for Britain makes it all the more important that "sends out a positive message."
"Part of the problem now, 60 years after World War II...[is that] the Holocaust is often discussed superficially [and] often used [as a description] for all kinds of things," Rozett said. The younger generation must be taught how it relates to them and why it is still relevant in their lives, he added.
<>The swastika gets its name from the Sanskrit word svastika, meaning well-being and good fortune. The earliest known swastikas date from 2500 or 3000 B.C. in India and Central Asia. A 1933 study suggests the swastika migrated from India across Persia and Asia Minor to Greece, then to Italy and Germany, probably in the first millennium B.C.
The fateful link was made by German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann. >From 1871 to 1875, he excavated the site of Homer's Troy on the shores of the Dardanelles. When he found artifacts with swastikas, he quickly associated them with the swastikas he had seen near the Oder River in Germany. As Steven Heller, art director of The New York Times Book Review, wrote in "The Swastika: Symbol Beyond Redemption," "Schliemann presumed that the swastika was a religious symbol of his German ancestors which linked ancient Teutons, Homeric Greeks and Vedic India."
Pretty soon swastikas were everywhere, rotating both clockwise and counterclockwise. Coca-Cola issued a swastika pendant. Carlsberg beer etched swastikas onto its bottles. During World War I, the American 45th Infantry division wore an orange swastika as a shoulder patch. The Girls' Club published a magazine called The Swastika. And until 1940, the Boy Scouts gave out a swastika badge.
Yet anyone who looks at art or architecture, no matter how casually, will eventually see the symbol. The Navajos, Tibetans and Turks incorporated the swastika into their rugs. Arizona's indigenous Pima and Maricopa people wove them into their baskets and painted them onto their pots. In Asia the emblem is found on everything from clothing to political ballots to the thresholds of houses. Swastikas are carved into the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., Philadelphia Museum of Art and many ancient Buddhist and Mayan temples. At Albuquerque's KiMo Theater, built in 1927 and recently restored, swastikas adorn the proscenium, entryway and the building's exterior. Elsewhere in New Mexico, they are evident in the architecture of the Shafer Hotel in Mountainair and the Swastika Hotel in Raton (now the International Bank).
One of the oldest symbols made by humans, the swastika dates back some 6,000 years to rock and cave paintings. Scholars generally agree it originated in India. With the emergence of the Sanskrit language came the term "swastika", a combination of "su", or good, and "asti", to be; in other words, well-being.
There's no clear answer on how the figure migrated to other parts of Asia, Europe, Africa and the New World. Early examples of swastikas on pottery and household objects in China indicate that the swastika traveled with traders and with the spread of Buddhism throughout Asia. According to Jim Clarke, an ancient Asian art expert and owner of Clarke & Clarke Asian Antiques and Tribal Art in Santa Fe, early Christian inhabitants of India and Iran used the swastika as an amulet or protective device. "In the 17th century, India and Iran were exotic places to Europeans," Clarke remarks. "Things brought back from these countries were viewed as exotic. To incorporate these symbols was considered very avant."Clarke is intrigued by the notion that the swastika might have made its way from China to the New World with Chinese traders lost on the seas. Remains of Chinese vessels have been excavated in coastal communities in South America, he says, and along with them the goods they carried. Another theory goes that the swastika traveled with Asians who crossed the land bridge to Alaska and migrated southward to become the indigenous people of North and South America, bringing with them the magic symbols they considered crucial to their health and well-being.
In his book, The Swastika Symbol in Navajo Textiles, Dennis J. Aigner cites Thomas Wilson's research in the 1890s that the earliest evidence of the swastika in America was found in excavations in Tennessee and Ohio. "That the swastika found its way to the Western Hemisphere in prehistoric times cannot be doubted . . . ." Aigner quotes Wilson's writing. One of the specimens "shows its antiquity and its manufacture by the aborigines untainted by contact with the whites."
It's also very possible that this simple variation of a cross—which was often used by early humans to represent a star—sprung up out of the "collective unconscious" among cultures all over the world. "Potters and weavers are basically the first artists," comments Josh Baer, a Santa Fe dealer of Navajo rugs and other Native American artifacts. "They probably didn't influence each other as much as resorting to patterns. In weaving if the image is not pictorial, the alternative is to use geometric forms in such a way that they represent celestial and terrestrial forms."
The swastika's meaning does seem to be similar across cultures, generally denoting abundance and prosperity and referring to the four cardinal directions. To Hindus, it is a symbol of the sun and its rotation. Buddhists consider it a diagram of the footprints of Buddha. Among the Jainas of India, the emblem is a reminder of the four possible places of rebirth: in the animal or plant world, in hell, on Earth or in the spirit world. In 1963, the well-respected Southwest author Frank Waters described the swastika's meaning to the Hopi people as a depiction of the migration routes Hopi clans took through North and South America.
In Navajo myth the swastika represents the legend of the whirling log. As told by Aigner, the tale is of a man, outcast from his tribe, who rolls down river in a hollowed-out log. With the help of sacred deities he finds a place of friendship and abundance. Until the late 1800s, when J. Lorenzo Hubbell and J.B. Moore opened their trading posts in Arizona and New Mexico, Navajos portrayed the swastika solely in their religious ceremonies in the form of sand paintings. But by 1896, with prodding by Hubbell and Moore, the symbol proliferated on Navajo rugs, sometimes lifted directly from the images in sand and depicted as a central cross with a male-female pair of standing figures ("yei" or "dreaming twins") at the end of each of the four arms of the cross.
