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Swastika, The

The swastika easily is the most universal and also the most ancient of symbolic devices. In form it has been of so many types that no line can be drawn between the swastika properly so called and what has a mere similarity to it; of names, such as swastika, suastica, fylfot, there is a long eatalog. It is impossible to say that it means anything in particular because it has in places and times been used to stand for so many hundreds of things! For almost the first time in history it was in Europe, Britain, and America being discarded and forgotten (except for trade-marks) until the Nazis, for some obscure reason of their own, adopted one of its thousand forms for their emblem. At bottom the device is nothing but two lines crossed, like the + sign; the Lines may be broken or not, the broken ends may be turned right or left, or they may be curved, or be ovoids, or ares of a circle, ete.; in one instance, the device consisted of four legs, bent at the knee; again, four arms, bent at the elbow.

Of those who have studied it Bro. and Count Goblet d'Alviela probably devoted more years and more learning to it than any other scholar. He could discover no beginning of it, but believed that in prehistorie times it was a sign used to denote either the cardinal points of the compass, or the North Star, once the cynosure and concern of every man on the seas, the arms of the swastika suggesting the swing of the Great dipper about the star, as on a pivot. It has never had a place in Freemasonry, except in the Scottish Prince of Mercy Degree, and then in a scarcely recognizable form, and with a special meaning defined by the Degree.

Among expert symbologists (a profession, not a science) it is classified as a "dead symbol." It has no meaning, force, substance, or suggestion of its own, no more than a diagram on a sheet of paper. The square, by contrast, is a symbol "alive" because it has ever been in use, and ever will be, and its use charges it with a Living meaning. A man gains something from the symbolism of the square; he can gain nothing from any form of the swastika because it is never used. It is doubtful if Medieval Masons ever could have been persuaded to employ it, except as a geometric ornament; because, first, it was forbidden by the church; and, second, it would have looked to them too much like a caricature of the Cross. They adopted no idle or dead symbols; each of their own had for them a use either for their working or for their thinking.

(The Migration of Symbols, by Count Goblet d' Alviela [Belgian Senator; eminent in Belgian Freemasonry]; Archibald Constable; Westminster; 1894. Symbolism of the East and TZesC, by Mrs. MurrayAynsley; George Redway; London; 1900. Chapter IV contains a long catalog of forms and of their distribution. Report of the U. S. National Museum, by Thomas Wilson; 1894; pp. 757-1011.)

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