By EILEEN WEINTRAUB
Last December, Microsoft announced that the "Bookshelf Symbol 7" font in the latest version of their Office software had a problem. It wasn't a security issue; it was a sensitivity issue. Among the font's array of graphic symbols was one that had been banned in Germany since 1946: the swastika. Mortified, Microsoft offered its customers a free utility to replace the offending character.

ABOVE: Swastika adorns South Indian home (photo by Eileen Weintraub). Click to enlarge.

How did this ancient symbol of cosmic benevolence become a modern logo for evil?

According to scholars, the swastika may be as old as 10,000 years. No other image has been found in so many disparate cultures, from Eurasia to America. Buddhists, Jains and Hindus so honoured the swastika that it is inscribed on deities, including the chest and footprints of the Buddha. Used, among other things, to invoke fecundity and to symbolize the sun’s path through the sky, the meaning of the ancient geometric spiral remains, like a dream, elusive and open to many interpretations. 

In Sanskrit, swastika literally means "it is well." As the symbol of auspiciousness, it is fittingly associated with the sun, both in its resemblance to a sunwheel and as an emblem of the sun's munificent power. Some say the twisting path of the swastika’s intersecting arms denotes the sudden leaps on the path to self-realization. According to the Italian Buddhist scholar Giuseppe Tucci, Buddhism sees the swastika as an endless knot with neither beginning nor end: the infinite peace of the balanced and enlightened mind.

Myriad memories of what the swastika meant have been passed down, but one thing is constant: before the Nazis, it was always a force for good.

It wasn’t until the middle of the nineteenth century that the swastika began its descent. German nationalists at the time resurrected this ancient sign of the Aryan race: the ancient Indo-European elite to which they traced their lineage. Even the great German humanist Goethe was smitten, according to Malcolm Quinn, author of The Swastika: Constructing the Symbol. But by 1880, the German Indologist Max Muller warned against the symbol's use outside of India, describing it as a "troublesome puzzle." Madame Blavatsky of Theosophist fame noted that "few world symbols are more pregnant with real occult meaning than the swastika." And later the notorious magician Aleister Crowley went so far as to say that "Hitler couldn’t have done it without the power of the sign."

By the time of Hitler’s Third Reich, notes art director Steven Heller in The Swastika: Symbol Beyond Redemption?, this power-turned-evil so appalled four Arizona Native American tribes that they forswore the swastika's use in their traditional design. Meanwhile, in Hartford, Connecticut, a Jewish congregation was shocked to discover swastikas decorating their synagogue and had them promptly removed. Ironically, swastikas had also adorned synagogues in ancient Palestine, sometimes side by side with the Star of David.

Contemporary Western authors doubt that the swastika can ever be rehabilitated. According to Heller, the legacy of horror has eclipsed the symbol's benign origins. So long as racists and neo-Nazis continue to embrace it, he concludes, the swastika remains tainted and should be rejected. Quinn — alarmed that the Nazi Hakenkreuz (Hook Cross) has resurfaced as an emblem of the far right in reunified Germany — similarly rejects "any philanthropic notions of a change in meaning."

Aquarian editor Syd Baumel comes from a family of Holocaust victims and survivors. "Humanity," he suggests, "still needs time to recover from the Nazis' subversion of the swastika — especially Holocaust survivors, who have every right to be spared the horrible anguish the symbol can still provoke." 

Though it may be symbola non grata in the West, the swastika remains a ubiquitous sign of well-being and good fortune throughout Asia. You can find it adorning everything from products in grocery stores to the emblem of China’s Falun Gong movement. During a recent trip to South India I even saw the swastika decorating a doormat at the Madras Cricket Club (an affront to any practitioner of Eastern religion). On that trip, my 69-year-old travelmate was an American who had moved to India some years before. One day she told me of her aversion to seeing the swastika displayed so prominently in the country’s temples. Having grown up during the Second World War, her negative associations ran very deep. I explained to her that I was so used to understanding the symbol in the positive Hindu, Buddhist and Jain light that it no longer cast any darkness for me. My comment seemed to open her eyes, lifting the toxic residue of Hitler’s shadow. 

Today, some people are trying to bring back what they call a "gentle swastika" to the West through education and art. In the Jewish tradition this is called tikkun olam: repairing the world by summoning good to make whole, or holy, that which has been broken or profaned. For this sacred endeavour, we must redeem what has been misappropriated. Yet so long as hatred dwells in the human heart, the "dual use" predicament of the swastika will remind us of what we're up against. In humanity’s collective consciousness the swastika’s destiny lies in wait.