Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

the similarities between the venerated archetypes and mystical
symbols that can be witnessed among religions spanning disparate
geography and time. An example of this is the ancient sun wheel
- the swastika. Before it was perverted, unfortunately beyond
reformation, in the 1930s by the occult-consumed offenses of the
national socialist Third Reich in Germany, the swastika had been
used for tens of thousands of years as a symbol of good luck and
well being. While its very first use dates back to the
Neolithic Age, at the end of what is known as the “Stone Age,”
the swastika became widespread by the dawn of the Bronze Age,
around four millennia before the birth of Jesus Christ (Helmkamp
51). The swastika was used - upon weapons and pottery and
jewelry and the thresholds of holy places – by the Hindu,
Buddhists, the Greeks and Romans, Celts, Goths, the Norse,
Anglo-Saxons, the Baltics and Slavs, Mayans, Aztecs, and even
pre-Columbian “Indian” tribes of America (53). This very
curious ubiquity – again, spanning geography and spanning time –
begs the question, for me, of what meaning it had for those who
would chisel, paint, or carve its likeness into things they held
dear.
Utterly powerful in its sheer simplicity, the swastika was
a symbol very much like the yin yang of the Chinese Taoist
tradition: a visual embodiment of the union of polar opposites
in the natural world and the greater universe. The yin and yang
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