Svastika
Also called swastika, manji
Indus Valley and after, across Asia and into European folk art
Indic symbolsSvastika meaning
The svastika is a bent cross whose Sanskrit name means well-being. Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist uses are living and older than the twentieth century. The Nazi emblem is a later occupation of the shape, and it does not get a softer reading here.
A bent cross that meant well-being, and was later occupied.
The name. Sanskrit svastika, from su-asti: it is well. A blessing, not merely a shape’s name.
Where it comes from
A cross with arms bent the same way, turning. Ancient on Indus seals, ordinary in Hindu and Jain ritual — thresholds, Ganesha, the four directions, a blessing — and ordinary in Buddhist East Asia as the manji, mapped in Chinese dictionaries to the Buddha’s heart. European folk ornament knew the shape long before the twentieth century. In 1920 the NSDAP took a right-turning black swastika, rotated, in a white disk on red, and filled a blessing-sign with a racial state.
Indic
It is well
The name is a wish. At a door it asks that what passes be well. The direction of the bend is not stable across centuries and regions; later arguments that police a single “good” rotation are neater than the archive. In India the sign remains in daily religious use. Context — a temple, a festival, a red mark beside it — is how it is read there.
Buddhist
The manji is still in the hall
Japanese maps mark temples with it. The sign on a Buddhist chest is not a provocation, though a visitor may feel it as one. That feeling has a cause. The cause is historical and European, and it does not rewrite the hall. It does make the hall harder to see.
A hard history
The Nazi emblem — rotated, in its colors, in its politics — means atrocity. It does not get a softer gloss here, and it is not this entry. A use can occupy a form so completely that older meanings become inaudible. In much of the West that occupation still holds. In temples and in Indian ritual the older sign remains. Knowing which one you are looking at is the whole task.
Near this
Sources
- Sanskrit svastika, from su-asti, “it is well”
- NSDAP adoption of a rotated black swastika, 1920
Named when the entry depends on a text, a date, or a standard. Catalog numbers are not invented.
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symbol.wiki, edited as Sigilla. Last reviewed 2 October 2026. A reading of public tradition, not a ruling.