The Ancient Secret of the Swastika (Pt. 1 of 2)

Western Europe, which has been predominantly Christian for centuries, has been “cut off” from its ancestral religion of Hinduism, which was practiced across prehistoric Europe for thousands of years before the rise of Christianity. As a result, Europeans and their descendants in the Americas and Oceania have lost their Path. Many seem to have forgotten “who they are” spiritually, and discard introspection in their wild pursuit of money and material possessions. We’ll examine the modern day censorship of Europe’s indigenous Hindu faith, and the suppression of its key symbol, the Swastika, which has become synonymous with brutality, racism and genocide, but once upon a time represented something very different.

Ancient Greek gold disk with swastikas at Greece’s
Otagon Museum dates to the 8th century B.C.

Hinduism—with its exceptionally high spiritual concepts of the Eternal Soul, Reincarnation, Karma, Yoga, the Third Eye, and Nirvana—is the lost religious tradition of Europe. It gained a strong foothold in Europe long before modern monotheistic religions arose, beginning a little more than 2,000 years ago, to take its place.

Swastikas Found On Ruins Across Ancient Europe

All ancient European cultures—i.e., the Etruscans, Greeks, Romans, Gauls, Celts, etc. —practiced the same high spiritual religion of Hinduism. We can still see this religion’s central symbol, the swastika, all over European ruins, visible in this 1898 Yale University study:

The Swastikas Of Ancient Europe from a 1898 Yale University study.

Ancient Swastika on a Minoan pottery piece from Crete.

Ancient Roman Mosaic with swastika.

Small terracotta jug with swastika, from Crete.
National Archaeological Museum, Athens.

Most people today associate Hinduism with India, but Hinduism was not unique to India. Although the precise origins of the Hindu religion are shrouded in mystery, it is widely accepted that the nomadic Aryans, progenitors of Iranians and Europeans, held similar religious beliefs.

From India, the Aryans eventually migrated westward into Europe, creating the high cultures that evolved in Germany, Great Britain, France, Spain, Italy, Poland, and so on. Every Caucasian in America who can trace family roots to Europe is a descendant of Aryans.

Hinduism is still practiced across India today, but it had largely vanished from Europe before its resurgence beginning in the late 1800s. The introduction of Christianity two thousand years ago cut Europe off from its indigenous Hindu religious roots, plunging the continent into the Dark Ages. This means that long before Christianity, most Europeans practiced the religion we now call Hinduism.

Although the swastika has been largely erased from Europe, the symbol is still considered sacred among Hindus who live in India; it is visible on Indian temples, altars, religious scriptures, used in Hindu weddings, festivals, and ceremonies, and painted on houses, clothing and jewelry.

Swastikas in India

Hindu temple in India featuring swastikas.

Indian musician with swastika guitar.

Hindu temple in India featuring swastikas.

It should be noted that many scholars believe that the nomadic Aryan peoples actually “founded” Hinduism long before Hinduism ever existed in India. These Aryans “brought” Hinduism into India during an ancient epoch. This theory, which is called the “Aryan Invasion of India,” is extremely controversial among many Hindus, who feel it is racist. Nevertheless, the theory is upheld by many in academia. (AUTHOR´S NOTE: By reporting this information, I am not affirming my belief in this theory.)

In the book Barbarian Tides, a 1982 publication from the highly respected Time-Life Books library, we are told:

“These people, the Aryans, would bestow their social institutions on the Indian subcontinent and spawn a unique spiritual culture, Hinduism.”

— Barbarian Tides, Time-Life Books

Regardless of whether the Aryans established Hinduism themselves or simply learned it from the indigenous cultures of India,  the presence of swastikas across ancient Europe has an interesting consequence that many Westerners would not hit upon at first: Long before Christianity, most Europeans were practicing the religion we now call Hinduism.

Of course, most Westerners today realize the swastika is sacred among Hindus who live in India; it is visible on Indian temples, altars, religious scriptures, used in Hindu weddings, festivals, and ceremonies, and painted on houses, clothing and jewelry. However, most Westerners are unaware that the swastika was once ancient Europe’s most important and prolific religious symbol.

Swastikas in Ancient Europe

Swastika from ancient Gaul. Musée gallo-romain, Lyon, France.

Ancient Roman mosaic floor decorated with swastikas in La Olmeda, Spain.

Artemis with swastikas. Greece, circa 700 B.C.

Shortly after the real-life groundbreaking discovery of the mythical Troy in the 1870s by German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890), he found a multitude of artifacts bearing the swastika in the city’s ruins. Having consulted with two leading Sanskrit scholars, Emile Burnouf and Max Müller, Schliemann became convinced it was a central Aryan religious symbol. Burnouf, a French Orientalist,  felt that the swastika was proof not only of the westward migration of Aryan tribes from India, but of the symbol’s connection to the sophisticated ancient Aryan religion—Hinduism.

In his 1896 book, The Swastika: The Earliest Known Symbol and its Migrations, Thomas Wilson, former curator of the Department of Prehistoric Anthropology in the U.S. National Museum, wrote of the swastika:

“Some authorities are of the opinion that it was an Aryan symbol and used by the Aryan peoples before their dispersion through Asia and Europe. This is a fair subject for inquiry and might serve as an explanation how…as a sacred symbol…the Swastika might have been carried to the different peoples and countries in which we now find it by the splitting up of the Aryan peoples and their migrations and establishment in the various parts of Europe.”

—Thomas Wilson

By the 20th century, swastika images were being discovered on artifacts all across Europe, designed into mosaics, friezes, sculptures, and paintings, used by the Etruscans, Romans, Scandinavians, Sabines, Phrygians and Greeks.

Outside of Europe, the swastika was found in some Mesopotamian city-states, on Hittite and ancient Iranian relics, and used by the indigenous Bön faith of Tibet. The swastika is also important in Buddhism and Jainism—modern offshoots of the prehistoric religion of Hinduism—adorning temples, and forming a repeating pattern in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese art.

The Dalai Lama with Swastikas.

Swastika on Japanese Buddhist temple.

Swastika on Japanese Buddhist temple.space

Revival Of The Swastika In Europe – “God Is Dead”

Soon after Schliemann’s discovery, the swastika became en vogue among right-wing white nationalists in Europe. Leading members of such groups denounced Christianity and came to see the swastika as an authentic emblem of their European ancestry. The movement spread to whites across the world:

The Edmonton Swastikas, Canada 1916

Boys swastika basketball team, San Francisco, 1908.

English author and Freemason Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
used the swastika on the dust jackets of his books.

Actress Clara Bow wearing swastikas in the 1920s.

Coca Cola made a swastika-shaped watch fob.

At the time, the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) were also credited with helping to bring the swastika into circulation. Nietzsche, well-known for his impassioned denouncement of biblical monotheism, famously proclaimed “God is dead” in Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883).

Nietzsche charged that the Christian religion ascendant in the West since Roman times has been a magnificent hoax perpetrated by “the Jews,” and that it was designed to put Jews into positions of power, influence, and authority. The Jewish aim, he believed, was to elevate the Hebrew God into the world’s God by establishing the New Testament religion onto the foundations of their Old Testament tradition:

“…Christianity can be understood only in terms of the soil out of which it grew—it is not a counter-movement to the Jewish instinct, it is its very consequence… even today the Christian can feel anti-Jewish without realizing that he himself is the ultimate Jewish consequence…”

—Friedrich Nietzsche

Remarks of this nature found a sympathetic audience in the anti-Semitic and racially charged atmosphere of 19th and early 20th century “white Europe,” which was fast becoming uncomfortable with what it now considered its unauthentic Jewish (Semitic) ancestry. Nietzsche’s work offers important insight into how the biblical Old Testament (and it’s “God,” Yahweh) has been unnaturally grafted onto European history, cutting whites off from their ancestral and indigenous Hindu religion.

As early as the Renaissance, many Europeans were already unwilling to continue in the biblical tradition, which they now perceived as alien to their ancestry. By the 19th century, European scholars and laymen had begun to rediscover their own religious heritage. This anti-Judeo/Christian movement gained tremendous ground among scholars, academics, and intellectuals, like Aldous Huxley, who always distrusted monotheism. In his article ‘One And Many’ Huxley says that:

“monotheism, as we know it in the West, was invented by the Jews”

—Aldous Huxley, One And Many

Followers of the Abrahamic or Semitic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam did not use the swastika. The Semitic people had a very different religious, cultural, and linguistic history from the Indo-Europeans (called Indo-European because the Aryans settled in India before migrating into Europe); the Semitic religions present in Europe, via Christianity, are much younger than the religion represented by the swastika.

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Sanskrit, Europe’s Mother Tongue

The whole “Aryan invasion” model arose after the English philologist Sir William Jones (1746-1794) recognized similarities between the ancient Indian language of Sanskrit and the more modern European languages, including Latin and Greek, the Germanic, Celtic and Slavic languages.

Scholars found that Sanskrit was in fact the “mother-tongue” from which these and indeed all of Europe’s languages had evolved. European languages are now called “Indo-European” in honor of their “Indo” or “Indian” (Sanskrit) origin. Other researchers soon built on Jones’ work, showing that the Avestan and Armenian languages were also based on Sanskrit.

The term “Aryan” derives from the ancient Indian (Vedic Sanskrit) and Persian (Avestan) term arya for “noble.” The Aryan tribes in India called their land Aaryaa varta or Aryan expanse. The Aryans in Iran similarly named their land Airyanem Vaejah, or Iranian Expanse, today known as Iran, which is a variant of “Aryan.”

Westerners unaware of Iran’s Aryan ancestry often lump it in with surrounding Arab states based on their shared religion of Islam. Iran, however, is distinct in many ways, having retained much of its national, racial and cultural identity for thousands of years. Describing the Iranians, the famous 5th Century B.C Greek Historian Herodotus wrote:

“In ancient times… they were renowned as Aryans among themselves and their neighbors.”

—Herodotus

The 6th Century BC King of Persia, Darius the Great, in an inscription in Naqsh-e-Rostam says:

“I am Darius the great King… A Persian, son of a Persian, an Aryan, having Aryan lineage …”

—Darius The Great

About two-thirds of Iran’s current population is described as “Caucasian,” descended from ancient Aryan tribes who pushed through Iran and continued westward into Europe from northern India. The remaining one-third is considered Turks and Arabs. The Shah had the title Arya-Mehr, which means “Light of the Aryans.”

Famous German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 – 1832) believed Jones’ linguistic discovery was proof of the westward migration of the ancient Aryans. Norwegian Sanskritist Christian Lassen (1800-1876) agreed. German lexicographer Jacob Grimm (1785- 1863), who compiled ancient Aryan myths now called “Grimm’s Fairy Tales” (i.e., Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, and Rapunzel), asserted that these stories were used for millennia as vehicles for transporting incredibly advanced spiritual teachings across time.

These renowned thinkers had a powerful influence in Europe, where they exerted a tremendous impact on the German philologist and Orientalist Max Muller (1823–1900), one of the 19th century’s most celebrated scholars.

Muller wrote:

“The Aryan nations…stand before us in history as the principal nations of northwestern Asia and Europe. …They have perfected society and morals; and we learn from their literature and works of art the elements of science, the laws of art, and the principles of philosophy. …these Aryan nations have become the rulers of history, and it seems to be their mission to link all parts of the world together by the chains of civilization…”

—Max Muller

Unfortunately, by the 1800s the British were already using this model for the political purpose of justifying their occupation and colonial rule of India, which began in the early 1600s and ended in 1947.

Several writers and historians had traced the origins of the Aryans to the Caucasus Mountains region; these mountains bridge Europe and Asia, and from this idea the term “Caucasian,” invented by German anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840), came into widespread use.space

The Great “Flood” That Sank Atlantis

Some scholars traced the Aryan homeland just east of the Caucasus to Tibet, the so-called “roof of the world,” where many scholars believed the floodwaters that destroyed Atlantis  sent Atlantean refugees into high-altitude Tibet, where they remained safe for generations. The Aryans slowly arose here, according to this idea, to become the direct descendants and blood inheritors of the Atlanteans. Interestingly, the world-famous German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804), describing Tibet, said:

“…this is the highest country. No doubt it was inhabited before any other and could even have been the site of all creation and all science. The culture of the Indians, as is known, almost certainly came from Tibet, just as all our arts like agriculture, numbers, the game of chess, etc., seem to have come from India.”

—Immanuel Kant

Scholars, thinkers, and philosophers once accepted this chronicle as fact. In Cosmic Memory, for example, Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), the famous Austrian philosopher, literary scholar, architect, playwright, educator, and social thinker, wrote:

“The greatest part of the Atlantean population declined, and from a small portion are descended the so-called Aryans who comprise present-day civilized humanity.”

— Rudolf Steiner, Cosmic Memory

Steiner’s pre-Nazi era sentiment reflects the widespread European belief of his day. This may surprise some Americans familiar with Steiner’s reputation as an innovative educator. Today there are over one hundred “Steiner schools” throughout North America plus dozens in other countries, serving hundreds of thousands of students.

The Greek philosopher Plato first named Atlantis in his dialogues Timaeus and Critias, in the fourth century B.C. He spoke of it as a sophisticated antediluvian empire that flourished for eons on a now submerged continent in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, from which its name is taken. Plato maintained that the Atlanteans possessed a highly spiritual wisdom-religion, which enabled them to “see” their own divine and eternal “soul” inside the physical body. According to him, seeing the “soul within” allowed the Atlanteans to harness its higher powers.

Plato asserted that a memory of these powers is preserved in the fantastic abilities attributed to the “gods” of Greek and Roman mythology; instead of being actual gods, they were mortals endowed with amplified perceptions due to their connection with their eternal soul (think here of Christ and Buddha). In time, however, the Atlantean kingdom grew weak due to their materializing tendencies, weak enough that they began to lose touch with the inner divinity that granted them such power. Plato wrote:

“For many generations…they obeyed the laws and loved the divine to which they were akin. …they reckoned that qualities of character were far more important than their present prosperity. So they bore the burden of their wealth and possessions lightly, and did not let their high standard of living intoxicate them or make them lose their self-control…But when the divine element in them became weakened…and their human traits became predominant, they ceased to be able to carry their prosperity with moderation.”

—Plato

Plato goes on to explain that the end of Atlantis came some several thousand years ago, when a series of natural disasters sank their continent into the sea. A handful of survivors escaped the devastation, spreading to different parts of the world and taking their wisdom-religion with them. Until fairly recently, most scholars believed that ancient civilizations, separated by both time and space, built pyramids and pyramidal monuments in honor of their mother culture, Atlantis:

Even today this theory is still widely held and debated. Pyramids can be found in India, China, Peru, Bolivia, Mexico, Ireland and many other places. Such diverse structures with similar purposes seem to indicate a connection; if there was no communication between the cultures during their development, there must then be a common source.

Skeptics point to the disparity in “pyramid-ages” around the world (scholars believe Old World pyramids were built thousands of years before New World pyramids). However, New World scholars are continuously pushing back the date of pre-Columbian pyramids and it seems only a matter of time before the dates run parallel; even if they were not, the similarity of construction, intention, and purpose of the Old and New World pyramid structures makes the idea of such an exact coincidence unlikely at best.

Most pre-World War II scholars agreed that the world’s pyramids were connected to Atlantis. They saw the Flood myths common to various cultures as proof of Atlantis’ end, parallel legends of a worldwide catastrophe after which man and civilization were forced to begin anew; they saw the legends as stemming from a dim cultural memory of that Atlantean Flood. From this catastrophe a general digression occurred—not just a cultural confusion of tongues; a digression in the physical Atlantean “race” itself. The Atlantean capacity to “hold the vision” of the “soul within” had become lost. Only the “idea” of the eternal soul remained—and it is still with us even today.

There also occurred a slow but inevitable demise of the entire Atlantean race itself, according to these thinkers. Over the course of thousands of years, the race died out, and the “Aryan” or “white” race arose in its place.space

In Conclusion

The swastika’s connection to the “Caucasian” race is clear, but modern events, contradictions, and misconceptions have perverted the swastika’s original meaning, especially its semantic association. Scholars, anthropologists, linguists, and scientists have understood that the swastika is evidence of the unified and highly spiritual nature of European prehistory.

The question is: Why is this history purposely being hidden? Why is it not taught in schools? Is it because of the direct connection to Atlantis? Is Atlantis being covered up by the Elite who don’t want the world to know of its past existence, for then perhaps the masses will ultimately uncover the ancient religion of the “soul”…and realize the truth of man’s inner divinity and innate spiritual powers?

Unfortunately, the atrocities that Adolf Hitler and the Nazis committed under the symbol of the swastika have left modern audiences with a very negative semantic association. As a result, there has been a “censorship” of this magnificent spiritual symbol that has plunged—and continues to plunge—late 20th century and early 21st century peoples in the dark as to its magnificent origins and spiritual meaning.

In Part II, we examine:

• 19th and 20th century academic research into the Atlantis / Aryan connection
• the swastika’s true ancient meaning that we are gods temporarily living as humans
  
• the Victorian era belief that Caucasians have been cut off from Hinduism by the biblical religions of Judaism and Christianity

Learn more about the hidden origins of the swastika in Written In Stone by Richard Cassaro:

 

Richard Cassaro’s new book, The Missing Link, explores the meaning, transformations and propagation of the ancient world’s most important religious icon. His first book, Written in Stone, is a wide-ranging exploration of hitherto-unknown connections among Freemasons, medieval cathedral builders and the creators of important ancient monuments, in support of his theory that a spiritually advanced mother culture, lost to history, is behind many of the world’s architectural and artistic traditions.

Prior to the publication of Written in Stone, Cassaro enjoyed a successful career as a U.S. correspondent, professional journalist, and photo researcher for Rizzoli Publications, one of the world’s leading media organizations. Cassaro, who is a graduate of Pace University in New York City, has examined first-hand the ancient ruins and mystical traditions of Egypt, Mexico, Greece, Italy, Sicily, France, England, India, Peru and Spain; he has lectured on his theories to great acclaim in the United States, Egypt, Italy, Spain and Peru.

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