signsThe swastikaस्वस्तिक

Take the living practice first, because it is older, larger and still going.

In Hinduism the sign goes before entrances and on doorways of homes and temples, marks the starting page of financial statements, and is built into mandalas for weddings and for welcoming a newborn. It has a particular tie to Diwali, drawn in rangoli — coloured sand — or laid out in deepak lights on the floor outside a house. Both turns are used and they are read differently: the clockwise form is solar, for Surya; the counter-clockwise, sometimes called sauvastika, connotes night and in tantric traditions stands for Kali.

In Buddhism it stands for the auspicious footprints of the Buddha, and a left-facing swastika is often imprinted on the chest, feet or palms of Buddha images. It is homologous with the dharma wheel, and the shape is read as eternal cycling, the theme of samsara. In the Bon tradition of Tibet it is the left-facing yungdrung.

In Jainism it is the emblem of Suparśvanātha, the seventh tīrthaṅkara, and in the Śvētāmbara tradition one of the eight auspicious aṣṭamaṅgala. All Jain temples and holy books must contain it. Ceremonies begin and end by making the mark several times in rice around the altar, and an offering is set on it — a fruit, a sweet, a coin or a note. The four arms are read as the four places a soul may be reborn before it attains moksha.

East Asia took it with Buddhism from India. In 693, under the Tang, it was declared the source of all good fortune and named wan by Wu Zetian. The character is a homonym for ten thousand and for infinity, so it also reads as immortality and longevity, and adding it to another auspicious pattern multiplies the wish by ten thousand. It has been part of the Chinese writing system since at least the Liao dynasty, 907–1125, as a variant of 萬. In Japan it entered with the writing system in the eighth century as the manji, became the crest of families including the Tsugaru and the Hachisuka, flies as the official flag of Hirosaki, and is the map symbol for a Buddhist temple under Japan's Survey Act.

It is far from only Asian. Armenians call it arevakhach and it appears on Copper Age petroglyphs. Islamic use runs from the Umayyad palaces of Walid, 705–715, and Hisham, 724–743, through Abbasid Raqqa and Cordoba to the Persianate world from the Seljuk period onward; on the Gonbad-e-Sorkh of 1147 it seems to have stood for the soul and resurrection. In Ethiopia one is carved in a window of the twelfth-century Biete Maryam at Lalibela. In Ghana the Akan adinkra symbol nkontim takes this form and stands for loyalty. Hopi, Navajo and Tlingit peoples have used it; the Navajo symbol tsin náálwołí, whirling log, represents humanity and life and is used in healing rituals. The Guna people of Panama adopted a flag carrying the sign in 1925 and call it Naa Ukuryaa. The earliest known swastikas are older still: a meander pattern of joined-up swastikas on a late Palaeolithic mammoth-ivory bird figurine from Mezine in Ukraine, dated 10,000 to 17,000 BCE, and mirror-image swastikas on pottery in the Devetashka cave in Bulgaria dated to 6000 BCE. In South Asia the sign first appears in the archaeological record around 3000 BCE in the Indus Valley Civilisation.

Now the other history, which is specific, recent and European.

Heinrich Schliemann excavated more than 1,800 ancient swastikas and variants at Hisarlik from 1871 to 1875 and linked them to the Sanskrit word. In 1872 Émile-Louis Burnouf, director of the French School at Athens, wrote to him that the swastika should be regarded as a sign of the Aryan race, adding that the Jews had completely rejected it. Schliemann accepted that reading and tied his Trojan finds to objects found in Germany. Before the Nazis, the sign tilted 45 degrees was already in use by the German nationalist Völkisch movement. The Nazi Party formally adopted it in 1920: a black swastika rotated 45 degrees on a white circle on a red ground, used on the party flag, badge and armband. Hitler described designing it in Mein Kampf in 1925 and said the hooked cross carried the mission of the struggle for the victory of the Aryan man. Racial hygiene and scientific racism were central to Nazism, and the party co-opted the sign as an emblem of an Aryan master race. On 14 March 1933 the NSDAP flag was hoisted beside Germany's national colours; as part of the Nuremberg Laws, on 15 September 1935 it became the sole national flag of Germany. Since the 1930s, in the West, the sign has been read as a symbol of hate and, in many Western countries, of white supremacy. Neo-Nazi organisations still use it; the Anti-Defamation League records it among hate symbols used as graffiti in United States schools, and in 2010 said it had for some become a more generalised symbol of hate while remaining predominant among American white supremacists, particularly as a tattoo.

The two histories now collide in law and in shop aisles. German and Austrian criminal law forbids public display of the swastika, with the swastikas on Hindu, Buddhist and Jain temples exempt, because religious symbols cannot be banned in Germany. Poland's ban likewise exempts religious use; a Latvian court held in 2007 that it may be used as an ethnographic symbol. In 2022 Victoria became the first Australian state to ban display of the Nazi swastika. Goods carrying the Jain, Buddhist or Hindu sign, exported to North America and Europe, have been read by buyers as Nazi emblems and withdrawn: Pokémon cards in 1999, Christmas crackers in Canada in 2002, a Shein necklace in 2020.

Hindu, Buddhist and Jain organisations have asked publicly that the two not be conflated, and they have names. When Berlin proposed an EU-wide ban in early 2007, Hindu groups across Europe campaigned against it, pointing out that the sign had been a symbol of peace for 5,000 years; the proposal was dropped on 29 January 2007. The Hindu American Foundation opposed New York bills A8545 and S6648 in July 2020, objecting that the bills defined the swastika as a symbol of Nazi Germany without explaining its origins and its continuing use in Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism and Buddhism, and warning that teaching that definition could expose Hindu American students to prejudice. In May 2022 the Coalition of Hindus of North America, with the Heiwa Peace and Reconciliation Foundation of New York and the Buddhist Council of New York, objected to California's AB2282 for keeping the phrase Nazi Swastika; its president Nikunj Trivedi said the wording perpetuates the false idea that there is a good swastika and a bad one. Their proposal is a vocabulary one: reserve swastika for the sacred sign and use Hakenkreuz, or Nazi hooked cross, for Hitler's emblem. The Rev. T.K. Nakagaki, a Buddhist priest in New York and author of The Buddhist Swastika and Hitler's Cross, 2018, argues the same distinction.

The objection to that distinction also has names. Mark Pitcavage of the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism has acknowledged the sign's sanctity in several faiths while holding that Hitler's association with it cannot be entirely removed. Shelley Rood Wernick, managing director of the Jewish Federations of North America's Center on Holocaust Survivor Care, has said the symbol stands for the annihilation of an entire people and can re-traumatise survivors. Hitler himself, speaking in Munich on 13 August 1920, said the Nazi sign was the same one found carved in temple pillars as far as India and Japan.

This atlas reports that argument and does not settle it. It records the two histories separately because they are separate: one runs from prehistory to this morning's rangoli, the other begins in 1920 and ends in a genocide.

Drawn rather than made, more often than not. Rangoli sand or deepak lights outside a Hindu house at Diwali; rice laid in the shape before a Jain altar and an offering set on it; painted or carved on a temple; woven into cloth; cast into lattice; imprinted on a Buddha image's palms.

Living and daily across South, Southeast and East Asia as of 2026, and prohibited or criminalised in its Nazi use in Germany, Austria, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Brazil, Geneva and the Australian state of Victoria, with religious exemptions written into several of those laws.