Lord Tree

Why would a small Indian prayer temple have 2 embossed Swastikas?

I visited a friend of mine who is from India. In one corner of her living room, was a small Temple made from copper and tin. She told me she uses it for prayer. I immediately noticed 2 Swastikas that were embossed on the tops of two of the small towers. I asked her about them, but she appeared not to understand the question. Swastikas are associated with Nazi Germany...why would they be part of an Indian prayer temple?

Public Comments

1. No you got it all wrong! Swastika is a symbol connoting general auspiciousness. It may represent purity of soul, truth, and stability or, alternatively, Surya, the sun. Its rotation in four directions has been used to represent many ideas, but primarily describes the four directions, the four Vedas and their harmonious whole. Its use in Hinduism dates back to ancient times. Nazism used a tilted version of this symbol under the name Hakenkreuz, and associated it with the notion of "purity of race".
2. Swastikas were around LOOOONNNGG before Nazi Germany, look it up.
3. Actually, they are a symbol that is the reverse of the German Swastika. Look closer. They are a Hindu symbol of good luck.
4. actually the swastika was a religious symbol of peace and harmony, often found in hindu temples and in ancient greece During WW II, Adolf Hitler then adopted the symbol to represent his party..this then spread the idea that the swastika represents evil and white supremacy
5. Until the Nazis used this symbol, the swastika was used by many cultures throughout the past 3,000 years to represent life, sun, power, strength, and good luck.
6. There are two types of swastikas, one is the asian swastika which has positive connotations in religion. The other is the german-nazi swastika which was stolen and perverted from the asian version.
7. The swastikas are actually the Hindu and Buddhist sign for all that is good and right with the universe. It was just used by Hitler for the same principles. He thought he was doing it all for God.
8. Swastikas are an ancient symbol, created long before the Nazis, and only came to represent evil from their use of them. They occur in several old religions and also I believe, in native American culture.
9. It is a Hindu symbol. Looks exactly like it I know.
10. The swastika is a Hindu symbol for the sun...or something associated with it. Hitler misused it along with many other symbols of occult origins to somehow gain "favor from the gods" and it proved effective as it seems.
11. Swastika designs have been used for hundreds of years by many different peoples. Certain Indian tribles of the American southwest used the motif, as have many asian cultures. There was even a US Army battalion that used it in their insignia and only changed it after Hitler became a negative force in Europe. The shoulder patch of the 45th Infantry Division, a National Guard unit from the Southwestern US, was originally a yellow swastika on a red diamond, in the context of a religious/mystical symbol of the Native American tribes of that region. As war with Nazi Germany became imminent in the late 1930s, the swastika was replaced by a yellow thunderbird emblem.
12. Hitler was into the occult as a member of the Thule Society. He thought that ancient Aryans dominated India and left traces of their symbols and ideas in that culture. He borrowed the swastika from India, though I think the "arms" go the other way. The Hindus are not using it as a symbol of hate.
13. The swastika actually goes back farther than that. They were a symbol from Babylon. They were used in some of the Babylonian temples to the Babylonian gods. They mean the same thing no matter which way they are turned. Hitler adopted this symbol from paganism. Strangely, this symbol can also be found in Catholic cathedrals and on the bottom of the feet of Buda. *Edit* Oh yeah. And it does have to do with the worship of the sun god.
14. The swastika is a very, very old symbol. It has a long tradition in Hindu culture, and was also used by Native Americans in the United States, as well as a number of other groups. Its use as a Nazi symbol came along very late historically, and has no bearing whatsoever on its use within Hinduism.
15. answer: as others have said: the swastika didn't originate with the Nazis or even the Thule society that predated Nazi Germany. It's a symbol that's been used throughout the world to symbolize the energy of the sun and moon. Hitler (or, more accurately, Himmler and Hitler) took symbols from Northern European and twisted them - runes and the swastika for example. That continues with fascist and Nazi groups these days. It will be another generation before the English-speaking world can use the swastika without being called Nazis.
16. The swastikas are a symbol of power and good luck common in Asiatic cultures such as Hindu, Buddhist and Jainist religions. It was common in baltic, germanic, celtic, finnic, bavarian, samic, many asiatic cultures, slavic, japanese, chinese, mandarin etc... The swastika was the essential symbol of Nazism and the German Third Reich. Though once commonly used over much of the world without stigma the symbol is no longer in general use in the Western world, because of its identification with Nazism. An attempt to ban the swastika across the EU in early 2005 failed after objections from the British Government and others. In early 2007, while Germany held the European Union presidency, Berlin proposed that the European Union should follow German municipal law and criminalize Holocaust denial and the display of Nazi symbols including the swastika. This led to an opposition campaign by Hindu groups across Europe against a ban on the swastika. They pointed out that the swastika has been around for 5,000 years as a symbol of peace. The shoulder patch of the 45th Infantry Division, a National Guard unit from the Southwestern US, was originally a yellow swastika on a red diamond, in the context of a religious/mystical symbol of the Native American tribes of that region. As war with Nazi Germany became imminent in the late 1930s, the swastika was replaced by a yellow thunderbird emblem; this may have been done as a simple tactical move to avoid confusion and friendly fire incidents as much as due to the political stigma of the symbol and its association with Nazism. On November 8, 2004 Microsoft released a "critical update" to remove "unacceptable symbols" from the Bookshelf Symbol 7 font. An analysis of the unpatched and patched fonts shows the symbol deemed unacceptable to be a swastika, and possibly a six-point star. In September of 2007 the United States Navy announced it would spend $600,000 to "camouflage" a barrack at the Naval Amphibious Base Coronado near San Diego, so that it would no longer resemble a swastika from the air.
17. The 'Indian' Swastika, is a representation of good fortune, positive connotations, as suggested earlier, and the Nazi has a negative connotation. I believe, the God/Deity Ganesha is associated with the Hindu Swastika, and if you looked, the Nazi Swastika is slanted, as opposed to the normal swastika being normally oriented with vertical and horizontal lines.
18. The "crooked cross" is just a mark(symbol) like a triangle, a square, circle and the like. If you had looked deeper into the war and Adolf Hitler, you would have found out that the crooked cross symbol was something he picked up(remembered and used the symbol) from his pastor when he went to church as a boy(yes he went to church) because his pastors last name was Hakencrutz(something to that spelling) translation: crooked cross. And so, many businesses hang a shingle outside of their business advertizing their store with symbols instead of words ...making it easier for the uneducated or the foreigners to figure out who was the shoe maker, or who was the dentist or whatever{because there was a picture of it} . On the church below the Christian cross was a crooked cross (the pastors name in a symbol). That is where it came from for AH. [He was only a kid of 15] barely read, there was no stealing of the symbol from India or China or aliens. No big deal. And a symbol was a symbol. It couldn't be a + because the official church in Rome got that already and the communists had the hammer and sickle - he wanted his political party to stand out so by taking the crooked cross gave them an identity and meant they were a party that was "(left or right) of church centre so that symbol was adopted. Of course the meaning of the symbol is whatever you the creator say it is. It just wasn't communist. Hitler hated and feared communism. But the crooked cross symbol has been used in the times of the Pharohs in Egypt....several thousand years before. Also the symbol has been found in Machu Pichu where the Incas once lived. It means different things to different cultures for different times. No matter what the film Indiana Jones says, Hitler was not into the occult. Hitler only tried to reclaim lands back that were won in the First World War and were taken back by the treaty of Versailles. No different than Napoleon, or those many who charged out from Britian to do the same. The so called Christian cross is all over the place too because it is "just a symbol" two lines intersecting which has nothing to do with Christ.
19. The swastika has been a religious symbol for peace for thousands of years, Hitler took it and turned it into an evil symbol.