The Swastika, the Earliest Known Symbol, and Its Migration: With Observations on the Migration of Certain Industries in Prehistoric TimesWilson, Thomas
Religion
The Swastika, the Earliest Known Symbol, and Its Migration: With Observations on the Migration of Certain Industries in Prehistoric Times
Wilson, Thomas
Industries, Primitive; Swastikas; Symbolism
There is no direct evidence available by which the migration of symbols,
arts, or peoples in prehistoric times can be proved, because the events
are beyond the pale of history. Therefore we are, everybody is, driven to
the secondary evidence of the similarity of conditions and products, and
we can only subject them to our reason and at last determine the truth
from the probabilities. In proportion as the probabilities of migration
increase, it more nearly becomes a demonstrated fact. It appears to the
author that the probabilities of the migration of the Swastika to America
from the Old World is infinitely greater than that it was an independent
invention.
The Swastika is found in America in such widely separated places, among
such different civilizations, as much separated by time as by space, that
if we have to depend on the theory of separate inventions to explain its
introduction into America we must also depend upon the same theory for its
introduction into the widely separated parts of America. The Swastika of
the ancient mound builders of Ohio and Tennessee is similar in every
respect, except material, to that of the modern Navajo and Pueblo Indian.
Yet the Swastikas of Mississippi and Tennessee belong to the oldest
civilization we know in America, while the Navajo and Pueblo Swastikas
were made by men still living. A consideration of the conditions bring out
these two curious facts: (1) That the Swastika had an existence in America
prior to any historic knowledge we have of communication between the two
hemispheres; but (2) we find it continued in America and used at the
present day, while the knowledge of it has long since died out in Europe.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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