Part 23

2. _The triskele, formed by the same process as the tetraskele, was an undeniable representation of the solar movement._—On coins from Asia Minor the triskele is frequently represented as three legs, and on Celtiberian coins (Fig. 130, K) the face of the sun appears between the legs. On the coins of Aspendus in Pamphylia the three legs are combined with animal representations of the sun, the eagle, the wild boar, and the lion; and on certain coins of Syracuse the triskele permutes with the solar disc above the quadriga and the winged horse. In various places transition occur between the tetraskele and triskele (Fig. 130, I). I have already (p. 213) referred to the ultimate fate of the triskele.

3. _The images oftenest associated with the fylfot are representations of the sun and the solar divinities._—The fylfot and the solar disc are, in a way, counterparts, not only amongst the Greeks, the Romans, and the Celts, but also with the Hindus, the Chinese, and the Japanese. The two are often combined into one figure, and the rays have been converted into horses’ heads, as on Gallo-Belgic coins, or into cocks’ heads and lions’ busts which take the place of the rays of the triskele on Lycian coins. Professor Goodyear points out that the fylfot is associated on Cyprian and Rhodian pottery with the goose (Fig. 130, G), deer, antelope, ibex, ram, horse, lion, etc. All of these are solar animals. It is associated with the lotus (Fig. 130, F), which is also a solar symbol.

4. _In certain symbolic combinations the fylfot alternates with the representation of the sun._—Among the Jains of modern India, a considerable Hindoo sect, the sun appears to be represented by the svastika, and this symbol and the solar disc constantly replace each other on the ancient coins of Ujjain in Central India (Fig. 130, O), and Andhra in the Deccan. Another proof of the equivalence between the fylfot and the sun, or, at least, the light of the sun, is found amongst the coins of the ancient city of Mesembria in Thrace. Professor Percy Gardner states, “Mesembria, as it stands, is simply the Greek word for “noon” or mid-day (μεσημβρία); and there can be no doubt that the Greek inhabitants would suppose their city to be the place of noon; and among the coins of Mesembria occurs ΜΕΣ卐.” Five-rayed and three-rayed (triskele) sun symbols were associated with Apollo on coins of Megara, now Mesembria was founded by a colony of Megarians.

Sometimes three solar discs or three fylfots, or combinations of both, occur (Figs. 130, B, C), and in these Count Goblet d’Alviella sees a symbolic representation of the three diurnal positions of the sun, and suggests that when four symbols occur crosswise, as frequently happens (Fig. 130, D), they “relate to four different positions of the luminary, which would, perhaps, suggest no longer its daily course, but its annual revolution marked by the solstices and equinoxes.”[189]

[189] The importance of astronomical lore in the cults of ancient civilisations is being more forcibly brought home to us as the remains of antiquity are being more critically and sympathetically investigated. Professor D’Arcy W. Thompson, Junr., has recently published a suggestive paper (“On Bird and Beast in Ancient Symbolism,” _Trans. Roy. Soc., Edin._, xxxviii., Pt. 1, 1895, p. 179) in which he suggests that many of the Greek representations of animals on monument or coin indicate not the creatures themselves but their stellar namesakes. M. J. Svoronos (“Sur la signification des types monétaires des anciens,” _Bull. Correspondance Hellénique_, 1894) had simultaneously and independently arrived at a similar conclusion, but D’Arcy Thompson carries the argument a step further, and attempts to show that the associated emblems correspond to the positions relative to one another of the heavenly bodies, in some cases to the configuration of the sky at critical periods of the year, or at the festival seasons of the cities to which the coins belong.

“The stellar symbolism that I here advocate is, I maintain, a different thing from the sun-myths, dawn-myths, and so forth, which are now to a large extent deservedly repudiated. We cannot ascribe to the civilised nations of antiquity the puerile conceptions of nature that are congruent with a stage of awakening intelligence and with the crude results of untrained observation. Rather are we dealing with the elaborated gain of ages of scientific knowledge, with the thoughts of a people whose very temples were oriented to particular stars, or to critical points in the journey of the sun; whose representations of Art, on frieze and pediment, in tragedy and epic, were governed by what would at first appear to be a tyrannical convention, which convention, however, so far from hampering their genius, seems, under the influence of a wholesome restraint, to have moulded their art into more beautiful, more poetic, and more sanctified forms.... The dominant priesthood, whose domain was knowledge, holding the keys of treasured learning opened the lock with chary hand, and veiled plain speech in fantastic allegory. In such allegory Egyptian priests spoke to Greek travellers, who came to them as Dervish-pilgrims or Wandelnde Studenten.... At Olympia, in the beginning of each Leap-year cycle, the noblest youth of Greece raced, round the symbolic pillars, their horses emblematic of the Horses of the Sun; thereby glorifying a God whom they thus ignorantly worshipped. Even so, we read in the Second Book of Kings [xvii. 16; xxi. 3, 5; xxiii. 5] how their Phœnician cousins worshipped with like ceremony the same God. And all the while, in the evening and the morning, priests and πρόσπολοι watched, measured, and compared the rising and setting of sun and stars, in temples that were astronomical observatories, to the glory of a religion whose mystery was astronomic science.”

The fylfot would seem to occasionally replace the moon. On coins of Cnossus, in Crete (Fig. 130, M), the Lunar Crescent takes the place of the solar disc in the centre of the fylfot; in such instances it may have been applied to the revolutions or even the phases of the moon.

Various suggestions have been made with regard to the reversed fylfot or sauvastika, but it is still uncertain whether this is of primary (Max Müller, Birdwood, Colley March) or secondary importance (Greg, d’Alviella).[190]

[190] P. Gardner, “Ares as a Sun-god,” _Numismatic Chronicle_, xx., N.S., 1880, p. 59.

The last theory of the origin of the fylfot that I need mention is that propounded by Professor Goodyear[191] in the following words:—“There is no proposition in archæology which can be so easily demonstrated as the assertion that the swastika is originally a fragment of the Egyptian meander, provided Greek geometric vases are called in evidence.” Professor A.S. Murray long since suggested that the “crosses which Dr. Schliemann calls _svastikas_, but which, in fact, appear to be only the simplest form or element of the meander pattern.”[192] Sir G. Birdwood says: “I believe the Buddhist swastika to be the origin of the key-pattern ornament of Chinese decorative art.”[193] Professor Goodyear makes him say that of Greek decorative art as well.

[191] _The Grammar of the Lotus_, p. 352.

[192] “On the Pottery of Cyprus,” Appendix to General L. P. di Cesnola’s _Cyprus_, 1877, p. 410.

[193] _The Industrial Arts of India_, 1880, i. p. 107.

It is a pity that Mr. Goodyear has pledged himself so fully as in the statement just quoted, as it is apt to make critics more captious as to his main thesis. If the fylfot is a detached intersection of the meander pattern, why did not the Egyptians hit on it? Granting that the meander may have had an indirect origin from a natural object in the Mediterranean countries, there is no proof that any religious or magical meaning was attached to it. The manner in which the fylfot was employed proves that it certainly had a symbolic signification. The strongest argument adduced by Professor Goodyear is in the case of some “geometrically” decorated Greek vases, in which between solar geese and other symbols occurs a small panel, which is variously decorated with a fylfot, or an element or varietal detail of the meander pattern.[194] But this, after all, may prove to be nothing more than that the Greeks noticed that the fylfot occurred in certain varieties of the meander pattern which had been arrived at from quite a different source. This occurrence of the fylfot in these patterns was quite accidental; it would be better to say that a fylfot design could be picked out from these patterns rather than to suggest that it was inherent in them. Granting the sacred associations of the fylfot, the fact that it could be separated from a pattern which itself may have had a recognised association with the symbolic lotus would probably appeal to a symbol-loving people. If they recognised that the fylfot on the one hand, and the lotus on the other, were sun-symbols, the isolation of the associate of a sun-symbol into another sun-symbol would be a pleasing exercise of ingenuity. I do not pretend to say that this has occurred, but it is to me quite a possible alternative. The sequence which Professor Goodyear seeks to establish appears to me to be nothing more than the birth of an analogy.

[194] _Loc. cit._, p. 353.

Before a judgment upon the Chinese meander pattern can be pronounced it would be necessary to make a detailed study of that pattern on objects from that part of the world, and I have not access to the requisite data.

We now come to the interesting question of the birthplace of this important symbol.

It was long ago remarked that the fylfot is almost exclusively an Aryan symbol. It is completely absent among the Egyptians, the Chaldeans, the Assyrians, and even the Phœnicians, although these middle-men traded useful objects and sacred symbols indiscriminately. The Semites did not employ it.

Although widely spread and venerated among the Tibetians (Fig. 130, R), the Chinese (Fig. 130, L), and the Japanese, it can be proved that these Mongolian peoples have adopted it along with Buddhism from India.

As a recognised religious symbol it is unknown among all the other peoples of the globe.

The conclusion is evident that the fylfot was a symbol before the swarming-off of the Aryan hordes. There seems little doubt that it was originally an emblem of the sun. It may, in certain combinations, have come to symbolise the apparent daily movement of the sun, and perhaps also the annual change of seasons. Some see in it the symbol of a sun-god, others believe it to be the god of the sky, or air, who in the course of time was variously known as Indra, Zeus, Jupiter, Thor, etc. Lastly, it has been promoted to signify “the emblem of the divinity who comprehended all the gods, or, again, of the omnipotent God of the universe.” This latter is certainly not a primitive conception, and we have no evidence that this meaning was ever read into the symbol.

Count Goblet d’Alviella points out that in Europe the geometric style of ornamentation embraces two periods, that of painted and that of incised decoration. “Now in this latter period, which is everywhere the most ancient, the gammadion is only found on the whorls of Hissarlik and the pottery of the Terramares. We have, therefore, two early homes of our symbol, one on the shores of the Hellespont, the other in the north of Italy.

“Was it propagated from one country to another by the usual medium of commerce? It must be admitted that at this period the relations between the Troad and the basin of the Po were very doubtful. Etruria certainly underwent Asiatic influences; but whether the legendary migration of Tyrrhenius and of his Lydians be admitted or not, this influence was only felt at a period subsequent to the ‘palafittes’ [pile dwellings] of Emilia, if not to the Necropolis of Villanova.

“There remains, therefore, the supposition that the gammadion might have been introduced into the two countries by the same nation.

“We know the Trojans came originally from Thrace. There is, again, a very plausible tradition to the effect that the ancestors, or predecessors, of the Etruscans, and, in general, the earliest known inhabitants of northern Italy, entered the peninsula from the north or north-east, after leaving the valley of the Danube. It is, therefore, in this latter region that we must look for the first home of the gammadion. It must be remarked that when, later on, the coinage reproduces the types and symbols of the local religions, the countries nearest the Danube, such as Macedon and Thrace, are amongst those whose coins frequently exhibit the gammadion, the traskele, and the triskele. Besides, it is especially at Athens that it is found on the pottery of Greece proper, and we know that Attica is supposed to have been primitively colonised by the Thracians. ‘The nations who had invaded the Balkan peninsula and colonised Thrace,’ writes M. Maspero, ‘crossed, at a very early period, the two arms of the sea which separated them from Asia, and transported there most of the names which they had already introduced into their European home. There were Dardanians in Macedon, on the borders of the Axios, as in the Troad, on the borders of the Ida, Kebrenes at the foot of the Balkans, and a town, Kebrene, near Ilium.’[195] Who will be astonished that these emigrants had taken with them, to the opposite shore of the Hellespont, the symbols as well as the rites and traditions which formed the basis of their creed in the basin of the Danube?

[195] G. Maspero, _Histoire ancienne des peuples de l’Orient_, 1886, p. 241, quoted by Count G. d’Alviella.

“Even when it occurs in the north and west of Europe, with objects of the bronze period, it is generally on pottery recalling the vases with geometric decorations of Greece and Etruria, and later, on coins reproducing, more or less roughly, the monetary types of Greece. It seems to have been introduced into Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Iceland, in the same manner as that in which the runic writing was brought from the Danube valley to the shores of the Baltic and the ocean. It may have penetrated into Gaul, and from there into England and Ireland, either through Savoy, from the time of the ‘palafittes,’ or with the pottery and jewelry imported by sea and by land from the East, or, lastly, with the Macedonian coins which represent the origin of Gallic coinage.

“We have already seen how it was brought among the islands of the Mediterranean, and into Greece proper, then from Greece to Sicily and even Southern Italy. It must be observed that even at Rome it seems to have always been connected with the traditions of the East. We must not forget that the Christianity of the Catacombs was likewise a religion of Oriental origin.”

So much for the western fylfot. The oriental form even in the extreme east of Asia can be traced without difficulty to the svastika of India. There can be no doubt that the fylfot and the svastika are genetically allied, but it is not at present very easy to demonstrate all the links of the chain. Here again I quote from Count Goblet d’Alviella.

“The svastika does not appear on the coins struck in Bactriana, or in India, by Alexander and his Indo-Greek successors. Even amongst the Indo-Scythians, whose coinage copies the Greek types, it is only visible on barbarous imitations of the coins of Basu Deva. On the other hand, as we have shown, it adorns the coins of Krananda and the most ancient monetary ingots of India. Moreover, Panina, who already makes mention of the svastika, is sometimes considered to have lived in the middle of the fourth century B.C. It might therefore be possible that the Hindus had known the svastika before feeling in their arts, and even in their symbolism, the influence of the Greek invasion.

“Yet, for the best of reasons, it is neither the Chaldæans, the Assyrians, the Phœnicians, nor even the Egyptians, who can have imported the gammadion to Hindustan.

“There only remain, then, the Persians, whose influence on the nascent arts of India was certainly felt before Alexander. But in Persia itself the gammadion only appears as an exception on a few rare coins approaching our era.

“Perhaps we would do well to look towards the Caucasus, where the antique ornaments with gammadions, collected by M. Chantre, lead us back to a civilisation closely enough allied, by its industrial and decorative types, to that of Mycenæ.

“Until new discoveries permit us to decide the question, this gap in the genealogy of the svastika will be equally embarrassing for those who would like to make the gammadion the common property of the Aryan race, for it remains to be explained why it is wanting amongst the ancient Persians. It is right, too, to call attention to its absence on the most ancient pottery of Greece and the Archipelago, where it only appears with geometric decoration.

“If the gammadion is found amongst none of the nations composing the Egypto-Semetic group; if, amongst the Aryans of Persia, it never played but a secondary and obliterated part, might it not be because the art and symbolism of these different nations possess other figures which discharge a similar function, whether as a phylactery, or else as an astronomical, or a divine symbol? The real talismanic cross of the countries stretching from Persia to Lybia is the _crux ansata_, the key of life of the Egyptian monuments. As for their principal symbol of the sun in motion, is it not the Winged Globe? There would seem to be between these figures and the gammadion, I will not say a natural antipathy, but a repetition of the same idea. Where the gammadion predominates—that is to say, in the whole Aryan world, except Persia—the Winged Globe and the _crux ansata_ have never succeeded in establishing themselves in good earnest. Even in India, granting that these two last figures really crossed the Indus with the Greek, or the Iranian symbolism, they are only met within an altered form, or with a new meaning.

“In brief, the ancient world might be divided into two zones, characterised, one by the presence of the gammadion, the other by that of the Winged Globe as well as of the _crux ansata_; and these two provinces barely penetrate one another at a few points of their frontier, in Cyprus, at Rhodes, in Asia Minor, and in Lybia. The former belongs to Greek civilisation, the latter to Egypto-Babylonian culture.

“As for India, everything, so far, tends to show that the svastika was introduced into that country from Greece, the Caucasus, or Asia Minor, by ways which we do not yet know. However that may be, it is owing to its adoption by the Buddhists of India that the gammadion still prevails amongst a great part of the Mongolian races, whilst, with the exception of a few isolated and insignificant cases which still survive amongst the actual populations of Hindustan, and, perhaps, of Iceland, it has completely disappeared from Aryan symbolism and even folk-lore.”

~TABLE ILLUSTRATING THE MIGRATIONS OF THE FYLFOT (AFTER GOBLET D’ALVIELLA.)~

? ? ? ~Centuries B.C. & A.D.~ ................ . . Anterior to XIIIth . Troas . | . +---+----+ . | | About XIII or XII. . <-- Mycenæ --> | +----------+--------+-----+ Villanova Greece | | From XI to VI. <-- | (Pottery) ..... Caucasus +-----+------+----+--+ <-- | . | | | | +-----------+ . | | | | Etruria | . | | | | | Greece (Coins) . To VI. | | | | | +-----+------+ . ? | | | | | Thrace and| | . To V. | | | | | Macedonia | Asia Minor . | | | | +-----+-----+ . . To IV. | | | | Sicily | . ? . | | | +--------+ .......... To III. | | | Gaul | <-- ? .. . ? | |India +-----+------+----+-----+ ... .......+-+ From II. B.C. Scandi- Ger- British N. | ... . | | to II. A.D. navia mania Isles Africa|... Persia | China | | | | To III. A.D. | Rome (Catacombs) | | +-+ | +-+ from III to VIII. | +-+ | | | | To IX. Iceland Thibet Japan

B. _The Psychology of Symbolism._

Signor G. Ferrero[196] has investigated the psychological laws of symbolism, using that term in its widest aspect. After giving a sketch of the history of the Fylfot, which is largely borrowed from that by Count Goblet d’Alviella, he proceeds to give its psychological interpretation in the following words (p. 148):—

[196] Guillaume Ferrero, _Les Lois Psychologiques du Symbolisme_, 1895. (Translated from the Italian.) I am indebted to my friend Havelock Ellis for the reference to and loan of this book.

“I believe that this symbol of the motion of the sun became transformed into a mystic symbol, precisely because it was a metaphorical symbol. The signification of a pictographic symbol can not be forgotten, for the sensation of the symbol directly recalls the image or the idea of the object; there are not in that case intermediate states of consciousness which can be eliminated. But when it concerns a metaphorical symbol, these intermediate states of consciousness exist, for the symbol must be interpreted, especially if a very imperfect and rude delineation is in question, whose relation to the object represented is of the slightest. The figure of a tree directly recalls to me the idea or image of the tree; but a circle drawn with three or four legs does not directly suggest to me in itself the precise idea of the motion of the sun; there is at least the possibility of different interpretations, and at all events there must be an original and independent act of interpretation. The significance of the symbol, finally, can only be known if one undertakes an investigation of induction and interpretation, or if one associates with an inspection of the symbol the remembrance of an explanation which has been given, or of an interpretation which we had formerly discovered for ourselves.