THE SWASTIKA AND HEXAGRAM DO NOT ORIGINATE with the Nazis and the Jews. These two symbols are part of a symbolic language, established upon natural and pure transcendental and metaphysical realities in connection to life and the cosmos. The four-armed wheel (or cross) and the double-interlaced triangle have hitherto become the symbols of two political ideologies and operations, but before the Nazis’ hakenkreuz, it represented the combined symbol of the Theosophical Society founded in 1875. FASCISM is the great buzzword of the hour, and National Socialism brings to us memories of psychological torment from the second “World War,” when the Nazi administration obliged Jews to brand themselves with yellow hexagram badges displaying faux-Hebrew letters, which spelled Jew in German. The hexagram (How the “Magen David” Became the Jewish Symbol), therefore had become a symbol of Jewish Ghettoization beginning with the Pale of Settlement.
The Theosophical Society’s* emblem proves that the swastika and hexagram are not the private property of any race, ideology, or tragedy. They are the shared language of indigenous tribes, cultures and mystic traditions in antiquity, therefore belonging to all humanity. Suppression of the symbol is a suppression of human history, and psychological association with the symbol with the pain and tragedy of a singular people from the second world war does not justify its post-war treatment and erasure. It has actually contributed to a paradox, in which a symbol of the Jews through political Zionism stands freely and triumphantly suppressing the rich expression of indigenous European culture and the influence the art endured throughout long periods as a symbol of prosperity and good fortune.
ANCIENT ROOTS AND THE PRIDE OF CULTURES
The swastika, a Eurasian symbol is not only a symbol of good fortune but represents an entire philosophy. It has a very long iconographic history archaeologically dating back to 3000 BCE in the Indus Valley. There are many archaeological finds of the symbol on ancient pottery and seals. As in this depiction, it was a symbol on the feet of an ancient Greek statue of Athena, a Dionysian mosaic 17 centuries old.
It was presented in art and cultures from the Neolithic (New Stone Age) periods to Mezine in Ukraine dating to 10,000 BCE, in Samarra culture in Mesopotamia 5,000 BCE, among the Indus Valley civilization 2,500 BCE, in ancient Greece and Rome (900-700 BCE), among Native American (Navajo and Hopi) artifacts and designs and religions in Asia for over 3,000 years, therefore making one of humanity’s oldest sacred symbols.
Hockey teams and Army Forces in Canada, Finland, among other regions wore the swastika on their uniforms.
THE HEXAGRAM’S TRUE HISTORY
We commonly recognize the Swastika as used by the National Socialists Party; and we recognize the second in the flag of Israel, in the political Zionism of Theodor Herzl. The first is neither purely Indian, nor the second, purely Semitic, rather Assyrian. They are mystic symbols belonging to ancient history. It never carries one singular meaning but is manifold. The first, the swastika symbolizes not only peace, but cosmic motion among other meanings. The hexagram or interlaced triangles (most commonly known as the Star of David) in the Theosophical emblem is encircled by a serpent biting its own tail, and the serpent symbolizes duration, or the cycle of time. The interlaced triangles can be dissected displaying four triangles, that represent the classical four elements, among other things. As said, each symbol is a language and contains an entire philosophy.
The claim that the hexagram is “the Jewish symbol from time immemorial” collapses under the weight of modern scholarship. Gershom Scholem, one of the greatest historians of Jewish mysticism, demonstrated that the six-pointed star has no roots in biblical or rabbinic Judaism. It appears as a decorative or magical motif among many peoples, often side-by-side with the swastika, as in the third-century Capernaum synagogue. Scholem notes that it “has been discovered on an ancient Hebrew (or Phoenician) seal, but together with other signs…none of which can be considered a Jewish religious symbol.”
Its Jewish career begins in medieval Practical Kabbalah as a talisman against demons (the “Seal of Solomon”), not as a religious emblem. Only in the seventeenth century (Prague) and especially the nineteenth century (Emancipation era) did Jews adopt it en masse, precisely because it was a widely recognized geometric form without strong religious baggage, perfect for a people seeking a national emblem analogous to the Christian cross. Zionists chose it in 1897 for the same reason. The Nazis later forced it upon Jews as a badge of shame, thereby sanctifying it through suffering.
Thus the hexagram’s modern “Jewish” identity is a nineteenth- and twentieth-century historical accident, not an eternal truth, exactly like the swastika’s Nazi identity. Both symbols were hijacked, yet neither was invented by its hijackers.
THE SUPPRESSION OF SACRED HISTORY AND SYMBOLISM
The idea, that a symbol is eternally corrupted once an organization, or individual misuses that symbol for malignant purposes is ridiculous (Hindu Swastika Causes Storm in Irving). It is not merely attributable to Hitler and Nazism, which no one in polite society wants to be associated with. The symbols however mustn’t be abandoned, because they not only represent symbols of peace to millions of people in their culture, but these symbols are central to our history, to understanding the Mysteries and its origins.
A symbol is not a trademark that can be cancelled by misuse. The cross was used by the Inquisition and the Ku Klux Klan, yet no serious person demands that Christianity abandon it. The crescent has flown over slave ships and jihadist banners, yet Muslims still rightly revere it. The swastika has been a sign of good fortune for three millennia across Eurasia and the Americas, but the hexagram has served as an alchemical and protective seal for even longer.
To permanently surrender either symbol to the Nazis or to any political faction is to grant evil the power to rewrite the sacred grammar of humanity. That is a surrender no free mind should accept. The Theosophical emblem stands as living proof that these two figures once spoke, and can speak again of unity, evolution, and the eternal dance of spirit and matter.
Now the two ancient and sacred symbols have become represented as two opposing sociopolitical forces, used in a narrative to support the preservation and cause of Jewish Zionism and Israel.
The flag of Israel is flown proudly, standing triumphant with the double-interlaced triangle, while a global and shared Eurasian symbol is demonized and voluntarily relinquished. The Japanese feared at the Olympics Game that foreigners would mistake their country’s liberal use of the Buddhist symbol of fortune on their temples for National Socialist sympathies. These are all of your ancestors’ symbols, and belong to humanity, that have become in our minds a remembrance of pain and war.
But for us, this is not so. The symbols remain ours, and we will reclaim and use them as intended, without permission, and as much as we like as it was before the war.
REFERENCES
- Gershom Scholem. “The Curious History of the Six-Pointed Star: How the ‘Magen David’ Became the Jewish Symbol.” Commentary 8, no. 3 (September 1949): 243-251.
- Gershom Scholem. Magen David: Toldotav shel Semel (The Star of David: History of a Symbol). Edited by A. Shapira. Ein Harod: Mishkan Le-Omanut, 2008.
APPENDIX
The symbol of the T.S.* has both the equilateral four-armed cross, and the double-interlaced triangle as displayed in all three below.
It takes the interlaced form of the Seal of Solomon, or talisman in Alchemical illustrations.
The Theosophical Society’s seal is not a random collage of exotic motifs. It is a meticulously designed cosmological map that unites East and West, spirit and matter, eternity and becoming. At the apex stands the sacred syllable Om — the unmanifest Absolute. Immediately beneath it whirls the swastika (the “fiery cross” or “hammer of creation”), representing cosmic electricity’s ceaseless activity that spins the universe into manifestation. Encircling everything is the ouroboros, the serpent of eternity that “bites its own tail,” declaring that the end is already contained in the beginning. Within this eternal circle stand the two interlaced triangles of spirit (upward, light) and matter (downward, dark), whose perfect interpenetration produces the hexagram. At the heart of the hexagram rests the ankh, the Egyptian key of life, asserting that divinity is immanent in every form.
This is not syncretism for its own sake. It is a visual declaration that the ancient Mysteries of India, Egypt, Chaldea, Greece, and the Americas spoke a connecting language of meaning. The swastika and hexagram are not borrowed but recovered. Any attempt to reduce them to twentieth-century political slogans is an act of historical vandalism.
THE HAMMER OF CREATION
Helena Blavatsky did not casually decorate her society with a pretty Indian design. In The Secret Doctrine she calls the swastika “the most sacred and mystic symbol in India” and “a summary in a few lines of the whole work of creation or evolution…from cosmo-theogony to anthropogony.” It is the “Hammer of Creation,” Thor’s hammer, Visvakarma’s tool, the whirling force of Fohat that strikes sparks of worlds from the flint of Space. Its four bent arms mark the cardinal points and the endless cycles of manifestation and dissolution.
ROOT RACES VERSUS RACIAL HIERARCHY
It must be stated first that the theories and use of terminology by the Theosophists are entirely opposite of the Nazis. The term Arya, or Aryan commonly referred to Indians, not a German race. We will also find out, that Helena P. Blavatsky considered Semites, Aryans, and Africans to be of common origin, which was not the theory of the Nazis and Mussolini.
“The Occult History of the Third Reich” is an old documentary that claims Blavatsky thought of seven evolutionary stages of humanity, and the seventh are said to be called Aryans, which is incorrect. The swastika it claims is their symbol. Helena Blavatsky did not invent the concept of root-races out of nowhere. She demonstrates her concept of the root-race through sources from the Chinese Shu-King, American (Guatemalan) lore, Puranas and Avesta.
What Blavatsky explains of these “root races” is strikingly different from Lanz von Liebenfels and the Theozoologists of the Ostara. Liebenfels and the Thule believed things, like animal origins of the Semites through sodomy, similar to the Qur’an on the Jews (see Suras 2:65, 5:60, and 7:166), while the Nazis concept of the Aryan was that the German-Aryan was of divine origin as a once “elect,” or “noble” race.
H.P.B. thought the idea of dividing mankind into superior and inferior races was obsolete. The Proto-Indo-European and Indo-European peoples were of variant gradation, and phenotype, and in a time when the British colonies asserted their superiority over the dark-skinned Indians and others, Helena Blavatsky regarded this as a hindrance to the mission of her colleagues and teachers. She often in her writings make sure to quote “inferior,” generally mocking the English peoples for their racist habits of thought, in regarding the lower classes, “negroes,” and foreigners as beneath them.
Theosophy has been criticized as laying too great an emphasis on the esoteric dimension of religio-philosophies. This view states, that the use of this language made it seem only outsiders could interpret a culture’s Holy Books correctly. These outsiders are seen as nothing but the reviled “European,” white people, the colonizers now ever forced to pay for their sins by guilt, even if it means guilting them into hating, or forgetting their own history based on the ignorance and evil committed by the Nazis. Doing this creates a problem.
William Q. Judge was of Irish descent, and Helena P. Blavatsky was Russian with German family roots. With this have been sad attempts in the past by some to dismiss Theosophy by describing the Theosophical Movement, H.P.B. and Olcott as merely of a “White racist imperialist” outlook and motive.
It is claimed in uncorroborated rumors, that Hitler kept the SD by his bedside, but these people apparently missed the fact that even if Adolf Hitler read The Secret Doctrine, or other works of H.P.B., the Aryans and Chaldeans spoken of, among other notable peoples are described also as “dark-skinned.” The Aryans are most of humanity today, according to Helena Blavatsky. She excludes the Dayak of Borneo, the Australoid and Capoid races, claiming them to be mixed remnants of “Lemurians” and “Atlanteans.” Though, this is problematic, understandably, particularly due to its conflict with archaeology, human migration and genome research and geology.
In Lucifer, Vol. 6, No. 58, June 1893, pg. 273-83, Helena Blavatsky explains, the “aborigines of Western Europe, and our distant ancestors were black, and far blacker.” They highlight the classical thinkers, who spoke glowingly of the origins of “Asiatic Ethiopians.” The 19th century Theosophists spoke of the Chaldeans as “dark-skinned” in the sense of their brown shade, rather than pale white. H.P.B. speaks of the Chaldeans as a pastoral nation and pre-Babylonian tribe, or caste of Hierophants from Kashmir, Tartary, Mongolia, China, Tibet, and India, devoted to the ancient sciences of arts and Astronomy.
Most decisively, H.P.B. wrote, that the Aryan, Semite and African are of the same origin. A position, that directly conflicts with the Nazis and anti-Semitic theory.
“The unity of the human species was accepted by the illustrious Professor of Cambridge (U.S.A.) [Professor Agassiz] in the same way as the Occultists do – namely, in the sense of their essential and original homogeneity and their origin from one and the same source: – e.g., Negroes, Aryans, Mongols, etc., have all originated in the same way and from the same ancestors.” (Helena Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 2., fn. pg. 607)
In a draft of Blavatsky’s Coming Race: Nationalism, Racism, and Fiction in Theosophical Doctrine, the author asserts a strange claim, that H.P.B. believed human skin darkened, because humanity became “black with sin.” She never said that. The line from a commentary in The Secret Doctrine (1888) on “black with sin” had nothing to do with African people. The subject was on the myth of Prometheus and procreation, according to Greek and Indian Puranic Tradition.
