often stands for night, the terrifying goddess Kali, and magical practices. In the Buddhist tradition, the swastika symbolizes the feet, or the footprints, of the Buddha and is often placed at the beginning and end of inscriptions. The modern Tibetan Buddhists use it as a clothing decoration. As Buddhism spread, the swastika passed into the iconography of China and Japan, and there it has been used to denote plurality, abundance, prosperity, and long life.
Most archaeologists believe that the swastika originated as a diagrammatic representation of the course of the sun in the heavens, as noted. some of the versions and names are noted above. In England the symbol was called fylfot, and this is explained as deriving from the Norse word fiol (or full, or numerous) and fot (foot) and translated into Old English. The Oxford Dictionary gives a different account and says the word derived from a medieval manuscript from about 1500 which contained instructions for the decoration of a memorial window. This seems to imply that the term refers to a pattern to fill the foot of the window and so "fill foot." This might refer to any convenient pattern, but the swastika was probably the most common of all known patterns and so gradually became associated with fylfot. Another name for it is Thor's hammer, as noted, or gammadion, but the symbol is in fact much older than any of its names (Whittick 270).
Some believe that the swastika sign was created fist by the primitive Aryans. The term gammadion as applied to this sign, meaning a cross with gammas, because the short lines at right angles to the arms make each resemble Gamma, a letter of the Greek alphabet. some early Christian mystics saw the sign differently and considered the two lines at right angles a symbol of Christ as the cornerstone, and architects and designers in the Middle Ages used the Gamma freely in their reliefs and patterns. Four of them grouped with their angle...