How the Virtuous Swastika was Stolen and Tainted
Symbology of Symbols: The Swastika
The Nazis
In 1868, an archaeologist named Heinrich Schliemann embarked on a quest to discover the ancient city of Troy. Fanatically fueled by the epic poem Iliad, which was commonly believed to be no more than a myth, Schliemann traveled to Ithaca in Greece, confident that the literature was a map to the hidden locations of the ancient cities.
Within a short period of time no longer than four years, Schliemann achieved what he had set out to do. The adventurous architect found the Homeric city. But that was not the only thing he had discovered, for with his uncovering of the epic city on the Aegean coast of Turkey, he had also found 18,000 variations of a single symbol — the Spindle-Whorls, otherwise known as the Swastika.
Schliemann would then go on to discover the Swastika all across the world: Tibet, Paraguay, even the Gold Coast of Africa. His exploits garnered global attention, and as the way that history does, his archaeological discoveries soon led to several narratives of national identities.
Having found stark similarities among the German, Romantic, and Sanskrit languages, linguistic scholars birthed the theory that the aforementioned races stemmed from a single ancestry: an Indo-European…
