“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.”
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):—