Northvegr - The Swastika

... In Iron Age Britain two brothers struggle for supremacy. The Archdruid prophesies kingship for one, banishment for the other. But it is the exiled brother who will lead the Celts across the Alps into deadly collision with Rome...

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The Swastika

Dispersion of the Swastika

Page 85

the Bureau of Ethnology, from a mound in Poinsett County, Ark. It is of yellow ground, natural color of clay, and decorated with light red paint. The paint is represented in the cut by the darkened surfaces. The four quarters of the jug are decorated alike, one side of which is shown in the cut. The center of the design is the Swastika with the arm crossing at right angles, the ends turned to the right, the effect being produced by an enlargement on the right side of each arm until they all join the circle. A similar water jug with a Swastika mark of the same type as the foregoing decorates Major Powell's desk in the Buerau of Ethnology.
Marquis Nadaillac (1) describes and figures a grooved ax from Pemberton, N. J., on which some persons have recognized a Swastika, but which the Marquis doubts, while Dr. Abbott (2) denounces the inscription as a fraud.

North American Indians.
The Kansas --- The Rev. J. Owen Dorsey (3) describes the mourning customs of the Kansas Indians. In the course of his description he tells of a council of ceremony held among these Indians to decide if they should go on the warpath. Certain sacred songs were sung which had been arranged according to a chart, which Mr. Dorsey introduces as pl. 20, page 676. The outside edge of this chart bore twenty-seven ideographs, which suggest or determine the song or speech required. No. 1 was the sacred pipe; No. 2, the maker of all songs; No. 3, song of another old man who gives success to the hunters; No. 4 (fig. 255 in the present

paper) is the Swastika sign, consisting of two ogee lines intersection each other, the ends curved to the left. Of it, Mr. Dorsey says only the following:

Fig. 4 Tradje wayun, wind songs. The winds are deities; they are Bazanta (at the pines), the east wind; Ak'a, the south wind; A'k'a jifigaor A'k'uya, the west wind; and Huia (toward the cold), the north wind. The warriors used to remove the hearts of slain foes, putting them in the fire as a sacrifice to the winds.

In the Eleventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology (p. 525) Mr. Dorsey repeats this statement concerning the names of the winds, and shows how, in their invocations the Kansas began with the east wind and went around to the right in the order here given. His fig. 195 illustrates this, but the cross has straight arms. In response to my personal inquiry, Mr. Dorsey says the war chart (4) was drawn for him, with the Swastika as represented, by Pahanle-gagle, the war captain,

ENDNOTES:

1. "Prehistoric America," p. 22, note 24. fig. 9. [Back]

2. "Primitive Industry," p. 32. Back

3. American Naturalist, XIX, July, 1885, p. 670. Back

4. Ibid., pl. 20. Back

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