The Oldest Mystery — The Swastika

1922

The Swastika is the oldest symbol in the world. Also, it is the oldest mystery. You find it engraved on primitive tools, dug up in the mounds of the Ohio, Tennessee and Mississippi mound-builders, who inhabited America, before the Indians. The Swastika also is found in the most ancient ruins of Alaska, Mexico, Brazil, Egypt, Babylonia, China, Japan, India, Assyria, Phoenicia, Persia, Tibet, Greece — and nearly every other country in the world, including obscure islands. It is the international symbol for good luck and general welfare — like our horseshoe, the negro's rabbit-foot and the "chung-meng-fui-goi" sign that is painted on the door of nearly every Chinese home.

The Swastika's origin is unknown. But archaeologists, the ditch-diggers of science, have traced it back to the beginning of the Bronze Age, 4500 years ago. For all we know, the Swastika may have been old then. How did it spread over the earth and become known in countries that are supposed to have had no knowledge of each other in ancient times?

The only plausible explanation of the universal use of the Swastika comes from China. The Chinese — who claim that their explorer, Fu-sang, visited America 1060 years before Columbus — believe that civilization travels in an endless wave — up 30,000 years, then down 30,000, so on forever. That's why Chinese mythology tells of "flying men" far back in antiquity.

The earth may be 1,700,000,000 years old, says Prof. William Duane, of Harvard Medical School. He bases his calculation on radioactivity. Regardless of the number of years, queer things are buried back there in the past, as shown by the Swastika, the oldest mystery.

—The La Crosse Tribune, La Crosse, Wisconsin, May 27, 1922, p. 3.