"The straight line, the circle, the cross, the triangle, are simple forms, easily made, and might have been invented and reinvented in every age of primitive man and in every quarter of the globe, each time being an independent invention, meaning much or little, meaning different things amoung different peoples or at different times among the same people; or they may have had no settled or definite meaning. But the Swastika was probably the first to be made with definite intention and a continuous our consecutive meaning, the knowledge of which passed from person to person..."

This is a real puzzle: a symbol thousands of years old that neither arises spontaneously in the mind of the artist nor, primarily, passes from culture to culture. It baffled Schliemann too, who remarked, "The problem is insoluble." And perhaps it is. However, if the swastika were originally something in the skies, something that could be witnessed independently by widely separated cultures, the mystery might be solved. The symbol then would arrive in each culture from outside, and yet not be transmitted from other cultures.

In the more ancient representations of the swastika, one often sees the arms curved, not bent; this is called the ogee swastika. In thinking about the significance of the swastikas he had discovered in ancient Troy, Schliemann thought he saw an attempt to depict spin, and suggested that the direction of motion was specified by the direction of the arms, which always trailed the rotation. But as to what it was that was rotating, he offered no hypothesis.

Another dilemma running through scholarly writings on the swastika is that, on the one hand, it appears to be connected with something brilliant in the sky, and on the other hand it is clearly something separate from the Sun. To give a flavor of the often turgid scholarly debate on this aspect of the swastika, Count Goblet d'Alviella argued in 1891, as follows: The arms of the swastika "are rays in motion." The images most closely associated with it represent the Sun or the Sun gods. Sometimes the swastika alternates with representations of the Sun. From this Goblet d'Alviella deduces that the swastika means the Sun. A critical piece of evidence is a Thracian coin on which the word for day is replaced by the swastika symbol. This, he believes, is a complete identification between the swastika and "the idea of light or of the day." But, critics argue, there is no need for an additional symbol for the Sun, and the swastika in no way resembles the Sun. In some Indian coinage the swastika appears separate from but with equal prominence as the great wheel of the Sun. Impasse.

All of these difficulties seem to be resolved if there once was a bright swastika rotating in the skies of Earth, witnessed by people all over the world. Ordinarily, the notion seems so far from astronomical reality that, while it must have been briefly considered by others who have wondered about the origin of the swastika, no one proceeded further, for the simple reason that there is nothing remotely like a burning swastika now apparent in the heavens. But we need only examine the sketches and photographs of the spraying fountains in a cometary nucleus, recorded by generation of astronomers, to realize that there is here the potential for generating such a prodigy.

What we are imagining is something like this: It is early in the second millennium B.C. Perhaps Hammurabi is King in Bablylon, Sesostris III rules in Egypt, King Minos in Crete. More likely it is a time not today associated with any famous personage. While all the people on Earth are going about their daily business, a rapidly spinning comet with four active streamers appears. When people look up at the comet, they are looking down on the axis of rotation. The four jets, symmetrically placed around the equator on the daylit side, generate--because of the comet's rapid rotation--curved streamers, as you can easily see in the patterns formed by a rotary garden spinkler. For the usual representation of the swastika, observers would have seen the pinwheel spinning counterclockwise, with the arms trailing. As long as all four jets were on at once, the inhabitants of Earth would see a brilliant swastika, perhaps somewhat foreshortened, in the daylight sky.

Comet p 184-185.