Calendars and Time Part 2
THE TRUTH ABOUT THE SWASTIKA AND EQUAL ARMED CROSS
Not every culture called this symbol the Suastika/Swastika which roughly means Well being from Su- "Well/Good" and Asti "Being/Existence." Ka is nominalizing suffix in the sense of belong to, not unlike -ing. It is, however Sanskrit.
What they represent: Its simple enough to sort out how this can be aligned with the Sun since all one has to do is face North, for example, and which the pattern of the alignment of the rising and setting sun to figure out the association with the turning hours, but also over the course of the year observe the rotation of the seasons themselves through these cycles and where the Sun is positioned and its path outlined. many simple do not give our collective human ancestors enough credit to have sorted these things out simply by paying attention to the world around them and how such knowledge improved survival during the seasons in diverse climates.
Mostly Modern Terms/Names:
The following are some of the historical and factual European names given through the centuries but should also be made clear that the ones who use it as a symbol for white supremacy don't get to lay claim on such things, and those that push that narrative out of paranoia and conditioning need to be corrected.
1. 8th to 11th Century (Viking Age Europe)
Þórsfhamar (Thor's Hammer)
The Record: Carved physically on Scandinavian rune stones and early silver coins. The hooked cross was used as a religious variant of the thunder god's protective glyph.
2. 12th to 14th Century (High Middle Ages)
Kolo
The Record: The native Slavic word meaning "wheel". It was used to describe the fourfold pattern of the bent cross because the shape suggested circular rotation. The eight-armed version (kolovrat) was a modern New Age creation.
Cross Gammadion (or Croix Gammée in Norman French)
The Record: Found extensively in medieval Catholic Church inventories, architectural carvings, and priestly vestments. It was named because the pattern mimics four uppercase Greek letters Gamma (Γ) joined at a central axis.
3. 15th to 16th Century (Late Middle Ages / Early Tudor)
Cross Cramponnée (or Croix Cramponnée)
The Record: Documented in French and English chivalric rolls of arms. It was named after crampons, the literal L-shaped iron hooks used by medieval masons to bind stone blocks together.
Fylfot (Craftsman Pattern Context)
The Record: Appears in Lansdowne Manuscript 874 (written around 1500–1560). The instructions tell craftsmen to place "the fylfot in the nedermast pane"—literally meaning a pattern used to "fill the foot" of a stained-glass church window.
Fylfot (Etymological Interpretation)
The Record: Later 19th-century antiquarians attempted to tie the manuscript word back to the older Anglo-Saxon roots fela (many) and fōt (foot), translating it as a "many-footed" geometric design.
4. 17th Century (Post-Medieval Heraldry)
Cross Potent Rebated
The Record: Codified during the Renaissance in formal British heraldic dictionaries. It describes a cross potent (arms ending in a "T" crutch shape) where one side of each "T" has been rebated (cut away) to form a hook.
5. 20th Century (Modern Era)
Hakenkreuz
The Record: The literal German compound for "hooked cross". While the parts of the word are old German, it was formally codified in 1920 when the German Nazi Party adopted it as the exclusive, official name for their party emblem.
Oldest One Known
The oldest known swastika pattern to date was found in 1908 at the Paleolithic site of Mezine (also spelled Mizyn), Ukraine, 10,000 to 13,000 BCE (roughly 12,000 to 15,000 years old) on a carved bird figurine.
SERPENT AND CROSS
One of the often misrepresented or misapplied symbols, this is actually a solar and seasonal symbol. The points represent the Sun itself at the North/Winter and South/Summer Solstices and East/Spring and West/Fall Equinoxes. The top point would be the direction of the South/Summer (When the Sun appears largest) and the bottom point the direction of North/Winter (when the Sun appears smallest). The Equal points on either side are for the equinoxes (when the Sun appears to be in its mid-size at these two points of the year). The Cross, also called the Tree, represents the world.
As to the Serpent, it represents the apparent path of the Sun that creates an elongated figure 8 shape when marked at a point in the sky at the same time throughout the year. The point where the line crosses itself as the intersection of the opposing loops us when the equinoxes occur. It is known as the Analemma of the Sun, however, the Moon also follows a similar path in the sky (depending on what location of the global hemisphere you are viewing from). It is caused by the Earth's wobble effect. In some examples of this kind of symbolism, the serpent may be given horns curved in a way to suggest the moon. Sometimes 'S' shaped Double Spirals represent this process.
Inspiration Sources
The very first time a single serpent coiled around a true Christian cross was visually created was in northern France between 1140 and 1144 CE, specifically inside the Basilica of Saint-Denis near Paris.
The First Textual Description (1612 or 1624 CE)
The very first time this specific image is documented outside of a religious framework is in an alchemical text attributed to the French scrivener Nicolas Flamel.
Though Flamel lived in the 14th century, the book credited with creating the symbol—Exposition of the Hieroglyphical Figures (Le livre des figures hiéroglyphiques)—was actually written and published in Paris in 1612 (and translated to English in 1624).
The First Printed Visual Illustration (c. 1700 CE)
The actual visual drawing of a snake draped over a cross—complete with a crown and detached wings—was printed for the first time in London and Paris around 1700. This design was included in later printed editions of Flamel's alchemical work to illustrate his text.
This 1700s illustration is the exact visual asset that modern anime (like Fullmetal Alchemist) and fantasy media copied directly for their imagery but added wings and a crown.
The Real Meaning of the Symbol
In this non-religious context, the symbol has a strictly chemical/philosophical meaning:
The Serpent represents volatile substances (elements that evaporate easily, like mercury or raw sulfur).
The Cross represents fixation or stabilization.
Coiling them together visually communicates the alchemical process of "fixing the volatile," taking a raw, unstable element and binding it down to create a stable compound, a core step toward creating the mythical Philosopher's Stone.
Associated symbolism
Because of these cyclical observations and applied symbolism, this Cross and Serpent where the cross is often represented in gold and the serpent in silver but with gold eyes and horns, or the reverse applied depending the source, it has an extremely ancient association naturally with the concepts of birth, death and resurrection/renewal. If one sees a rod with three different sized spheres where one is large on one end, one is small on the other, and there is a midsummer size in the center, it represented the Three Faces of the Sun and may or many not have a serpent like design looped or spiraled around it.
Shedding skin = visible rebirth
One of the strongest roots is biological. Snakes periodically shed their skin, emerging glossy and renewed.
To early cultures, this looked like:
Death of the old body
Re-emergence into life
This made the serpent a living emblem of cyclical renewal, long before abstract philosophy existed.
Earth-dwelling = liminal power
Snakes live close to or within the ground, which many cultures associated with:
Graves
The underworld
Ancestral realms
On the other hand Snakes also come out to warm themselves in the light of the Sun as well as to discard old skins they have outgrown. Additionally, the earth is also where seeds sprout.
So the serpent becomes a threshold creature—moving between:
Death ↔ life
Below ↔ above
End ↔ beginning
Past ↔ present (and in some cases a potential future)
The serpent often represents time and eternity, especially when biting its own tail.
This image expresses:
Destruction feeding creation
Death generating rebirth
The universe renewing itself endlessly
Serpents are also linked to forbidden or transformative knowledge.
In many traditions, awakening brings:
Loss of innocence (a kind of death)
Expanded awareness (a kind of rebirth)
This is why serpents appear in initiation and healing rites, and resurrection myths—not as villains, but as catalysts. This dual capacity—life renewed vs life taken—made them natural symbols of:
Mortality
The boundary between life and death
The suddenness of fate
Because death often arrives unseen, the serpent became its perfect image.
However, even venom contributes to the paradox. Many ancient medical traditions used snake venom in medicine, reinforcing the idea that:
What kills can also heal.
That logic still survives in medical symbolism today.
Error of Androgyny Association
Serpents appear for the most part to be androgynous or sexless so they are also often associated with resistance to classification as well as bridging boundaries and perceived (erroneously) as living paradoxes. Becoming further removed from the solar/lunar/seasonal associations, much of the errors and lack of awareness of the actual biology of serpents and their distinct genders and processes of reproduction had resulted in the additional following associations:
They move without legs neither walking nor crawling
They live above and below ground and traverse the light and dark
They shed their skin so they are always both old and new
Because of this, many cultures treated the serpent as neither–nor, which naturally extended to male/female polarity. A being that crosses boundaries easily also crosses sexual duality. This was and is further taken into the concepts of serpents assumed to be (which is known to not be true):
Self-generating and Self-consuming
Self-renewing (this being a cause for ancient beliefs serpents are generally immortal) and eternal
In Western alchemy, the serpent often represents the prima materia, the raw substance before it is split into opposites (heavily associated with concepts of Gnosticism).
Alchemical texts frequently describe this state as:
Masculine and feminine combined
Sun and moon united
King and queen in one body
The serpent, because it renews itself and encloses itself, became the perfect emblem of this pre-dual unity.
This ascent symbolizes:
The merging of masculine (active) and feminine (receptive)
The return to a unified, awakened state
Transcendence of gendered identity altogether
A Birth Defect as Justification
Here, androgyny means integration, not neutrality. Because of a known fact that 1 in every 100,000 snake births a result of an incomplete embryonic split end up producing two headed snakes, such two headed snakes were often represented as proof and embodiment of this symbolism.
Thus, when such are represented with or without multiple heads, they become symbols of divinity in association with the concepts of:
Creation without loss
Power without division
Wisdom beyond polarity
Mystical and Occult Nonsense in Psychology
In depth occult and mystical based psychology, the serpent often appears in dreams during periods of integration—when unconscious (traditionally “feminine”) and conscious (“masculine”) aspects of the psyche begin to unite.
Thus:
Androgyny = psychic completeness
Serpent = the force that makes that union possible
Form these same psychological driven nonsense is where we get the neurological fiction that the right hemisphere of the brain with characteristics stereo-typically considered "female," such as creativity, intuition, and emotion, while the left was considered "male," logical, and analytical as a basis of other garbage behind "gender identity" opposed to gender reality. In any case, the serpent often symbolizes androgyny because it represents life before it splits into opposites in various occult mystical rhetoric—a state where masculine and feminine, death and life, creation and destruction exist as one continuous process.
Twin Serpents Symbolism of Sky and Sea
In these traditions that are less often mentions, and all but forgotten even in many academic circles, the serpent does not symbolize androgyny, but cosmic generation through distinct yet complementary male and female principles, whose union gives rise to the world itself.
Not every ancient culture projected androgyny onto serpents. Many traditions carefully observed serpents breeding and clearly distinguished:
One serpent as male
One serpent as female
Rather than collapsing sexual difference, these cultures affirmed polarity as real, meaningful, and generative. In these traditions, the foundational symbol is not the single androgynous serpent, but the serpent egg.
The egg represents:
Original being
Undivided potential
The source from which differentiation begins
From this egg emerge twin serpents, already distinct in sex and function.
The twin serpents that emerge from the primordial egg are:
One male
One female
Their power lies not in sameness, but in complementarity. They entwine not to erase difference, but to activate creation through polarity.
The two serpents are often cosmologically distinguished:
The Sky Serpent
Associated with air, height, light
Often winged
Linked to transcendence, motion, and ordering forces
The Earth–Water Serpent
Grounded, unwinged
Associated with soil, rivers, seas, and fertility
Linked to substance, gestation, and nourishment
These are not symbolic abstractions, but cosmic roles. Creation does not arise from a self-contained being, but from relationship.
Through the entwining of:
Serpent of the Air (Sky)
Serpent of the Water (Earth/Sea)
Procreation occurs, producing:
The earth itself
All life upon it
All life within it
The world is thus the offspring of their union.
This cosmology preserves a crucial insight:
Life emerges not from androgynous sameness, but from differentiated forces held in balance and harmony.
“One of the Sky and one of the Sea” expresses:
Sexual distinction
Elemental polarity
Creative reciprocity
Without collapsing into a single, undifferentiated principle. As to when or how the "egg" these serpentine creators emerge from came into being, the most basic sense in these ancient examples is it spontaneously formed in nothingness and often represented as an obsidian egg or sphere that hatches and with the emergence of the serpents, light, elements and life came forth as debris of this "First Time" or "First State of Being from Non-Being."
It should also be noted that such serpents may be representatives as in messengers of omens of particular cultural lore for other deities and even ancestors but all expresses the reality that serpents are among and often the most powerful of ancient beings in ancient lore as indifferent as nature itself, as friend, as foe, and even as tricksters that embody bipolar ambiguity.
