Yes

by Jess Howe

Created on: August 27, 2009

It is very hard not to be swayed by symbols, actually. We as a human race have used symbols for things for centuries: they were originally for the heraldry of rulers and for religion, as well as a way to distinguish fighters on a field from one another. Today those symbols survive in the flags of countries, and sometimes in the tartans and badges of real clans and of societies. The cross, though, is probably the most powerful of all these symbols.

THE CROSS

The cross started out in the very early times, far before Christianity, in fact. The solar or wheel cross, for instance, has been found in France as a neolithic image. The Ancient Egyptians used something that looks like a letter T, called the Tau Cross. It wasn't until around 1500 BC in Greece that the cross we recognize best appeared; this cross has four sides like one we know, but all the arms of it are equal in length. At the same time, the Coptic Cross appeared, which looks most like the cross we know but with a circle on the upper spoke. So it's very like a Sun Cross mixed with the Latin Cross. The Latin Cross started about 1000 AD though descriptions of it are still found in writings from two hundred years before that!

... and there are hundreds more versions of the cross. For it to have survived for so many thousands of years, it would have to be an important and powerful symbol - however you or I look at it, whatever we see in it, the cross has remained with us in its varying forms throughout history and into the current day. Today, we still use the Coptic Cross, the Latin Cross, Brigit's Cross, the Papal Cross, and many others. The cross is even found in mathematics: it's our plus sign, part of a language that moves over all borders. There are so many words that incorporate a cross, like "across," "crossed-out", "double-crossed," and so on. And in medicine, worldwide the Red Cross is recognized as the symbol of that organization, one which gives aid and healing to anyone in need. That's a red Greek Cross, actually.

The cross has been a symbol of peace, love, and healing, since centuries before Christ. Today, there are thousands of Christians, Catholics, Protestants, Methodists, and Rosicrucians, among others, who use it as a religious symbol, and millions of mathematicians, not to mention the billions of humans on Earth, who use it every day in addition and formulas. Scientists also use it in the symbols of some elements, like mercury. The cross is literally everywhere.

THE SWASTIKA

There's another kind of cross that evokes very powerful imagery and emotion: the swastika. By now many of us know that it started out as an Indian symbol about 4 thousand years ago, and was used by other cultures as well, before Hitler took it and changed it to mean something else, as a symbol of evil, for his Nazis. Now, we can't think of the swastika without thinking of Hitler and the Nazis, the Jews, the Holocaust, pain and suffering.

In fact, the swastika was called different names by at least five different cultures, and some people consider it to be the oldest symbol there is. It was in neolithic England, in fact, as a swirly image called a fylfot. People in the medieval times there used it for window decorations. The hakenkreuz, as the Germans called it, and the one we know as the Nazi symbol, is very widely used: everyone from the Sumerians to the people of the Indus Valley used it to symbolize various things.

THE HEART

The heart symbol is something else that is ancient and still around. To us, it symbolizes love, and it theoretically started out in the Victorian Era as that specific meaning. However, it's been claimed by the Catholic Church that they were the first to use it, in a symbol with a heart on a cross surrounded by a crown of thorns, which St. Margaret apparently saw in a vision in the 17th century. The Ancient Egyptian ab symbol looks a lot like this one, and is older, dated to about the 7th century BC. And the Africans have the heart as a symbol of love, associated with the city of Cyrene and birth control by means of an herb that grew near town.

HERALDRY

Heraldry appeared in Europe in the 1100's, and the Japanese used even simpler symbols called Mon since at least the 1500's. In Continental Europe, heraldry was for Feudal Era knights and rulers. It was used to distinguish fighters on the field from one another, and to say to which ruling house they were beholden. Nobody knows who started Continental European Heraldry.

While Scotland has no legal family arms, each of its clans bears a crest. Like the Continental Europeans, the Scottish arms were only given by the rulers - to the clan chief, to be passed on father to son. These arms symbolized the clans to which this or that person belonged, and are still in use today.

LANGUAGE

The very words we speak are full of symbols! Each letter is a symbol, each with its own special history and meaning. The letter A comes from hieroglyphs, while P comes from Greek symbol pi. In English, there are only 26 letters, but the Georgian language has 33, while the Chinese system uses thousands as does the Japanese who also use various different symbols for their writing. Arabic uses hundreds of symbols as well.

Anyone who can write today uses symbols, therefore, to express themselves. But even people who do not write use them, because in order to express yourself properly in most cultures you need to be able to speak. However, deaf people use a language as well, as do blind people. So symbols are within language.

MATHEMATICS

Math symbols are very old. Even numbers were used in some form by the Babylonians, the ancient Inca, the Egyptians and the Chinese, the latter of which have the distinction of having maybe the oldest numerical system. The point is that these were all symbols, designed to make life easier for people to denote "how much" something amounted to. Mathematical symbols for other things like geometry date back to people such as Hippocrates of the Greeks.

The system used commonly today in the Western World for math was originally a hindu-arabic one, which was a switchover from the Roman system. This changed to the hindu-arabic system in about 900 or so.

Symbols are everywhere in the world, and have been since the beginning of time. The constancy of them is what makes them so potent, and so firmly lodged in the human psyche.

If someone asks you what 2X2 is, or how to spell "ambidextrous," you know because you were taught these things, or you were not taught and so the person is likely to tell you. Isn't that swaying someone? Isn't a spelling bee or a math contest in school an attempt to sway others to your cause, when you tell other people "yes, this is how you spell this word," and "this is what 2X2 means" ? When you watch a horror movie and a vampire appears, don't many of you out there think the good guy should pull out a cross and aim it at the creature? Don't some of you wear a pentagram, a turban, a Star of David?

All these are symbols, all of them powerful. When you wear them, you might sway the person near you on the bus to your thinking, but most likely you've been swayed yourself that this is the right thing to do, that your religion is correct. When you type out a sentence on a computer, you're using many years of having been taught this is the right way to spell something. The fact that symbols have been around so long is proof that they are firmly enough lodged in people's minds to sway people to one cause or another - be it religion, language, mathematics, science, or something else. Secondly, the fact that symbols are such a part of our lives is also proof they can sway people.

http://www.designboom.com/history/cross_2.html

http://history1900s.about.com/cs/swastika/a/swastikahistory.htm

http://www.heartsmith.com/guide_history.html

http://www.oshel.com/a_brief_history_of_heraldry.htm

http://www.samurai-archives.com/dictionary/dictnotes.html

http://www.studioarts.net/calligraphy/c2.htm

http://www.satellite-one.net/musicology/

http://rustaveli.tripod.com/language.html

http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/52545.html

http://www.math.wichita.edu/history/topics/num-sys.html#hindu-arabic

http://msteacher.org/epubs/math/math12/systems.aspx

http://jeff560.tripod.com/geometry.html

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