Off: Music help

[Carl E. Anderson]

On ons 3 dec 1997 16.24 +0000 "J Strobridge" <eset08 at HOLYROOD.ED.AC.UK>
wrote:
> Am I right in thinking that there's
> a left handed and a right handed version of the swastika (the short bits
> point clockwise or anticlockwise) the right handed one being the good
> luck version - the left handed one being the Nazi one?   Or am I just
> havering again....

     No--or rather, not originally.  Although I've seen a lot of people
espouse this belief in recent years.  But it's a post-WWII tradition, and
I don't know where it started.
     Consider, after all: the Nazi's would have have hardly chosen a _bad_
luck symbol!!  ("Yup," says Hitler, "we're evil motherf*ckers and our
bad-luck symbol here proves it!").

     In ancient tradition, both "directions" were common.

folklorically,
Carl

--
Carl Edlund Anderson
Dept. of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, & Celtic
St. John's College, University of Cambridge
mailto:cea20 at cus.cam.ac.uk
http://hea-www.harvard.edu/~carl/