When masked kachinas dance in the plazas of Hopi villages in northern Arizona during annual ceremonies to pray for rainfall and fecundity, they usually carry a flat gourd rattle in their right hand. Sometimes these rattles bear the icon of the swastika. Far older than Germany’s Nazi regime, this Anasazi (or ancient Hopi) symbol once conveyed a sacred rather than a malevolent meaning. Specifically, it represented the center of ancestral Hopi land.
Author Frank Waters explains the swastika in terms of the tribe’s prehistoric migrations. "We can now see that the complete pattern formed by the migrations was a great cross whose center, Túwanasavi [Center of the Universe], lay in what is now the Hopi country in the southwestern part of the United States, and whose arms extended to the four directional pásos." ......
