| | One customer, a Hindu I think, got irate because we sold the Shiva bobblers, plus lunchboxes, stickers, etc. (The Elephant god stickers actually had swastikas on them, since they were originally Indian symbols before the Nazi usage. Joe-
...are you setting me up again? 
I'm sure you know this, but the swastika is a symbol of near-universal background; it appears on Mesoamerican temples and Tibetan manuscripts as well as in Hinduism as you mention.
In Norse Paganism, the "sun wheel" or swastika (usually three bladed, in some contexts six-bladed and enclosed), is a symbol associated with the dying god Baldr, god of sunlight and beauty; as a rune it connotes power, sunlight, healing, (male) fertility, and (implicitly) masculinity- though there are several divergent and overlapping interpretations (And oddly, as someone's Book I looked up to check my math noted, the Asatru sun is female, which feels all counterintuitive personally).
I don't know whether the Nazis picked up the symbol from the Asatru tradition or from Vedic sources (i.e., the "Aryan" racist mythology picturing Hindu achievements as the product of Caucasian upper castes), but I suspect the symbol's cultural power has a lot more to do with the Germanic Baldr- whose figure has been traditionally assimilated to Christ (in Snorri Sturluson, most famously)- than it does with Shiva, even if associating the god of destruction with Nazism sounds tempting. (Though in the Hindu concept of evil, Shiva's destruction stands for a necessary part of an organic cycle of existence- a "creative destruction" in much the manner market economist Joseph Schumpter defined an oddly coincident term)
Sorry... I ran a fantasy role-playing campaign in a fantasy Scandinavian setting, after which my ex-girlfriend became a Norse Heathen. (she ran a campaign set in a three-way alternative Renaissance culture-clash between Christianity, early Enlightenment rationalism, and Pagan Wicca... don't ask)
regards,
v
*
Jeanie Shiris Ring )( )( - "not all those who wander are lost"
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