The Lauburu Revisited

This information about the Lauburu appeared today at EITB:

Basque symbols

The Lauburu

05/22/2006

Lauburu stands for "four heads" (lau buru) and is considered to be an ancient indo-european symbol.

The lauburu is an ancient symbol common to many cultures from the East of Asia, to some islands in the Pacific Ocean and center Europe. Some theories say Basque legionnaires brought it from the Roman army after some campaigns in the Celtic countries. However, most theories say it represents the sun and is a symbol commonly found in many European cultures.

Some say its vertical heads, sometimes called sunset, represent female expression (emotional and perceptual) or the elements of fire and water. The horizontal heads, sometimes called sunrise, represent male energy (mental and physical) or the elements air and earth. Often this symbol was the apparatus used prehistorically to make fire and thus represents sacred fire, living flame, and productive power, later to be considered as the Pre-Christian Basque Cross.

It seems that the lauburu shares the characteristics of other swastikas, which have been employed for thousands of years as religious signs and decorative emblems. There are swastikas with the arms pointing either clockwise or counterclockwise, and with more than four arms. Swastikas appeared in ancient China, Egypt and India.

Anyway, swastikas have also been found on Greek coins, pre-Christian Celtic and Scandinavian artefacts, in the catacombs of the early Christians at Rome, and in Byzantine buildings. Swastikas were also widely used by American Indians. It seems that they represented the sun and infinity. The nazis, mistaking its origins, regarded swastikas as an "aryan" symbol and linked it to the notion of their "racial superiority."

In Basques' prehistoric religion, Jose Miguel Barandiaran saw some signs pointing to an indoeuropean influence in the cult of the sun (e.g., the orientation of the dolmens). This and other coincidences point to some common grounds of the basque and other indoeuropean paganisms, basques having been less isolated and impermeable to foreign influences than we have always been told.

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