Taking Back the Swastika - With CosmosphereDrums

While browsing Etsy yesterday, we had to do a double-take, when we stumbled across the steel tongue drum pictured right.  Adorned boldly with a large swastika, as it is.

The majority of us from the Western-hemisphere at least, most likely associate the well-known symbol with Hitler’s Nazi Party, and the wealth of negative connotations that go hand-in-hand with that particular pairing.  However, the swastika, prior to its misuse by the Nazis in the Second World War, was held as a universal symbol of strength, luck, and other decidedly un-fascist like attitudes, by a variety of peoples, and cultures, the world over. And in recent years, there has been something of a growing movement, to reclaim the swastika.

The swastika has held a place of great importance in India and Asia for thousands of years, and is widely used by Hindus, Jains and Buddhists.  The swastika can be seen everywhere across the Indian sub-continent - you’ll find it: sculpted into temples, adorning homes, decorating taxis, and buses, and shops, and etched into the dashboards of the many motor-rickshaws - making it one of the most prevalent symbols that one will see in India.  Though the swastika has also found widespread use outside of India’s shores too.  And is known to have been used in ancient Greek architectural designs, on pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon and Druidic artefacts, on Native American Indian artefacts including those of the Navajo and Hopi, on the badges of Boy Scouts' in Britain from 1911 to 1922, and on the dust-covers of books by Rudyard Kipling and other authors - to name but a few...

Cosmosphere are a range of handmade steel tongue drum made in Russia, by maker, Sergey Glushenkov.  And if you'd like to help in the battle to reclaim the swastika, with the aid of singing-steel - you can find Sergey's CosmosphereDrums for sale at Etsy: HERE

-->