Swastika Stone, Ilkley Moor

This famous carving was first described as a 'swastika' by J. Thornton Dale in 1880 - and the name seemed to catch on damn quick! The stone had become established with this title at the end of that decade, and seemed immortalised with the name when J. Horsfall Turner wrote about it in the very popular history book he co-authored with the reverend Collyer in Ilkley Ancient and Modern. (1885) By then, comparisons had already been drawn with the acknowledged swastika symbol in Tossene, Sweden, and by the time Harry Speight described it in his colossal Upper Wharfedale (1900), other near-identical European swastika carvings had been found in Valcamonica, northern Italy. (though these lacked the 'tail' found on Ilkley's carving)

The Leeds Buddhist scholar, Steve Hart, said that Ilkley's Swastika Stone "to a Buddhist should be a sonorous gatha (a sutra or verse), a plenitude of transcendental boddhisattvic vision. The swirling wheel of the four arms suggests the four realms as experienced by Jains, upanishadic sages and ancient Buddists. They ARE samsara. The samsara is resolved into the nirvana at the hub. The four realms are the human realm, god realm, hell realm and the nature realm. There are no clear delineated demarcations between these realms. All interpenetrate."

(Images of the popularised 'modern' swastika - a huge misnomer - can be found on several church bells in Yorkshire, where they were used as charms to protect against lightning, following in the mythic fashion of Thor. These swastikas date from the 15th century.)

I first saw this carving when I was 10-years old and it had one helluvan effect on me! The cups in the design align north-south and east-west. The northern line points directly at Simon's Seat on the northern skyline. The eastern axis points directly at Almscliffe Crag, above which the equinox sun seems to rise from here.

For the real alignment fanatics, check out the alignment from Twelve Apostles to here: on the date of the last major lunar standstill (occurrent every 18.6 years), the moon set over the cairn at Lanshaw Lad. It wasn't until I got home and checked the veracity of this line, that I realised if you follow this moonset line further, you hit the Swastika Stone bang on!

The single 'outlying' cup from the four spiralling arms is, to me, the point from which the four-arms originated and not the other way round. In early cosmogenic patterns the world over, the worlds emerged from the round, the single, the point, or uroborous - and this is what this Swastika Stone appears to represent. (For those of you who aint into using psychedelics at sites, a good overview of this idea is in Erich Neumann's Origins & History of Consciousness [although there's no reference to this symbol] and which should be read by anyone pretending an interest in the nature of the archaic mind. It's a good work on the psychology of the Dreamtime.)

Note:
A fella who used the pseudonym of 'Pad' suggests that the carving is only a few centuries old, and compares it to other much more recent etchings on these moors, where the erosion has been of no greater or lesser force. The suggestion has been made about other carvings on these moors and whilst I have an open mind about this, if this is the case, we would perhaps have to relate the same reasoning to just about every other carving on these hills. In which case, a great deal of cup-and-ring art would have to be redesingated as a medieval phenomenon.

NB - Check the new, updated Northern Antiquarian blog, here: http://megalithix.wordpress.com/ - Kicks shit outta this one!