Dec. 21, 1888.] J-'* fBrinton. 



The Ta Ki^ the Svaslika and the Cross in America. 

 By Daniel G. Brinton^ M.D. 

 (Bead before the American Philosophical Society, December 21, 1888.) 



What I am about to saj- is, to a certain degree, polemical. 

 M}' intention is to combat the opinions of those writers "vvho, like 

 Dr. Hamy, M. Beauvois and many others,* assert that, because 

 certain well-known Oriental s^'mbols, as the Ta Ki, the Triskeles, 

 the Svastika and the Cross, are found among the American 

 aborigines, thej^ are evidence of Mongolian, Buddhistic, Chris- 

 tian or Arj'an immigrations, previous to the discoverj^ by Colum- 

 bus ; and I shall also try to show that the position is erroneous 

 of those who, like William H. Holmes, of the Bureau of Ethnol- 

 ogy, maintain that " it is impossible to give a satisfactory ex- 

 planation of the religious signiScance of the cross as a religious 

 symbol in America."f 



In opposition to both these views I propose to show that the 

 primary significance of all these widely extended symbols is quite 

 clear ; and that the3^ can be shown to have arisen from certain 

 fixed relations of man to his environment, the same everywhere, 

 and hence suggesting the same graphic representations among 

 tribes most divergent in location and race; and, therefore, that 

 such symbols are of little value in tracing ethnic affinities or 

 the currents of civilization. 



Their wide prevalence in the Old World is familiar to all stu- 

 dents. The three legs diverging from one centre, which is now 

 the well-known arms of the Isle of Man, is the ancient Trique- 

 irum, or, as Olshauseu more properl}^ terms it, the Triskeles,X 

 seen on the oldest Sicilian coins and on those of Lycia, in Asia 

 Minor, struck more than five hundred years before the beginning 

 of our era. Yet such is the persistence of symbolic forms, the 

 traveler in the latter region still finds it recurring on the modern 



* Dr. E. T. Hamy, An Interpretalion qf one of the Copan Monuments, in Jownal qf the An- 

 thropological Institii'.e, February, 1887; also. Revue cV Ethnographie, 1886, p. 233; same 

 author, Le Svastika et la Roue Solairc en Amirique, Revtce d' Ethnographie, 1885, p. 22. E. 

 Beauvois, in Annales de Philosophic Ckretienne, 1877, and in various later publications. 

 Ferraz de Macedo, Essai Critique siir les Ages Prehistoriques de Bresil, Lisbon, 1887, etc. 



t See his article, "Art in Shell of the Ancient Americans," in Hecond Annual Report 

 of the Bureau of Ethnology, p. 270. 



J See his article in Zr.itschrift fUr Kthnologie, 1886, p. 223. 



PROC. AMEK. PHILOS. SOC. XXVI. 129. W. PRINTED JAN. 30, 188&. 



