THE TOMOYE AND THE SWASTIKA 211 



the division of the circle as in the Tomoye, for it dates 

 only from about the twelfth century of our era. 



If we suppose the circle divided, as in the Tomoye, 

 to be a very ancient badge or device, dating from pre- 

 historic man, then it is probably derived from a natural 

 object. And this object was probably a ground-down 

 transverse section across a whelk-shell, for if one makes 

 such a section just above the mouth of the shell 

 at right angles to its length, one gets two adjacent 

 chambers of the spirally-coiled shell separated by an 

 S-like partition, the resulting figure given by the slice 

 across the shell being that of the 

 " tomoye," with its paired, one-sided, 

 cone-like constituents. Shells are 

 amongst the chief ornaments used by 

 prehistoric and modern savage man. 



Large ones are ground down to make 



FIG. 57.-Terra-cotta 

 armlets. The perception of the spiral cone w j t h a seven- 



as a decorative line is almost certainly armed sun -like 

 due to the handling and grinding- fi 8 ure engraving on 



c -i u 11 j J j >* Tr y- (Schlie- 



down of snail shells, and, indeed, we mann j 



find spirals and reversed spiral scrolls 



engraved on bone by the Pleistocene cave-men (see 



Fig. 29). 



The ^Egaean people of the Greek islands (of whom 

 the Mykenaeans are a part) copied a variety of forms of 

 marine animals in their decorations of pottery, and, in 

 fact, natural shapes were the basis of their decorative art. 

 They simplified and " grammatized " their more nature- 

 true designs into badges and symbols. 



We find in early work discovered in the ancient mounds 

 of North America decorative circles (Fig. 58) in which two 

 S-like lines at right angles to one another are inscribed 

 as shown in Fig. 56, and we find also that these curved 

 rays may be prolonged as a marvellous enveloping 



