Symbols That Changed Meaning Over Time

The Swastika: Thousands of Years of Good Fortune, Then Twelve Years That Erased It in the West

The swastika is the clearest and most consequential case of a symbol's meaning being overwritten. For at least 5,000 years before the twentieth century, the swastika (from the Sanskrit svastika, meaning roughly 'conducive to well-being') was a widespread and overwhelmingly positive symbol across an enormous geographic range — used in ancient Indus Valley civilisation artefacts, in Hinduism (where it remains a sacred symbol of the sun, prosperity, and good fortune, commonly drawn at the entrance of homes and businesses, especially during festivals like Diwali), in Buddhism (where a swastika-like mark, sometimes left- and sometimes right-facing depending on tradition, appears on the chest of Buddha images and marks the location of Buddhist temples on maps in Japan, China, and Korea to this day), in Jainism, and in numerous Native American, Greek, Roman, Celtic, and broader European decorative and religious contexts, generally as a solar or good-luck symbol.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European scholars studying Sanskrit and Indo-European linguistics popularised the swastika in the West partly through a mistaken and now-discredited theory linking it to a supposed ancient 'Aryan' racial identity. Nazi ideology seized on this theory directly: Adolf Hitler adopted the hakenkreuz (hooked cross) as the centrepiece of the Nazi Party flag in 1920 and, after 1933, of the German state flag, explicitly invoking the pseudo-scientific 'Aryan' racial narrative to claim the symbol as an emblem of Germanic racial supremacy. The Nazi regime's subsequent atrocities — the Holocaust, the Second World War — were carried out for twelve years under this specific version of the symbol, and the trauma and horror of that period was severe and thorough enough to functionally overwrite, in mainstream Western consciousness, five millennia of an entirely different and overwhelmingly positive meaning. Today, a swastika displayed in most Western contexts is read, correctly given the dominant present-day association, as a Nazi and white-supremacist symbol, and it is illegal to display in several European countries including Germany. At the same time, the symbol remains in continuous, unbroken, entirely benign religious use by well over a billion Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains worldwide, who did not create the Nazi association and whose own traditional use of the symbol predates it by thousands of years — a genuine and ongoing source of cross-cultural friction.

The Pentagram: From Pythagorean Perfection to Pop-Culture 'Evil'

The five-pointed star's reputation shifted more gradually and less totally than the swastika's, but the shift is real and well documented. In ancient Greece, the Pythagoreans revered the pentagram for its mathematical elegance — the golden ratio is embedded repeatedly in its proportions — and used it as a symbol of health, perfection, and a badge of recognition among members of their philosophical school. Through the medieval period in Europe, the pentagram frequently carried protective and positive symbolism; it appears, for example, on the shield of the knight Sir Gawain in the medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, explicitly representing the five virtues of chivalry, five wounds of Christ, five joys of Mary, and other sets of five, presented entirely positively as a symbol of a knight's integrity.

The shift toward negative association developed gradually through several strands. Renaissance and later ceremonial magic and occult traditions used the pentagram as a working ritual symbol representing the elements, an association that reflected the pentagram's use within Western esoteric practice broadly, much of which its practitioners considered benign or even devout. Nineteenth-century occultist Eliphas Levi's influential illustrations specifically associated the inverted (point-down) pentagram with more explicitly Satanic or 'baphomet' imagery, cementing a specific visual distinction — upright versus inverted — that many later popular sources collapsed or ignored. Twentieth-century horror films, tabloid coverage of Satanism and heavy metal subculture, and a wave of largely unfounded 'satanic panic' moral alarm in the United States during the 1980s cemented the pentagram broadly as visual shorthand for evil in mainstream Western popular perception. Meanwhile, contemporary Wiccan and broader modern Pagan traditions use the upright pentagram, typically encircled as a pentacle, as a central, sincerely positive symbol representing the five elements and protection — a genuinely devout religious use existing in parallel with, and largely unrecognised by, the horror-and-Satanism association dominating wider pop culture.

The OK Sign: A Recent, Deliberate Hijacking

The most recent and, in an important sense, most artificial case is the 'OK' hand gesture, which carried an overwhelmingly simple and positive meaning across most of the English-speaking and broader Western world for generations, alongside some genuinely different regional meanings elsewhere (in parts of Latin America, the Middle East, and Southern Europe, the same gesture has long been considered vulgar or offensive, an older and separate case of regional variance worth noting on its own).

In 2017, participants in a coordinated hoax originating on the message board 4chan, calling itself 'Operation O-KKK,' deliberately promoted the false claim that the OK hand gesture secretly represented the letters 'W' and 'P' for 'white power,' explicitly designing the hoax to bait media outlets and commentators into over-reacting to an ordinary, innocuous gesture — the creators of the hoax stated this intent openly on the message board itself, and initially the symbol carried no genuine white-supremacist history at all; the meaning was invented as bait. The situation became genuinely more complicated afterward: some actual white supremacists, aware of the hoax and its media coverage, began deliberately using the gesture as a genuine in-group signal specifically because of the resulting controversy, including at least one documented case flashed during a courtroom appearance by a defendant with white-supremacist affiliations, and the Anti-Defamation League added the gesture to its hate symbol database in 2019 while explicitly noting its overwhelming everyday innocuous use and cautioning against assuming ill intent from context-free use of an extremely common gesture.

What These Three Cases Actually Show

Taken together, these three cases demonstrate genuinely different mechanisms of symbolic meaning-change, not one repeated story. The swastika shows a total, traumatic overwriting in one cultural sphere that left an entirely different, unbroken meaning intact and dominant elsewhere — the same symbol now functioning as two nearly opposite things depending on which population and history you're standing in. The pentagram shows a gradual, partial, and contested drift, where multiple genuinely sincere meanings coexist simultaneously across different communities rather than one meaning cleanly replacing another. The OK sign shows that in the internet age, a meaning can be manufactured deliberately as bait within days, then made partially real by a small number of people choosing to adopt the manufactured meaning in earnest afterward. The practical lesson across all three: check current context and community before assuming any symbol's 'traditional' or 'obvious' meaning still applies unchanged, and recognise that more than one meaning can be simultaneously true, sincerely held, and actively in use by different people looking at the exact same image.