Ancient Symbols With Mysterious Meanings

Ever since we learnt how to draw, to carve, to daub and to write, mankind has used symbols and logos for various purposes both good and evil. We use symbols to intimidate people, to indicate our love, to deign something sacred and to demonstrate our faith. But there are some symbols out there that we’re not quite sure about. Symbols that have been used all over the world and by many disparate cultures, but whose origins and meanings have been lost to time. So let’s take a look at a few of those ancient symbols with mysterious meanings.

 The Jolly Roger 

The Jolly Roger is of course heavily associated with Pirates, with the combination of a white skull and crossbones on a black background used to indicate that the ship approaching you was full of men who wanted to steal your doubloons, drink your rum, and caress you ever so gently with their shiny hooked hands. But where did this symbol come from?

Well, the Jolly Roger would be flown when a ship was getting ready to attack, and was most commonly seen during the early 1700’s. But this wasn’t the first time the skull and crossbones emblem had been used to strike fear into the hearts of one’s enemy, because many historians believe that the Jolly Roger symbol dates back to the mysterious Knights Templar.

The Knights Templar was a Catholic military order which became one of the most powerful and wealthiest organisations in the world after their inception in 1119. The group, which was responsible for laying the foundations of our modern banking system, was supposedly disbanded by Pope Clement the Fifth in 1312. But legend has it that the Knights Templar merely disappeared from public view, with their influence rumoured to be still in effect today through organisations such as the Freemasons and the Illuminati.

During the height of their powers the Knights Templar even had their own fleet of ships, which in the 13th Century may have constituted the largest navy in the world. This fleet was often used for acts of piracy, and the skull and crossbones symbol used by the Templar was flown during these raids. So where did they get it from?

Well one theory links it to a gruesome legend involving a Templar who desecrated the grave of his ex-lover. Described as “A great lady of Maraclea”, the woman apparently died when she was young, but her Templar bae wasn’t having this, so he dug up her body and violated it. At this point a strange voice told the Knight to return in nine months to find his son, so he obliged, and when he dug up his ex-lover’s grave for a second time he found a head placed upon two crossed leg bones - hence the skull and crossbones. This head supposedly possessed magical powers, allowing the Knight to defeat his enemies merely by showing it to them, and when he died, the head became property of the Knights Templar, who took it as a symbol to intimidate their enemies.

The Three Hares 

The symbol of the three hares depicts three hares chasing each other in a circle, with each one having two ears, but with the three hares arranged so that only three individual ears need to be shown. Nobody knows quite what this symbol means, but whatever it stands for must be universally understood, because it’s been found in locations all around the world.

The three hares symbol has been spotted on a 15th Century church roof in southern England, on a 13th Century copper coin used by the Mongol people, and displayed in Ukrainian synagogues from the 16th Century. The three hares symbol has also been found on a 13th Century German church bell, a 14th Century Jewish manuscript, and even painted on the walls of 5th Century Chinese Buddhist caves. In fact several sightings of the three hares have come from these caves near the Chinese town of Dunhuang, which was once an important part of the ancient Silk Road.

This proximity to such an important trade route means the symbol probably originated in China, before making its way through Persia and spreading across ancient Europe - but to be honest that assessment is a complete and utter guess. Because in truth, the Three Hares symbol’s origin is as unknown as its meaning.

However, since it seems to transcend cultures, language and religion, we can deduce that it must once have been a mark of great importance.

The @ Symbol 

The first recorded use of the “@” symbol came from a Bulgarian translation of an old Greek chronicle, circa 1345. In this context, “@” was used to replace the capital letter A in the word Amen, but nobody knows why, and over the following centuries the “@” symbol has been used in a variety of different contexts outside of religion too.

At one point, it signified a unit of measurement known as an amphora, which was used by the French, Spanish and Portuguese. But the symbol has also been employed as a contraction of the Latin word “ad”, which seems pretty unnecessary, as a Greek preposition which meant “at the rate of”, and as a Norman French symbol derived from one of their fancy letter “ás”.

The “@” symbol then began to appear on typewriters towards the end of the 19th Century for use as an amphora in business correspondence, and today of course we use it for emails, twitter handles, and for getting swearwords past a profanity filter. But before all this, nobody knows exactly where the “@” symbol came from, who invented it, and what it was originally used for. What we do know is that different countries call the “@” symbol different things, based on what they think it looks like.

In Armenian it’ called a shnik, meaning puppy. In Hungarian it’s called a kukac, which means maggot. And in many languages including Bulgarian, Croatian, Dutch and Macedonian they refer to this symbol as monkey, little monkey, or monkey tail.

The Pine Cone Symbol 

The Pinecone symbol is associated with many of Earth’s oldest and supposedly most enlightened civilizations, as pinecones themselves are meant to represent the Third Eye and the human Pineal Gland.

The Pineal Gland, which can be found in the brain and which looks a lot like a pinecone, has long been thought of as the potential source of either the human soul, consciousness or some other state of spiritual awakening. But even with modern technology, we don’t know much about what the Pineal Gland actually does.

However, due to the use of this symbol repeatedly throughout the cultures of the Roman Empire, the Babylonians, The Sumerians and the Egyptians, some people believe that these early civilizations found and subsequently lost the ability to operate the Pineal gland, or at least had some understanding of how it once worked, leading them to then worship the Pinecone as a symbol of human enlightenment.

This is only a guess, though, as we’re really not quite sure why the Pinecone and Pineal Gland came to be seen as so meaningful. But the reason why this symbol permeates so many cultures is simple, since the Conifer Pine Trees from which they come are one of the oldest and most widely spread species of plant on the planet. So at least we know something.

The Swastika 

Since its appropriation by a certain group of zero-chill Germans in the 20th Century, the Swastika has come to represent evil, death, intolerance and bigotry. But that’s not always been the case. Some of you may already know that this symbol was originally used to decorate items that were lucky or auspicious, and for most of recorded history, it was considered a positive mark, with Hindus, Buddhists and Jainists still believing it to be a sacred symbol even today. But what you might not know is that the use of this symbol, also known as the gammadion cross or the Hakenkreuz, actually dates back before the Neolithic period over 14,000 years ago.

On the site of a Palaeolithic Ukrainian settlement called Mezine, archaeologists found a small bird carved from mammoth ivory that was covered in this symbol, and this was later confirmed as having been made between 12,000 and 10,000 BC.

Similar symbols have also been seen in Aztec and Mayan works, Native North American carvings and in objects found in ancient settlements of Western Europe. There’s no doubt that this symbol has become heavily stigmatised today due to its more recent usage, but when the first groups of civilised humans began to carve it, what did they mean to use it for? What did it represent? How did it make its way to India, South America and Europe? And also, how did one group of tyrants manage to change its meaning so drastically? Will the peace symbol be a mark of hatred in 100 years time?